On Hardship
“[In order to shift your life in a new direction], it must be harder to stay the same than to change.”
-Dr. Wayne Priest
This school is hard. It is set up to pose the greatest challenge that our learners can handle. School is supposed to, when properly oriented, prepare you for life, and life is hard. Hardship is what causes you to grow. Perhaps more importantly, hardship is what teaches you how to grow. Strength trainers don’t lift cotton balls, they lift the heaviest weight they can safely lift. Runners don’t jog a few feet, they run as far or as fast as they can. Heroes don’t keep living their normal, easy lives, they go on adventures that push them to their limits. By willingly taking on challenges that are difficult, you not only learn the skills necessary to overcome those challenges, but you also transform yourself into the kind of person who can stand strong when things get hard. You build up character and learn to stay the course and weather the storms, not only to survive, but to come through the other side stronger, not despite the struggle, but because of it.
My childhood was relatively easy. We weren’t wealthy by any means, but my parents worked hard to ensure we had what we needed, and on occasion, we got what we wanted too. School was a breeze, for the most part. I excelled in all of my school subjects. I loved reading, math, and science. Creative writing was one of my favorite activities, and I jumped into music programs as soon as I could, with enough natural talent that I was consistently in the top two or three musicians on my instrument without spending much time practicing. It’s not that I didn’t encounter difficult things that I had to overcome, but rather, I did not have any existential struggle that truly pushed me to be better. I was able to coast through K-12 with As and Bs effortlessly, that is, until I started taking college courses.
The strategy I had been using, namely, to do my homework assignments in class and then relax at home, stopped working. It turns out you can’t write an eight-page history paper with at least five references while simultaneously listening to the lecture. At the very least, I can’t. So I changed strategies…slightly. I did what I needed to in order to avoid a failing grade, and that was it. I did homework, but as rarely and as quickly as I could get away with. I still ended up dropping a class just about every semester, so the failing grade I was on track to get wouldn’t affect my ability to graduate. I passed all of my classes, barely, graduated, and achieved my goal. A piece of paper from the university that said I knew a little bit about psychology. I didn’t ultimately make a shift in my life. My goal was still simply to get the rubber stamp from my professors and move on. It turns out rubber stamps aren’t particularly useful when you get into the “real” world. A piece of paper didn’t make my marriage any easier. The thumbs up from my professors didn’t make it any easier to excel professionally. The signature of the dean stating that I had completed coursework sufficient to be awarded a Bachelor of Arts didn’t make me a decent father. Achieving that goal wasn’t hard for me, so other than a bit more book knowledge and an inflated ego nothing really changed.
Then I got a job. I got married. I had children. I entered the unsheltered world of adulthood, utterly unprepared. Suddenly, I couldn’t just drop a subject that I wasn’t doing well in anymore; I did my job, or my family would be homeless. It turns out minimal effort isn’t enough to have a successful marriage, so I stepped up or my family would fall apart. I very quickly found out you can’t really put off your responsibilities if you have an infant, or else they die. When I entered the real world, I saw very quickly how easily it would be to allow my life to slip into a living hell. Turns out hell was a way worse prospect than stepping up and sacrificing a bit of my own short-term wants and desires. Life was suddenly harder to deal with than change was. So I changed.
This school does for its learners what traditional school never did for me. It doesn’t look at its learners and say, “That’s adequate, move along.” It looks at them and says, “You know that you can do better than this.” It doesn’t make learners comfortable, giving them tasks they can easily handle. It calls them to adventure, to take on trials and challenges at the edge of their abilities, it calls them to be better. It isn’t set up to give them a rubber stamp for academic mediocrity. It is set up to build character, to push growth as individuals who must contend with a world of genuine challenge. A world where the stakes are high, where anything less than your best puts you at genuine risk of descending into a living hell, but also a world where strength of character and the highest aim produces a life of meaning. It produces the life of a hero not despite its hardships, but precisely because of them. It produces a life that changes lives. A life that changes the world.
“...don't tell people, 'You're okay the way that you are.' That's not the right story. The right story is, 'You're way less than you could be.’”
-Dr. Jordan Peterson
I wasn’t faced with serious challenges when the stakes were low. When the stakes were suddenly existential, it was a gut punch. If not for the grace of God (and the grace of my wife) I would have certainly spiraled down into the depths. But I chose to be better, to do the hard thing. To face up to my inadequacies and choose a better way. But where would I be if I learned those lessons early on? How much further would I be professionally? How much stronger could my family be? When you aren’t challenged, you don’t grow. In my formative years, I wasn’t challenged, and so I stagnated. I thought I was sufficient. I was convinced that my mediocrity was excellence because I was never put into a situation where that view was seriously challenged until all safety nets were removed.
As a parent and as a guide, it is often difficult to watch my children and our learners struggle. Especially when the tasks are particularly challenging or the consequences are exceptionally uncomfortable. I want them to have the best life they can, and seeing the discomfort and struggle hurts. No one enjoys seeing those they care for in pain, and growth is painful. My instinct pushes me to give them a boost, to soften the blow. But that robs them of the hardship. It robs them of the types of experiences that made me a better me and pushes it off until the consequences aren’t just uncomfortable, but dire. Beyond that, it robs them of the very thing that gives life meaning. The stories that we care about, the ones we remember, the ones that inspire us, do so because of the difficulties that the hero overcomes. If we want our children to have lives of meaning, to be inspirational, we cannot shield them from hardship. We cannot rob them of what makes them exceptional.
I am still trying to push myself to be better. I hope to be an eternal learner who is never quite comfortable but who is always pushing himself farther. If I rob children of the opportunity to grow, then I am working to hold them down, I’m contributing to stagnation and mediocrity. I’m telling them that they are fine just the way they are. But that isn’t the right story. The Epic Story is about hardship. Because a story without conflict is a story without meaning. The hero doesn’t grow despite what is hard, the hero grows because of it. Because the whole point of the story is the overcoming of the thing that is hard. So this school is hard. It is set up that way because that is what drives us to be better. The challenge is what calls us out of our mediocrity and demands excellence. Answering the call is what makes us heroes, and heroes change the world. This school is hard because we know our learners are capable of changing the world, so long as we don’t steal away their heavy weights and let them believe that cotton balls are all they can carry.
