Struggling can play a crucial role in helping us build strength and achieve success. Challenges can influence individuals to step outside of their comfort zones, acquire new skills, learn valuable lessons, and be encouraged to overcome obstacles. While struggle can help us with growth, it can lead to burnout, frustration, and loss of motivation. Overall, embracing our struggles can lead to personal development and long-term achievement.
John R. Miles in The Value of Struggle for Your Growth says, “When individuals recognize the value of encountering difficulties during their learning process, it can help them achieve their learning potential”. Struggling guides us to learn more about ourselves, define our limits, and discover what makes us stronger. However, excessive struggle leads to consequences and may make it difficult to overcome challenges. To explore this idea further, I spoke with Mr. Laufer, a science teacher at Judge Memorial Catholic High School, who shared his experience: “In my graduate school year in college, I was at risk of failing out with a C average. I had to figure out and improve in all of my classes and start buckling down because I had not been trying very hard before. I was barely able to squeak it out, but I think I learned to do work in school more than I used to”. His perspective highlights how challenges can ultimately lead to success and fulfillment.
In Willpower Isn’t the Key to Success, Brad Stulberg states “If you use willpower too often without any rest or recovery in between, eventually it fatigues and gives out”. Overworking can tend to make a person fall under pressure and make it harder to overcome challenges. Laufer resonated with this idea, saying, “Academically, I didn’t struggle much until college and I wish I almost had because I didn’t have that resilience to figure out what to do to get back up,” says Laufer. His “wake-up call” came when he experienced difficult obstacles, struggling to find solutions. Stulberg says “An equally powerful route to dealing with the willpower challenge is to eliminate the need for willpower altogether, to admit that you’re never going to have enough of it to live the kind of life you want to live”. This highlights the idea that we never always overcome the obstacles that we may face, yet we will always learn something and build strength in ourselves from these experiences.
In Does Suffering Make Us Stronger and Leads to Success, Michael Gonchar highlights the writer Alfie Kohn’s argument of whether children’s suffering and their given rewards help them with success and resilience for their future. In Kohn’s article Do Our Kids Get Off To Easily, he writes “Giving trophies to all the kids is a well-meaning and mostly innocuous attempt to appreciate everyone’s effort”, which tells us that the outcomes of achievements build various levels of strength and understanding of hardships. Overall, it is important to note that struggles can and cannot be overcome, but there is always a lesson that comes after these experiences. Though, our struggles are unique on a deeper level, which can help shape our ideals and skills as life moves on.
As life goes on, it is important to remember to value the experiences where we may face the most challenging obstacles, because even if it doesn’t lead us to success, it will always teach us a lesson to help us become our stronger selves. In response to the question: What advice would you give to someone who is struggling and may be having a hard time overcoming these challenges, Laufer responded with “My gut instinct is to always say you’re not alone in it, but I know when I was feeling that, I hated being told that I’m not alone because it did feel like a unique experience to me. I think my advice is to take it one day at a time, accept advice and help from others, but also realize that you’re gonna have to translate it into your own language so it makes sense for you. Because even if superficially, our struggles and our pursuits for success seem the same from a really high-up view, when you dive into it, it is a unique experience for each person”. Struggling is an unavoidable part of life, and no matter if it leads to success or failure, the outcome of how we have responded to these experiences is what matters most.
