There’s a pattern that has shown itself time and again. Some people seem to meet with success in their early efforts. Be it sport, school, music, or work, some have the knack and showcase their skill sooner than others. They levitate to the top of their group. This cycle continues, until it doesn’t. They move forward with effortless ease, so it seems. They perch on the podium, until they don’t. At some point, they are either immersed in a larger group containing other stars, or their group catches up, or some other permutation presents where they no longer easily dominate. This is the point at which the rubber meets the road. For many whose progress seemed assured, when presented with something other than easy victory, they lose interest. They have come to expect that things come naturally to them. They have known little other than success for their entire journey. The longer they have gone without experiencing struggle, the more disconcerting their interaction with an obstacle becomes. They have internalized that if they must work at something, then they can’t be good at it. For many, that’s it, they quit. There’s no resilience where shade obscures their brilliance. It’s no longer possible to outshine.
The stellar success streak of one’s youth not only isn’t a predictor of positive performance but becomes a negative correlating factor. Those that have had consistent performance from early years are more likely to give up as young adults when they meet stiffer competition. Having had no experience with struggle, the interaction with average performance becomes an indicator that they have hit their limit. The limit isn’t seen as an obstacle against which to lean, but as a ceiling under which they are stuck. Having been sheltered from struggle, these winners haven’t been exposed to the value of effort. Resilience wasn’t needed because the results reliably rolled along. Work was for those without talent. The cost of having things seem easy is that we expect them to continue this way. No heart for hard work has been cultivated.
How do we see setbacks? Are struggles a sign that we should find something else to do or do they suggest that we’re now learning, improving, growing? Where does difficulty direct? Does it attract or repel?
There’s a direction in parenting that has grown more common in recent decades that has earned its own label. Snow plow parenting refers to parents that are seeking to ensure their children experience smooth sailing for as long as possible. The goal of a snow plow parent is to move ahead of their child knocking down obstacles and paving the way for the ease and comfort of their precious babies. It may be driven by the best of intentions, but the result isn’t a resilient or well-adjusted child. If we work to make things easy, what’s the cost? In The Exploration of Happiness, authors Richard Ryan, Veronika Huta, and Edward Deci point out that, “The more directly one aims to maximize pleasure and avoid pain, the more likely one is to produce instead a life bereft of depth, meaning, and community.” There’s a deep downside to avoiding adversity. We’re reducing capability and resilience while increasing anxiety. Snow plow parents are doing the opposite of the folk wisdom spare the rod, spoil the child. The more we spoil, the less they’ll want to toil.
Comfort makes us, well, comfortable. The easier things are, the more we’re thrown ajar when things don’t work perfectly. When all we’ve seen is ease, we think life is supposed to be a breeze. Where we’ve been protected from difficulty, we don’t know how to handle problems when we inevitably face them. In other words, creature comforts make us soft. When we try to bubble wrap our kids, we don’t help, we hurt…. In the opening to their excellent book, The Coddling of the American Mind, authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt offer the following folk wisdom, “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.” Snow plow parents are doing the exact opposite. They are barging ahead breaking trail and focused on clearing the road in service of the child. The child learns nothing but dependence. Definitions of coddling, as Lukianoff and Haidt note, highlight the overprotective aspect of the term. To coddle is “to treat with extreme or excessive care or kindness.” When the way forward is made easier for us, we become weaker. The implicit message is either an expectation of ease or that we’re incapable of handling difficulty and require assistance. Both are debilitating not liberating.
The curse of modernity and problems of progress reflect the consequences of what happens when things are too good. The Hygiene Hypothesis is an attempt to explain the explosion of allergy rates in wealthier countries in recent decades. The suggestion is that as things progress, we’re faced with less threats. However, with less threats our body’s ability to protect itself and fully develop its immune system is lessened as it needs exposure to threats like viruses, bacteria, a wide range of foods, and more to best develop. This is, after all, the idea behind traditional vaccines. The goal is to insert a safe amount of the disease to spur the body’s immune system to develop a response so that when it faces the real threat it has a defense against it. We need exposure to challenge to build resources to handle it. Without exposure we become more vulnerable, not less. Discussing the Hygiene Hypothesis in a Wall Street Journal article titled, “Should We Let Toddlers Play With Saws and Knives?” Alison Gopnik writes, “By shielding children from every possible risk, we may lead them to react with exaggerated fear to situations that aren’t risky at all and isolate them from the adult skills that they will one day have to master.”
Safety is one of those things that started off as a good idea and has slowly crept into making more of us inept. Consider baby proofing. It’s a good idea to prevent our little ones from sticking forks in electrical outlets. It’s also a good idea to prevent bookcases or TVs from falling onto toddlers pulling themselves up from a crawl. To protect from massive physical trauma is a good idea. However, to eliminate bumps and bruises reduces learning. Moreover, trying to make us not just perfectly physically safe but emotionally safe is taking things too far. Safety now means being emotionally safe. Ensuring our feelings are what we want them to be all the time. A word like trauma in psychological diagnoses has been watered down from exposure to extremely rare events to daily occurrences. It’s even now become a subjective, personal word. Now a trauma can be virtually anything we say it is. In our quest for safety, we’re creating safe spaces. It’s not just physical threats, but ideas as threats. What started with sound intentions has leaked into lessening our capabilities.
