June 10, 2025
Strength is impressive so it gets all the attention while its major counterpart—weakness—goes unacknowledged.
But there is no strength without weakness. They are inseparable because they are the two expressions of the same energy.
Crucially, weakness is the dominant force. Where strength is transient and depletable, weakness, like entropy, is the default and omnipresent state. Weakness is the aether from which strength occasionally arises but always decays back into.
And yet, despite the overwhelming reign of weakness, strength is possible.
Interestingly, strength begins with the willingness to be weak.
Totally accepting your fundamental weakness is a precondition for strength.
Note how, in many cases, it’s not a lack of strength that inhibits us but rather it is our unwillingness to embrace our weakness.
A procrastinator is not afraid of their work—they are afraid of feeling miserable, scatterbrained, bored, and unfulfilled while doing it.
A person skipping a training session is not afraid of exercise—they are afraid of feeling weak under load.
A writer is not afraid of writing—they are afraid of feeling disconnected, incoherent, or impatient while writing.
None of these examples suggest an absence of strength, but all point to an unwillingness to tolerate weakness.
You must surrender.
When you have to wake up early, you must be willing to feel weak and groggy and cold and miserable as you stand barefoot and vulnerable in the middle of your room and shiver.
And no, surrendering to weakness does not mean hitting the snooze button and staying warm and cozy under the covers. That is the equivalent of standing under a weight that is racked.
You must bear the weight on your shoulders.
Because it’s not about avoiding or overcoming weakness. It’s about succumbing to it. And that means you have to put the pressure on. And putting the pressure on will humble you like nothing else, and you have to cultivate that kind of humility.
You must throw off the blanket, you must get up or crawl out of bed, you must stand there in the cold murky light and shiver twice as hard and hate twice as much your morning breath and dread twice as much the day ahead. You must be willing to experience all these emotions freely without any resistance.
Because surrendering to weakness clears the way for strength. Because you cannot access strength until you’ve channeled weakness.
Cold showers provide an apt depiction of this special moment when one accepts to experience weakness. And feel free to try it yourself. The instant right before you turn the shower temperature to blue—this is the moment. The unracking. The surrender. The willingness to lose your breath when the icy stream hits your skin. It takes negligible strength to turn the temperature control. It takes great humility to decide to do it. It takes great courage to face your weakness.
After that decisive moment, weakness begins to dissipate and what is revealed to us are very subtle but real strands of strength that we are woven from. Resolve, resilience, resourcefulness, hope. We can now access these energies because we had the humility to embrace our weakness. We demonstrated a willingness to accept that we will be miserable.
And we can go deeper and embrace the idea that it is very much possible that we might die cold, hungry, unfulfilled, and alone. That our strength, even at its greatest, will never be enough against the much more powerful forces at play. That our strength is only temporary and that death, disease, depression, circumstances, emotion, rejection—they can strip all our strength away in a blink, leaving us with nothing.
This sober acknowledgment is the foundation upon which we can stand firmly. This is the platform for strength.
And strength is really just the willingness to expose yourself to and withstand increasing amounts of weakness.
When we understand this, it ceases to strike us as peculiar that exercise, an activity that builds strength, is entirely based on repeated depletion of strength. In other words, it’s about descending into the realm of weakness again and again and surviving it.
That last rep, that last kilometer, that last paragraph—the whole point is that they break you, wear you out, make you useless. Your body shakes, your muscles refuse to cooperate, your mind goes on autopilot, you lose your sense of identity. Your ego dies to make room for growth.
This is why the strongest people know more about weakness than they know about strength. Because they understand that it is there, on the brink of total collapse, where strength roams wild.