Pavel Durov, the billionaire founder of social app Telegram, swears by a morning routine of 300 push-ups and 300 squats. Then he goes to the banya, a traditional Russian sauna. There, he alternates between extreme heat and ice-cold plunges.
The banya routine is 20 minutes of deliberate suffering, but you feel extraordinary for days afterwards.
Alcohol and most vices work the opposite way. They make you feel great for a few short hours and then terrible for days after.
And it’s funny to consider that you know this in advance and usually bite the bullet anyway. People knock back tequila shots knowing they’ll feel awful in the morning. But the pending hangover isn’t felt viscerally in advance.
People scoff down chocolate knowing, quietly, in the backs of their minds, that the calories will sit with them for weeks if not years. But you don’t feel the discomfort of clothes that no longer fit and the lethargy of slowing metabolism until much later.
An underrated proportion of meaningful exchanges in life aren’t balanced ones. They’re wildly asymmetric. You don’t get equal-but-delayed returns. You get multiplied outcomes – in both directions.
The ice bath is brutal for three minutes, then you’re euphoric for hours. The difficult conversation feels excruciating for twenty minutes, then resolves months or years of compounding tension. Learning to touch-type frustrates you for three weeks, then doubles your writing speed for life.
Public speaking terrified me as a child. My father pushed me to do it anyway. Then I joined a debating club at school - more voluntary terror. Years of forcing myself through presentations that made my hands shake and my voice crack.
Now I keynote for large companies and get paid quite well for something that’s become effortless. The fear compressed into a few years of practice bought me decades of confidence and opportunity.
I’ve seen this play out personally in many other ways.
I earned £18,000 at my first full-time job - barely enough to survive in London, even in the mid-2010s. But I taught myself to live within those means and save, even on that pittance.
By the time I was able to earn five or ten times that amount, saving had become second nature. The discipline I built when it was hardest made it effortless when it became easy. The asymmetry compounded.
Take even something as mundane as handwriting. Mine used to be illegible chicken scratch - I couldn’t read my own notes. I’m convinced I got extra points on one of my law school exams because they couldn’t read what I wrote and just mentally filled in the gaps.
Once I moved into corporate law, fast accurate note-taking became essential. I needed near-verbatim records of important meetings to turn into client memos. So I bought my first fountain pen and taught myself clean cursive. I was 21/22 at the time. An age where most would consider their handwriting ability as a baked-in default.I did writing drills, deciding intentionally how I wanted to write each letter in both cases. Tedious work up front. But I built handwriting that serves me constantly - people consistently comment on it, though I think it’s far from perfect. Still worlds better than the illegible scrawl it might have remained.
A short-term investment for a permanent asset.
Most things are like this. Your health, fitness, relationships, and more.
Seneca the stoic practiced voluntary discomfort - sleeping on hard floors, eating simple food, enduring cold - deliberately choosing suffering to build resilience. The Spartans subjected boys to brutal training from age seven. They understood asymmetric advantage: concentrated suffering creates disproportionate strength.
The inverse is equally true. Negative asymmetry compounds just as powerfully in the wrong direction.
Twenty minutes of drinking produces hours of fun, then days of hangover, then years of accumulated health damage. Minutes of junk food pleasure become chronic disease. Seconds of social media dopamine destroy hours and erode attention spans. Credit card gratification creates years of servitude to interest payments.
It’s easy to hunt for the things which feel good in the present, and flee that which feels bad.
We’re led to choose wrong because immediate pain is visceral whilst future benefits remain abstract.
Temporal discounting makes us massively undervalue distant consequences. And social proof shows everyone else accepting negative asymmetry - drinking, scrolling, avoiding difficulty. Entire industries profit from our preference for immediate comfort over long-term gain. It’s easy to let it become default.
But the divergence compounds brutally over time. James Clear demonstrates how 1% daily improvements compound to 37 times better over a year, whilst 1% daily declines compound toward zero.
Small asymmetries, compounded, create massive divergence.
Churchill spent the 1930s in political wilderness, warning about Hitler when it damaged his career and credibility. That decade of being right whilst ridiculed created the moral authority that made him indispensable when crisis came. The suffering itself generated the political capital.
Mandela’s 27 years in prison - ultimate suffering - created moral authority that made peaceful transition possible. The asymmetry was extreme: decades of loss bought something that couldn’t be purchased any other way.
Sometimes the best path for the course feels the worst in the moment. And that which feels easy now only sets you up for difficulty later.
