Is struggle admirable?

On achievement, the incommensurability of struggle, fish in a tree; soup with a fork, and a brief discussion on mental health and psychological safety at the workplace

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"If there's one thing that I've learnt from video games, it's that if you meet more enemies, then you're going in the right direction."

- Anon

In the discussion of worldly achievement, struggle and setbacks are often framed as prerequisites for success. However, it may be possible that this confuses the necessary for the causal, in our perception that more struggle is correlated with a higher degree of future success. 

We may first resolve the discussion of whether struggle is necessary for success and achievement.

"And it's the hard way

"But it's the right way

"The right way... to break in a glove

"With something like this, you gotta be ready to put in the work, make the commitment. So what do you think?"

- To Break in a Glove, from Dear Evan Hansen (musical)

It may be true that worthy goals require struggle, but we must also be aware of the false dichotomy, as it is not always that case that the right way must be the hard way, or that the correct method must be difficult to achieve; Sometimes, things can be easy and right at the same time, and when they are, taking the more difficult approach might not only be unnecessary, but sometimes may even be manipulative— especially if this "struggle" is for someone else and where reciprocation is implicitly expected.

Barring that different people have different definitions for what constitutes "success" to them, we may consider that achievement can be classified as "global" or "personal", where the formal may refer to general great feats across the mean abilities of all humans (such as performance in the Olympics), and personal achievements compare yourself to who you were in the past (ie personal growth and development). 

Struggle is also a personal metric, as it references the current ability of the individual measured against the demands of the situation or circumstance, and changes with a function of improved ability. For example, a novice athlete may "struggle" at the start of her career to master the fundamentals of the sport, but similarly "struggles" competitively at the world stage after making it thus far, because she pushes the bar of achievement higher with each improvement that she makes, thus changing what she struggles with, but always struggling nonetheless.

Thus, struggle is not equivalent at different stages of one's development. It is also incommensurable across persons. The closest metric that we may have for comparison could be the effort required or put in by the person to overcome the same difficulty. However, this is not completely fair since different people have different perceptions of how much effort constitutes the percentage of overall possible input, and may have different circumstances that affect their "capacity for struggle".

"We all have the same number of hours in a day, but not the same circumstances"

- of trauma, illness, and loss

Therefore, it may be fair to consider that a worthy achievement is defined by its difficulty of being achieved. Thus, a necessary condition of personal achievement must be some known struggle as a function of your current abilities, and that global achievement is that of an aggregate of abilities of the typical pool of people who may choose to attempt it.

Perhaps achievement is only worthy if not everyone can achieve it. Thus, it may be possible that we are "struggling" with the wrong goals that other people may only need to struggle less to achieve.

"Sometimes, some settings or some contexts won't necessarily see your value— and that's not about you; it's about the context."

Of emotional well-being, "numbness is not feeling nothing— it's feeling everything, and never really having learnt to manage it all". I begin to realise that I might not actually have learnt how to cope with overwhelming situations, as much as I have removed myself from them, or tided over the phase as a function of passing time. Changing your environment is an important strategy— but it is a privilege that not everyone may have all the time.

Even in psychologically safe environments, there may be psychologically unsafe moments, and it would benefit us to shift our mental model from the dependence on external validation as "Am I doing okay?" to the quiet confidence that 'I Am doing okay", in the knowledge that we are working in the right direction.

In movie Gattaca (1997), a genetically inferior man assumes the identity of a genetically superior in order to work at a spaceflight organisation to achieve his dream of being an astronaut. If we disregard the in-universe discrimination of these genetically inferior persons and the whole main premise of gene editing and elitism, within this cherry-picked context, it may be plausible that the condition of genetic superiority is due to the physically demanding nature of space travel on the human body. Thus, just as how a fish may never climb a tree or as drinking soup with a fork, perhaps some struggles are "unnecessary" if the individual is not the most suitable for the given context in the first place.

However, the protagonist of the film may strike a chord with the audience because he has a clearly defined goal in mind and is unwilling to let the "arbitrary" requirements of external entities limit his potential, and we are all a sucker for a story of someone rising above his circumstance and beating the odds— which is also what makes this perceptibly a worthy achievement if he succeeds, or unfortunate and "sad" if he fails (no spoilers).

Therefore, perhaps the key to evaluating struggle is in its necessity in achieving what you want, or moving in that direction, and to be mindful to avoid the lose-lose situation of "unnecessary struggle" as being inadequate in an unsuitable environment or organisation that works toward a goal that you may not even really want in the first place; We must still choose something to struggle with, but perhaps the struggle is only most worthy or admirable if the individual struggles toward a clearly identified outcome that she deeply resonates with.