 One year when I was 19, I was studying abroad in Switzerland and I fell in love with this sweet girl from Alabama. And I'll tell you, I fell pretty hard. You know, she was the first love for me. She had the sweet friendliness of a southern belle and I just love the smell of her lip gloss that she kept putting on obsessively throughout the day. Now, eventually, we sort of started dating. That is, she was not very into me, but like some things about me. And not too long after, when our short study abroad ended about six months, what felt like out of the blue, she told me, you're too nice. You know that we don't have a future at all, right? As if it were the most obvious thing in the entire freaking world. Well, I'll tell you what, I self-destructed. When I got back to college, I drank. I smoke. I acted like an idiot to everyone I knew. I skipped class. I hated women. I said I would never date again. And I did all the wrong things to cope. In life, struggles shape who you are. And you either wake up or you go to sleep from the difficulties. You either wake up to the areas you weren't doing a good job in, or weren't achieving it, or weren't showing up in. Or you go to sleep and pretend that everything's fine and never even happened. And you repeat it again and again. Now, the next year was a blur for me. I got my shit together. I got a 3.9 GPA. I joined a new club, the crew club, made the best friends of my entire life through the sports team in college. By the time I graduated, I was planning a one-way trip to China to pursue my biggest passion in the world, martial arts. It was a 180 turnaround. Look, there are going to be things that hit you that you can't predict. It might be an illness that you didn't sign up for. You might be losing your mom or losing your dad in an accident. You might be getting dumped by someone you love and you think is going to be there forever. But whatever you do, don't give up. Channel that pain into growth, into becoming a better person. Whatever you do, choose to get better instead of self-destruction. Whatever you do, let your pain help you wake up and not go to sleep faster. Because adversity does one of two things to people. It either makes you a better person or it breaks you into a broken one.