Give Me Mountains to Climb

Goal in life always seems to be as comfortably as possible. We want to be rich and live in a big house where people do our cleaning for us. We work to not have to work. We want the same thing for our kids as well. I've heard of parents who have made it in life say that they're going to use their success so that their kids don't have to struggle as they did. We need to realize that avoiding pain stress and trials isn't the goal.

In psychology, there's a chart called the Yerkes-Dodson Law. In this chart, it gives a scatter plot of the relationship between stress and performance. As stress goes up so does performance. As stress continues to go up performance peaks and starts to go down. According to this chart there is a level of stress that gives best performance. This chart varies based on the complexity of the task. The more complex the task, the less stress required to hit peak performance. Stress can help a ton when it comes to getting stuff done and succeeding in life.

I served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, I went door to door bugging people about God and Jesus Christ because I knew it was the thing that could help them the most. This was just out of high school and never had left home for more than a week at a time before, but I was going to California to leave my family for 2 years. My mission was incredibly difficult. I went through a lot of trials and stress. I felt I had the salvation of souls and the bringing of eternal joy on my shoulders. I was sent to teach in Spanish which was the one class I basically failed in high school. I was chased by angry drunk men. I got really sick for about 3 weeks. I got hit by a car while on my bike. I hated my companion to from the start

. My life sucked the first 3 months of my mission, but with every failure and every trial I learned something. I became more capable of dealing with trials and tribulation. I was humbled and was willing to receive the help that was extended to me. After those months I became a great missionary. I made friends and built relationships that were stronger than any other that I had had in the past. Imagine going through these trials with a partner. Over time the relationship between the two would become strong enough to overcome anything.

Getting through the hard times alive is probably the hardest part of the process however. It requires a lot of communication and openness about one's feelings to make it through. As missionaries we're paired with another person which we call our companion. So, we go out in groups of 2. At the start of my mission, I was a very closed off person. Whenever I was upset, I would go silent. I had a companion who tried to out stubborn me and we sat in a room for an hour until I spoke. It wasn't until I started talking about my feelings and and what I wanted that we started bonding and our trials became easy to endure.