Podcast 77. The subject is the thin line between pain and pleasure, and I talk it through with what I watched in Leon. Success and failure in this work sit closer together than men want to admit. The same week can look like a breakthrough or a collapse depending on which side of a small decision you were standing on.
Men treat a bad night as proof they should quit, and a good night as proof they have arrived. Both reads are too large. The line is thin. One more approach, one honest conversation after a blowout, one decision to go home early and lie about it. Those are the inches. Pleasure and pain are not two separate careers. They are what the same effort feels like before you know how the night ends.
I am not interested in a speech about embracing suffering. I am interested in the observation. You can be one conversation away from the result and describe the whole month as failure because you stopped on the wrong side of that conversation. You can also luck into one good night and decide the work is finished. Both mistakes come from forgetting how narrow the gap is.
Leon is in the episode as the case, not as a mascot. Watch what the thin line looked like in a real student instead of in a theory. The question on the cover is the question of the episode. Success or failure. Often you cannot tell which one you are in until you take the next step.
Stay in the set long enough to find out. The men who call everything pain usually left before the line moved.
