Eric Thomas

See, it's hard when you are 49 years old, been working on a job for 17 years, and they come in and tell you you're finished and give you one week's severance pay.

And you got to start all over again.

It's hard when you're married and raising children and your children are crawling and your husband dies unexpectedly.

It's hard handling just the tragedies of life.

It's hard when you're working on something and you put everything you have in it and it doesn't work.

You lose your money and other people's money.

It's hard.

You will go through things and while you're going through them, you can't understand why it's happening to you.

But after you go through it, you get back and you look at it and you say, oh, now I understand why I needed that lesson.

At some juncture, you will encounter pain.

And the moment that you get acquainted with pain, you get acquainted with hardship.

You realize that no matter what you do, no matter how much you study, no matter how much you plan, you will not be able to avoid a measure of pain.

If you want this thing, I don't care what it is, then you're going to have to get acquainted with pain, the pain of discipline, the pain of growth, the pain of learning, the pain of giving, the pain of forgiving.

It all hurts.

So pick your pain.

Choose your heart.

But getting knocked down or getting knocked back doesn't mean you stop living.

It doesn't mean you stop growing.

It doesn't mean you don't carry on.

But I dare you to go the hard way.