Conflict Is Real. So Is the Way.

I used to think the goal was to kill the part of me that caused problems.

Not in some dramatic way. Just quietly, grind down the laziness, strangle the fear, starve the doubt until it stopped showing up. I figured if I got disciplined enough, the bad stuff would die and I'd be left with something clean and functional. A better version. Less friction.

That's not what happened.

What I found was that waging war on yourself is still war. Both sides take casualties. You push hard against the lazy, undisciplined part of you and yes, it retreats. But the disciplined part is bleeding too. And somehow the lazy part comes back, and you fight it again, and the whole thing cycles. Progress, maybe. But not the kind that sticks. Forward, but always fighting the same enemy on the same field.

I remember a stretch where I was white-knuckling my way through mornings. Cold water. Journal. Workouts. All the markers of a guy getting after it. And underneath it I was angry. At myself, mostly. The version of me that wanted to sleep in. The one that checked the phone. I treated that guy like the enemy.

The anger didn't make me better. It made me brittle.

Here's what I've been working through since: conflict is not the problem. Conflict is real. The friction between who I am today and who I'm trying to become is a fact, not a failure. The question is what you do with it.

Most people try to resolve conflict by elimination. Kill the doubt. Suppress the fear. Shame the weakness into hiding. It kind of works, for a while, until it doesn't. You haven't resolved anything. You've buried it with temporary force.

The better move, and I'm still learning this, is integration. You don't destroy the bad aspects of yourself. You forge them. The reckless part becomes courage under pressure. The stubborn part becomes relentless pursuit of the right target. The anger becomes fuel, not sabotage. You take the raw material of the conflict and put it in the fire instead of fighting it in the street.

This is what I mean when I say the way is real. There is a path. It runs directly through the conflict, not around it. WayMakers don't wait for the frontier to clear. They see the danger, see the difficulty, and move anyway, because the other side is worth it.

Sisu is the Finnish word for that threshold. It begins where grit ends. Grit is what you do when things are hard. Sisu is what you do when hard has become extreme and you act anyway, not because you feel ready, but because ownership doesn't have an off switch. The distinction matters: grit can still be fueled by willpower. Sisu is fueled by something quieter. Decision. Identity. This is who I am now.

What I've learned is that the conflict doesn't go away when you get better. The internal gap between who you are and who you're becoming is permanent. The territory just changes. The man I was fighting five years ago wouldn't recognize the battle I'm in today. Different stakes, same field.

So I've stopped trying to make peace by winning. I've started trying to make peace by forging.

You hold to the target hard. You hold to the method loosely. When the path injures you, you don't change where you're going, you change how you're getting there. Adjust the tactic, not the target. This keeps showing up everywhere. In business. In the 5am moment when every part of you argues against getting up. The target doesn't move. The way adapts.

And this is the thing that took me the longest to believe: the way is real. Not metaphorically. Not eventually. It exists, right now, as a functional path forward from wherever you are standing. The conflict you feel isn't a sign the way is blocked. It's a sign you're close enough to feel the resistance.

Growth isn't a clean upward line. It's volatile, jagged, sometimes ugly. Some days the whole win is showing up and not retreating. That counts.

The conflict is real. So is the courage to move through it. Both are true at the same time.

That's the part I'm still sitting with.