It’s a strange paradox, isn’t it, that struggle makes us stronger?
In all breakthrough human striving – explorations, scientific discoveries, feats of endurance or craft or willpower – struggle and suffering are bedfellows of greatness. But how important is struggle for the vast majority of us, in relation to our work and daily lives?
Well, if we don’t keep struggling for improvement even in small dimensions, for ways to reinvent what we do, for maintaining our relevance in our chosen field (or a new one), we may become personally and professionally stagnant.
Betterment, innovating, staying relevant – these are mentally taxing, and require hard work. Practise definitely matters. But it must be the right kind of practise: deliberate practice. Growth requires difficulty, and often repeated failure, without which learning doesn’t occur.
“This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practise: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve,”
Why Our Brains Are Wired to Benefit From the Struggle
Even our brains are wired to benefit from struggle: developments in neuroscience indicate that effort and challenge builds new neural network pathways with strengthened protective sheaths. In our sleep, too, we grapple with problems: our dreams are a form of struggle, a subconscious re-patterning and learning. So even when we aren’t aware of progress, or it feels impossible, improvement may be happening in the background. The trick to actualising this is to persevere.
How do vision and belief drive the struggle?
Perhaps the underlying reason we need to embrace struggle is precisely because it’s impossible to pin down the degree of endeavour needed to achieve a goal. Genes do matter: some people simply have the intellectual capacity, or skilful predisposition, or physical attributes, to perform certain tasks better than other people.
It’s also probably true that luck, or randomness, depending on how we consider it, plays a role in a successful struggle. We can take comfort in how even expert statisticians are baffled by the relationship between causation, correlation, association and outcomes, as wonderfully captured in this cartoon by webcomic XKCD…
Still, by continuing the struggle, by keeping up the momentum, and by maintaining what Intel co-founder Andy Grove called a ‘productive paranoia’, we can weigh the odds in our favour.
In times of intense difficulty and pressure, it may be helpful to remember what Tesla and SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk once said: “Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” He took social media flak for this – but apart from the incredible hours he specified (he worked 80-90 hours a week during the start-up phases of his companies!), his point surely holds true.
In different words, what Musk meant was that accomplishing ground-breaking or high-performance work should not be seen through the lens of the required grind and graft, or the many hours of practice, but to see the struggle as a journey towards a vision. This helps to reframe the question, from ‘What am I struggling to do?, to ‘What do I believe in?’
Pain Points
Russian performance-protest artist Pyotr Pavlensky has been jailed numerous times.
His form of art often involves self-mutilation. In Fixation, in an attempt to shake Russian citizens from what he called their passivity, he nailed his scrotum to the paving stones outside the Kremlin in Moscow’s Red Square.
In Carcass he cocooned himself, naked, in barbed wire outside the Russian parliament in St. Petersburg to protest restrictive laws.
“Everything in my art is done to make people think. It’s not enough just to have your own individual freedom; you need to help others free themselves.”
How far would you go to struggle for something you believe in?
The value of struggle for growth
Reinvention and innovation: many of the world’s most valuable companies today – Amazon, Apple, Netflix – made significant early losses as their founders battled to crack the different elements needed for success. Interestingly, what filters through in many such examples is the prioritization of growth as a business strategy rather than short- or even medium-term profits. The creative minds pioneering these companies understood the intrinsic link between struggle and – as a first-base measure of its progress – growth.
FedEx, Fortune and the Power of Perseverance
FedEx is another example, with an unusual twist to the founder’s tribulations. Started in 1971 by Frederick W. Smith, the company made substantial losses in its first three years. Nearing bankruptcy, Smith went to Las Vegas with the company’s last $5,000 in a desperate bid to win further working capital in the casinos. He was, literally, lucky. Leaving Las Vegas with $24,000 meant he could buy a bit more time before securing further loan financing. Today, FedEx earns about $80bn in annual revenues, and has a market capitalisation of around $60bn!
Stories like this present some of the most important lessons for organisational leaders and entrepreneurship in general. Business innovators and pioneers embrace struggle because they understand it to be a path towards achievement. The vision is paramount, and so they are willing to tolerate the stress and challenges to fulfill it. Truly, it’s a case of ‘struggle now, dividends later’.
