The Gift of Struggling
Struggling is seriously underrated.
Like lifting weights, it is not pleasant in the moment but will yield great rewards.
When I started in my current role, our company was getting started with marketing automation and I was the first one to use it. There was no one to learn from. I had a few online training sessions but the rest I had to learn for myself. A year and a half later, we switched marketing automation platforms and now I had to learn something brand new. There is no doubt that I benefited from having to struggle through things to find the right answers. Having someone who could have told me exactly how to do things would have helped me in that split second but would have prevented me from learning all of the other valuable information I gained while looking for the answer. I am better because I struggled and so is our company.
I think struggling is especially important for intelligent people or for those whom most things come easily. It can be shocking to them not to have the answer right away. I believe without struggle they will do good work and you will get exactly what was asked for but nothing more. The struggle will push them outside their comfort zone and put their genius to work.
There is a saying that “You give a poor man a fish and you feed him for a day. You teach him to fish and you give him an occupation that will feed him for a lifetime” but I’ll take it one step further and say “you let someone learn how to fish for themselves and they may re-invent the whole fishing industry”.
