Mark Mansons Most Important Question of Your Life prompted this poll.

From the article (bold by me):

Everybody wants what feels good. Everyone wants to live a care-free, happy and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular [...] Everyone would like that — it’s easy to like that.

If I ask you, “What do you want out of life?” and you say something like, “I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,” it’s so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even mean anything.

A more interesting question, a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.

People want to be rich without the risk, without the sacrifice, without the delayed gratification necessary to accumulate wealth.

[...] happiness requires struggle. The positive is the side effect of handling the negative.

At the core of all human behavior, our needs are more or less similar. Positive experience is easy to handle. It’s negative experience that we all, by definition, struggle with. Therefore, what we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings we’re willing and able to sustain to get us to those good feelings.

---

So the question of this poll is: Which pain(s) are you prepared to bear? Each pain can be rated independently between 0.0 (you can't or wouldn't want to stand any of this pain) and 1.0 (you are prepared and/or willing to stand any pain (of this kind) necessary to achieve you goals). The values don't have to sum to anything. You could anwer 0.0 always to indicate that you don't want any pain of any kind at all.

(The first poll options are extracted from Mark Mansons article)

[You can] suffer through 60-hour work weeks, long commutes, obnoxious paperwork, to navigate arbitrary corporate hierarchies and the blasé confines of an infinite cubicle hell.

[You can stand to] go through the tough conversations, the awkward silences, the hurt feelings and the emotional psychodrama [of relationships].

[You] appreciate the emotional turbulence that comes with weathering rejections, building the sexual tension that never gets released, and staring blankly at a phone that never rings.

You legitimately appreciate the pain and physical stress that comes with living inside a gym for hour upon hour, [...] you love calculating and calibrating the food you eat, [...]

[You appreciate] planning your life out in tiny plate-sized portions.

You find a way to appreciate the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, and working insane hours on something you have no idea whether [the business] will be successful or not.

[You stand] the daily drudgery of practicing [music], the logistics of finding a group and rehearsing, the pain of finding gigs and actually getting people to show up and give a shit. The broken strings, the blown tube amp[...]

I took the freedom to add the following options for a more broad range of human experience:

• You appreciate the pains and fears of pregnancy, the sleepless nights with small infants, sitting all night at the bed of your sick child, the worry whether your teenager will come home well and all the million small chores a life with children brings.

• You accept the humiliation and abuse that is part of quite some career paths. Being lackey for persons in key positions, doing their every wish.

• You can stand the infinite study - often of stuff you will never use - the endless exams, doing boring courses, lecturing to clueless students, doing superfluous studies or professor's pet projects. The pressure to publish. The many research directions that didn't work out.

• You boldly face the risks of high danger professions. The pain of frequent of major injury. The fear to never recover.

• You stand the demand of working to the highest levels of perfection. Other peoples lives depending on you making no mistakes.

Added by VAuroch:

• You'll live with the pressure of ends just barely meeting, of luxuries being rare and being limited to the cheapest methods of entertainment.

• You can bear the pain of empathy, being unable to help those in need while you stay on the sidelines dealing with your own needs.

Did I miss any? You may add them.

---

This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes. So choose your struggles wisely, my friend.