Ultimately, perhaps we should adjust how we view struggle.
Stress, too: a significant body of research informs us that stress can serve a helpful purpose to resolve problems, learn from the process, and develop.) The stories that intrigue and move us often involve trials and tribulations, sometimes a tortuous path. But – let’s be honest – most of us do not go through these exaggerated troughs.
That doesn’t mean we aren’t battling, in our own way, against those circumstantial demons Fate places in our paths. As such, maybe the idea of struggle is better understood as determination, perseverance, rejuvenation, or reinvention.
And so what strikes me most is that our struggles are often neither unique, nor fought in isolation. We are all connected. We can help one another. And even when we compete we can improve, mutually.
When you last struggled, what was it about – and did you grow?
Key Takeaways: What Embracing Struggle Teaches Leaders
- Struggle is not a sign that something is wrong. It is often a sign that something important is happening.
- Deliberate practice requires discomfort. Growth without difficulty is not growth.
- The greatest companies in history were built through adversity, not despite it.
- Vision reframes struggle. The question is not what am I struggling to do, but what do I believe in.
- We are not alone in our struggles. Connection and mutual support accelerate the journey.
At LRMG, we believe struggle is not the enemy of performance. It is the engine of it. This is central to our approach to leadership development across South Africa. In practice, we help organisations build people who perform at their best when conditions are hardest. That is leadership development South Africa’s high-consequence industries genuinely need. Explore how LRMG can help through our talent advisory and talent development solutions, or contact us through our contact page.
Frequently Asked Questions: Struggle, Growth and Leadership Development
Why is embracing struggle important for leadership development?
Leadership development in South Africa and globally depends on the ability to tolerate discomfort, persist through failure and extract insight from adversity. In practice, leaders who avoid struggle tend to plateau. They optimise within their existing capabilities rather than expanding them. As cognitive psychologist Anders Ericsson’s research on deliberate practice shows, genuine improvement requires operating at the edges of current ability, not within the comfort of what is already mastered. As a result, the most effective leadership development programmes build the capacity for productive struggle alongside technical and interpersonal skills.
What is deliberate practice and why does it matter for performance?
Deliberate practice, as defined by Anders Ericsson, is structured, focused effort specifically designed to push beyond current capability. In practice, it is different from simply repeating what one already knows how to do. It requires feedback, difficulty and persistence through failure. As a result, deliberate practice produces genuine capability improvement rather than the illusion of competence that comes from practising within one’s existing comfort zone. For South African leaders and organisations building high-performance teams, deliberate practice is the mechanism through which real skills growth occurs.
How do the world’s most successful companies use struggle to drive growth?
Companies like Amazon, Apple, Netflix and FedEx all made significant early losses as their founders battled to build something genuinely new. In practice, what distinguishes these organisations is not that they avoided struggle but that they prioritised growth over short-term profit. As a result, they built the resilience, adaptability and institutional capability that allowed them to eventually dominate their industries. The lesson for South African organisations and leaders is clear: struggle is not a sign that the strategy is wrong. It is often the sign that the strategy is right and simply not yet complete.
How does LRMG help South African leaders build resilience and high performance?
LRMG helps South African organisations build the leadership capability, performance culture and talent readiness needed to compete and grow in demanding conditions. In practice, this means going beyond skills training to address the mindsets, habits and behavioural patterns that determine whether people perform well under pressure. Through talent development, talent technology and talent advisory solutions, LRMG helps organisations build people who do not just function in favourable conditions but who perform at their best when conditions are hardest.
What does LRMG’s approach to leadership development involve?
LRMG’s approach to leadership development in South Africa is grounded in the belief that people are capable of far more than their current performance suggests. In practice, this means building structured development pathways that challenge leaders to operate beyond their comfort zones, reflect honestly on their patterns and develop the deliberate practice habits that produce lasting capability change. As a result, LRMG’s clients build leadership teams that are commercially sharp, resilient under pressure and aligned to the organisation’s growth strategy. To find out more, contact the LRMG team through our contact page.
