The only way to grow is to struggle.

It’s everywhere. The entrepreneur has to work 100-hour weeks. The athlete has to sacrifice their health. The celebrity must be stricken with drama.

Society sells us discomfort, pain, and suffering as not just the best, but the only way to get anywhere in life. But it’s a lie. A big, fat, pervasive one.

Let’s look at some people who’ve got a lot of growth behind them: billionaires.

First, you have people like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump.

Jobs was fighting all the time. With his employees, journalists, even about being a father. All for the sake of giving his customers the future they didn’t even know they wanted. And at age 56, he died rather young from cancer.

Elon always looks like he could use a good night’s sleep. But he’d rather be a media tornado instead. Tabloids love him more than any amateur sex tape socialite - and he loves to make things worse by calling emergency rescuers pedophiles, pretending his company is bankrupt, and smoking weed on the air.

Then, there’s the crown prince of making his own life a living hell: Donald Trump. Twitter fights, trade wars, government shutdowns, building walls (literally) left and right - not bad for a guy who never wanted to be president.

But there are also billionaires like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos.

Growing Microsoft wasn’t easy. Gates had to make hard decisions. But now, he spends most of his time reading, learning, figuring out how to move humanity forward, and convincing other billionaires to donate the majority of their money to said cause.

Buffett takes actual pride in the fact that he sticks inside his little, comfy circle of competence. He knows himself well - and he likes that person. Same breakfast, same car, same house, same city. And he also mostly reads.

Amazon is 25 years old and one of the most valuable companies in history. Jeff Bezos now has to defend himself in public for the first time, but, for over two decades, very little drama surrounded the richest man in the world. He took every innovation, product, and step at Amazon slowly and deliberately. Test cheaply, risk little, improve quickly. Not exactly a skydiving approach to business, is it?

All of these people have accomplished everything there is to accomplish. Yet some of them continue to choose to fight. To struggle. Others hit cruise control and adapt.

If you believe in fighting itself more than in what you’re fighting for, your life will always be a fight, even long after you’ve achieved your goals.

Yes, everything in life has a price. Yes, we all have to make hard choices. But struggling just to struggle is nuts. There are so many other ways you can grow.

You can think. You can talk. You can learn more about what you love. You can make many bets with little risk. And you don’t have to nuke your life in the process.

There are many other factors that go into it, but I’m sure it’s no coincidence the latter three guys top the billionaire list while the formers’ combined wealth is ten times less.

Don’t fall for it. Yes, struggle leads to progress. But it’s not the only way you can grow.