Strive

Chapter 5The dangers of avoiding the struggle

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, if you are going to strive, you are guaranteed to run into something called struggle. I broadly define struggle as the difficulty and discomfort people experience when they are in the process of striving towards a meaningful goal, vision or aspiration.

The problem is, however, we are not wild about struggle. When you bring up the topic of people having more challenge and pressure in their lives, you rarely get an enthusiastic response. As much as we have tried to evolve, we still see pressure and challenge as something we should try to actively avoid in order to have a happy life. In a survey of over 2000 employees in Australia, my research team asked, ‘Would your quality of life improve if you had less challenge and pressure?’ The overwhelming majority of people said yes! But are they right? Let’s explore what happens to us when we try to avoid struggle.

When I was a kid …

It is commonplace for each generation to talk about how they had it so much harder than the youth of today. I myself have endured countless sermons from grandparents over the years about how privileged I am and that I don’t fully appreciate what I have. The reality is that each generation faces its own challenges. I think it is futile to compare generations and say one had it harder than the other.

The youth of today face many challenges, such as huge levels of social comparison and harassment through social media and ...