Struggle, Joy, and The Meaning of Life

What Alysa Liu can teach us about a worthwhile existence

Following her extraordinary gold medal performance, figure skater Alysa Liu’s first words: “That‘s what I’m f---king talking about. That was so much fun.”

In a recent interview, she also said: “I love struggling, actually. It makes me feel alive.”

Over the past week, the internet exploded with memes celebrating Liu’s success and the path she took to achieve it. Some latched onto the spirit of her first quote, with an emphasis on fun-maxxing. Others focused on her second quote, and the concept of struggle-maxxing.

We love simple, binary narratives: “it’s all about fun” or “no pain no gain.” But the truth is that it’s a bit more complicated; it’s not one or the other. It’s both.

Alysa Liu worked hard, struggled, and sacrificed. She endured monster training sessions. She put in thousands of hours. She fell on ice more times than you could imagine. Anyone who tells you her path to gold was all fun and games is not a serious person. But what changed between the first ten years of her career (age 6 to 16) and the last two (age 18-20) is that she began to find joy in the hard work. It’s not that every day was fun, but the totality of the journey was.

In the first stage of her career, Liu had no autonomy. Her entire career, if not her entire life, was dictated by others. She was told when to skate, how to skate, what music to select, what to wear, what she could (and couldn’t) eat, and on and on and on. “The rink was my home for far too long, and I didn’t have a choice,” she said. The cost was a loss of joy, leading her to quit the sport in 2022.

Two years later, Liu was on a ski trip and found herself having a blast. “I went skiing, and your legs are tired, you’re out of breath, you’re cold, and the cold wind keeps hitting you, and you’re gliding down the mountain, and that’s a lot like skating,” she says. "I love this feeling," Liu remembered.

It occurred to her that perhaps she could reconnect with that feeling on the ice.

So she laced up the skates again, but this time on her own terms. She chose the music. She selected the costumes. She dyed her hair. She worked collaboratively with her coaches to design the training. She still worked harder than most people can even imagine. The struggle was real. Only now she was also having fun.

It’s not just Liu, and it’s not just sport.

I interviewed over 100 top performers across diverse fields, from sport to business to medicine to music to the creative arts, for my new book The Way of Excellence. What I found in all of them was a combination of fierce intensity and deep joy—a willingness to work hard, struggle, and sacrifice; and also to have a whole lot of fun.

People love to romanticize the athlete, artist, or entrepreneur who has a chip on their shoulder, fueled by anger and resentment. It’s the David Goggins’ approach to greatness. But the truth is that if you’re not having fun, you are not going to last long at whatever it is you do, and you certainly won’t get the best out of yourself. Not every day has to be great, but you’ve got to learn to find joy in the totality of the journey. There’s this foolish misconception that you either have to be full of struggle and intensity or full of joy. But that’s nonsense. Time and time again in my reporting I found that joy and struggle can coexist, and in the best performers, they almost always do.

Over two decades of research on passion comes to a similar conclusion: Passion that is driven by rote obsession and diminished autonomy leads to depression, anxiety, declining performance, and burnout. Passion that is driven by joy, curiosity, agency, and interest leads to peak performance, longevity, and fulfillment.

The best performers in the world are focused, determined, a little bit crazy, and often live mundane lifestyles that most people would find boring. That is all true. But the best performers in the world also experience deep joy in their crafts. What makes for greatness is being intense, willing to struggle, and joyful. It’s the joy that makes the ferocious dedication, drive, struggle, and intensity sustainable.

I can’t stress it enough: it’s not fun-maxxing or struggle-maxxing; it’s fun-maxxing and struggle-maxxing. Having fun while working hard is the greatest competitive advantage there is.

Finding Aliveness in a Numbed Out World

The combination of struggle and joy feels like a particularly vital lesson for our current moment. A great risk of the modern world is that we numb ourselves to death, going wherever the current takes us, like automatons floating along an algorithmic conveyor belt to nowhere. Technology lets us date, order food, shop, scroll, and work all from the same small screen. You are always one click away from making a decision or reversing it. You never have to put yourself out there. You can build a whole life around consumption without much, if any, production. It’s an emotionally flattened passivity that kills struggle and joy. Which is to say it kills aliveness.

One reason Alysa Liu’s story became such a cultural phenomenon is that in her, we all saw the best possible versions of ourselves. We saw the unabashed joy and fun. But we also realized all the hard work, struggle, and effort that went into it. That combination is a big part of what makes for a good life.

In 2022, a team of neuroscientists at McGill University in Montreal showed that when we apply effort to challenging tasks, it boosts activity in brain regions that respond to rewards. They looked under the hood and found the neural networks underlying the contentment and satisfaction we feel after a hard day’s work on something we care about. But here’s the catch: The neural activity associated with reward, along with the accompanying real-life feelings of accomplishment, was significantly greater in participants who viewed their effort as worthwhile. The more you believe your hard work is rewarding and satisfying, the more rewarding and satisfying you’ll find it.

It’s an important point. Suffering for the sake of suffering is foolish. What makes for a good life is meaningful struggle. The goal is to seek worthwhile challenges that help you grow into the person you want to become. Train for a marathon. Learn an instrument. Join a choir. Make art. Coach a team. Read 50 books in a year. Put yourself out there. Challenge yourself. Do cool shit.

In the myth of Sisyphus, the gods condemn the protagonist to push a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll down each and every time, for all of eternity. There are countless interpretations of the story. The one I’ve come to adopt is that we are all Sisyphus. We are all pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have it fall—again and again and again.

A good life is about finding fulfillment in the struggle. It’s about expressing our unique talents and gifts and creating joy, community, and meaning in the process. It’s about exerting ourselves with a smile on our face more often than a frown.

This post was adapted from my new book, The Way of Excellence. If you found it valuable, you’ll love the book.