It’s the opposite approach to that used by psychologists to address phobias. CBT or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is an approach which has much research support behind it. It is a way to help people come to terms with facing things that have made them nervous. It does so by seeking to gently expose people to ever increasing levels of the thing that scares them. They are then taught ways to think that help overcome the negative thoughts that flow from their anxiety. It’s one of the best approaches to helping with anxiety inducing situations and depends on its effect to exposure not avoidance. The creep of those advocating for safety is creating weaker individuals and doing the exact opposite of what CBT is doing. Safety, sadly, has become a primary value which is leading to less capability and courage. As Seth Godin offers, “No one gets paid to each chocolate cake.” If it’s easy, it’s common, it’s less meaningful. It may bring short term happiness. But whatever positive feelings are produced from ease are fleeting.
The problems of these kinds of views are deep. Seeing struggle as something to avoid is counter to thousands of years of experience across cultures. It also contradicts psychological research developed in recent decades. Finally, it is bad for both the individual and communities to believe that adversity should be avoided. Our beliefs about struggle and sacrifice have the power to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Our beliefs can create virtuous or vicious cycles. We can either believe we benefit from struggle and lean into challenges which builds both our competence and confidence, or we can believe that we should run from difficulty and become weaker and less confident as we avoid any kind of challenge. Worse yet, is where we avoid, we don’t just become weaker, we can develop depression and amplify anxieties.
We’re tougher than we think. We can expand our capabilities. We can improve on most, if not all, fronts of our lives. The idea that failures and pain are to be avoided hurts and doesn’t help. If we’re responsible for developing others, a piece of our part is to encourage a constructive relationship with challenges. We don’t want to shelter and work to make things easy. We want to build individual belief in the ability to face difficulty and take proactive steps to move forward. Remind yourself and those for whom you’re responsible that “I fail you when I make it easy for you.”
There are people and systems that when faced with a challenge become stronger. They don’t just survive it, they improve. Author Nassim Taleb calls these types of systems antifragile. Taleb suggests children, muscles, and bones all represent examples of intentionally designed antifragile systems. With stress, they improve their strength and capability. Taleb introduces his idea with a great visual observing that wind fuels a fire to get bigger but easily extinguishes a candle. We want to be a fire that when brushed with the winds of adversity expands and grows as opposed to being a fragile candle that is snuffed out by struggle. Meng Tzu over 2,400 years ago observed, “When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger, put him to poverty, place obstacles in the paths of his deeds, so as to stimulate his mind, harden his nature, and improve wherever he is incompetent.”
We must work to see nuisance as necessary and difficulties as desirable. Where we can embrace the strength of struggle, we can breakthrough barriers to continue our climb. In The Life of Greece, Will Durant writes that the Spartan king Archidamus noted “There is little difference between man and man, but the superiority lies with him who is reared in the severest school.” Those that have endured command more respect than those that have been pampered. Doted dunces are neither capable of caring for themselves nor thinking. We owe it to ourselves and those we care about to establish and hold standards. A healthy respect for diligence, effort, and exertion should be encouraged. We should celebrate challenge and struggle, not seek comfort and ease. The Latin phrase “dulcius ex asperis” translates to sweeter after difficulty. It’s a value expressed by Sandra Bullock’s character in the movie The Lost City. She captures it in the feeling she experiences when getting to the top of a mountain. The effort involved is what makes the accomplishment worthwhile.
Canadian Decathlon coach, Andy Higgins, has said “No one is going to become excellent…without consciously seeking to push the boundaries. And you cannot push them without running into adversity and having disappointments.” The Stoics and many others since have preached the power of training for pain. Embedded in the idea is to pick opponents that challenge. Seneca offered, “A gladiator deems it a disgrace to be matched with an inferior.” Conductor Ben Zander notes that good teachers recognize that failure is essential to learning. It’s only once we encounter struggle, that gains can be made. A job of leaders isn’t to solve people’s problems it’s to help them build the capacity internally. A British track coach, Frank Dick, offers, “Do you think you will encourage human development in our athletes by solving their problems? The truth is, that never develops people. You only develop people by giving them the right level of challenge. That is what coaches do.” Leaders teach that struggle is fun. Good coaches and teachers push us to find the sweet spot of struggle known as the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). It’s the Goldilocks point of challenge. If things are too easy, we become bored, if it’s too challenging we become frustrated. Good leaders know their team, they push you outside of your comfort zone into the challenge zone where you can stretch. Khalil Gibran, author of The Prophet, wrote “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”
Whether it’s video games, school, or sport, where we do well at one level, we’re granted permission to the next level. Struggle leads to success. Struggle is your friend. If it’s an adversary, it’s one that’s worth trying to overcome as in the process you become better. Learning follows leaps. Leaps over obstacles. Obstacles don’t interfere, they serve. We want to embrace elevating ourselves over difficulties because the leaping leaves us better. In Learn Better Ulrich Boser writes, “The practical takeaway here is pretty simple. We need to believe in struggle. We need to know that learning is difficult. What’s more, we need the people around us to believe it, too.” As Aniela and Jerzy Gregorek write in, I Got This, “Goals are essential in life. The longer it takes to achieve them, the more meaningful they are.” Surmounting a struggle is its own reward. The bigger the burden, the better the feeling when achieving. Worthwhile achievement follows effort.
At the heart of the hero’s journey story framework that lies at the root of so many famous books and movies is the pain and suffering endured by the hero which forges them into the person they become. There’s no progress without first pain. Heroes aren’t heroes because their path was easy. They become heroes because of how they approached adversity. The historian Arnold Toynbee noted “that all of history can be written in a simple little formula—challenge, response.” Pick an event that has made it into the history books, they share the common element of challenge. A challenge shows up, then we humans respond. Our responses as individuals, families, businesses, communities, and societies determine our results. The writer Truman Capote gave us, “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.” Yes, life is sweeter after difficulty.
