Nowadays, all people care about is money, wealth and gain of any kind. Whenever you start an activity, you only focus on the gain, thus ignoring the losses that come along. Every single action has a side effect, a theory proven even in physics and chemistry.
During life, one has to endure much, in order to achieve the social and material status desired by so many people. To get to live on the “easy street”, you have to start from the beginning and later step out of the line and make yourself hard. You have to go through a lot of pain, especially moral pain, because you will always be underrated and mistreated by your boss, who will generally think he is superior. This feeling of inferiority usually makes a person work even harder than before, making his or her goals achievable. Without motivation, a person cannot withstand the harsh and cruel road to wealth and fulfilment.
I am sure that everyone wants to be fit. Unfortunately, it does not just come with the snap of a finger. You have to work out regularly and improve your stamina. If you are quite unfit at the beginning, it will take a lot of pain on your part to improve your physical fitness—if running the extra few metres will make you fit, go for it! Also, if you are inflexible for your age and you want to be more flexible, the best way to do that is to stretch. Yes, it might hurt at first and yes, it is painful, but you will be able to do a lot more sports and improve your physical fitness by being flexible. You might be asking: What’s the gain? The gain is that sports make you happier throughout the day, improving your look, inside and out, helping you concentrate better, making you sleep longer as well as drastically improving your health, reducing the risk of getting diseases such as cancer, and making you live longer. Wow, that is a lot of gain! That is why pain is worth it—for imagine if you never exercised at all, never ran that extra few metres, and never stretched! You would be overweight, moody, and at the risk of getting major diseases (among many other reasons). I would much rather be the first group of things listed above rather than the second—wouldn’t you? That’s why this is a good example of “No pain, no gain.”
Even though the things that happened to Nelson Mandela for most of his life were unfair (namely being sent to jail for many years), he still fought on throughout the rest of his life. He did not give up, even though he had been in jail for so many years—living on rations of food and wearing the jail outfit, he would get his friend to sometimes sneak in a copy of the local newspaper to him so that he could find out what was going on in the world. In jail, he would be planning ideas for what he would do once he was released. Because he went through pain, it actually made him a more patient person. When he was released at last, he fought against racism and eventually became the President of South Africa. Later on in life, he earned at least fifty awards—which is a great gain from the pain that he went through for most of his life in jail. If he had not fought his way out of jail, he would not have become President of South Africa and definitely would not have won any awards. Even though most of his life was pain, the remainder of his life resulted in great gains that would make him famous forever. He might have been able to accomplish all of this without going to prison, but I actually think that it made him a better person.
In conclusion, nothing good can happen to a person without some pain. Some people might think that pain only happens to bad people, but in truth, it happens to every person who wants to make a difference in this world. That is why you have to realise that nothing is going to hand itself over to you—you have to work for it. And if that means going through some pain, it does not matter, for if you work hard enough, you will definitely get some gain out of it.