We Endure Before We Conquer
How Mike Tyson, Nietzsche, and Camus teach us the meaning of struggle
The Art of Becoming is about turning obstacles into opportunities.
I draw on philosophy, the science of resilience, history, and real-life experiences to help you find the best ways to navigate adversity, cultivate wisdom, and live with purpose.
Life isn’t about avoiding hardships. It’s about becoming someone who thrives in it.
Join me.
In five minutes or less:
Life is a fight.
Some battles we choose. Others are thrust upon us. The difference between those who endure and those who fall lies in how they carry their burden—their terrible how.
Nietzsche wrote: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” But what happens when that how is unbearable? When the weight of our life is too heavy to carry?
We are not meant just to survive—to take the pain, to accept life’s beatings. Life is about the relentless will to endure, to outlast, and to overcome the unimaginable. So we can thrive. So we can conquer. And learn a simple truth:
In our willingness to endure, we find the strength to conquer.
But what if life beats you down before you’re old enough or strong enough to fight back? Many live with abandonment, violence, and loss as children. Some collapse under the weight. Others, either through grace or some hidden strength, carry their burdens, suffer through them, and still find the will to rise.
Because champions aren’t born—they are made in the fire of their suffering.
Let’s get to it.
The Early Fight
He was arrested 38 times by the time he was thirteen.
When he was two, his father abandoned him. Violence chased him through the streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn. His mother struggled with alcohol, bringing home men who abused her. He was shy and small, and often bullied. Before he was a teenager, he joined a gang to survive his childhood—and to belong.
Yet where he started did not define where he ended. That boy became the youngest heavyweight champion in history. His name is Mike Tyson.
“Adversity makes the strong stronger or the weak weaker.” —Mike Tyson
Mike Tyson has been fighting his entire life. And in many ways, he still fights the demons that pursued him as a child.
At ten, he had his first fight after an older kid ripped the head off one of his pigeons. From then on, the streets became his arena. At twelve, in juvenile detention, he and the other boys were shown The Greatest, a film about Muhammad Ali. When the credits rolled, Ali himself walked into the room. At that moment, Tyson saw what his life could be.
“You gotta be the champ before you can be the champ,” Tyson later said.
Soon after, a counselor introduced him to Cus D’Amato, the legendary trainer who had molded champions like Floyd Patterson. D’Amato took Tyson in when his mother died, becoming his legal guardian and father figure.
Tyson’s ascent was meteoric. At sixteen, he was fighting grown men. At eighteen, he turned professional. His first nineteen fights ended in knockouts, twelve in the first round. He was relentless, a mythic demigod in the ring.
Triumph Over Tragedy
Tyson’s story teaches us a simple but profound lesson:
Everyone faces adversity. Everyone loses. Everyone fails.
But we also get back up again. And fight. And win.
Champions are not the ones who avoid suffering. They are the ones who get up when suffering pins them down.
Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz, wrote: “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.” Tyson’s “what” was a childhood of neglect and violence. His “why” was to become heavyweight champion. His “how” was the brutal training, the grief of losing his mother, and the discipline to push through.
History is filled with similar patterns. Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer, endured shipwreck and frozen seas with his men because their “why” was survival and loyalty. The Stoics taught that we cannot control fortune’s blows, but we can control how we endure them.
The French philosopher Albert Camus took it further. He argued that life itself is absurd—a relentless confrontation between our hunger for meaning and a universe that offers none. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he describes the condemned figure of Sisyphus, forced to push a boulder up the mountain only to watch it roll back down, again and again, for eternity.
And yet Camus wrote: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
The lesson is piercing. The “terrible how” is not only something to endure, but something that can become the meaning itself.
Like Sisyphus, even through life’s many absurdities, we are defined not by escaping our burden, but by how we shoulder it, push it, and even embrace it.
Carrying the Burden
Tyson once had a daily routine that included:
2,000 squats
2,500 sit-ups
500 push-ups
500 dips
500 shrugs with a barbell
Ten minutes of neck work
And that was before sparring, running, or ring work. He trained as if he were already the champion.
Why? Because discipline was his weapon against chaos. Training was how he fought the demons of Brownsville that never left him. Every rep was an answer to abandonment. Every drill was defiance against the violence that tried to define him.
Kobe Bryant once said, “After all, greatness is not for everybody.” He meant that most people are not willing to carry the terrible burden—the hours of practice, the solitude, the sacrifice—that greatness demands.
For Shackleton’s men, it was frostbite, hunger, and despair. For Tyson, it was iron discipline and endless drills. For us, it may be the daily grind of work, the unseen effort behind raising a family, or the weight of responsibilities we didn’t choose.
We carry these burdens not because they’re pleasant, but because without them, the weight crushes us. The work we do, our discipline, is the only way through.
Like Sisyphus, we push the rock not because it is easy, but because the struggle itself transforms us.
Endure to Conquer
Not all terrible “hows” destroy us. Tyson’s training made him the “Baddest Man on the Planet.” Shackleton’s endurance saved his men.
It is not enough to name your “what” or dream up a noble “why.” Purpose without endurance is like a map without scale.
One of life’s hard truths is this: Before you can conquer, you must endure. Before you can endure, you must be willing to suffer.
As Ernest Shackleton’s family motto declared:
“Fortitudine Vincimus: By endurance, we conquer.”
So I ask you: What are you willing to endure?
Thanks for reading. In all you do, I hope you conquer.
Love to you and yours,
Michael