In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, author Ben Horowitz writes about what he calls, “The Struggle.”
In The Tough Stuff, Cody Royle writes about a similar feeling he dubs, “The Weight.”
In your typical coaching leadership book, they might only cover 5% or less of the struggle. The rest of the book is filled with cliches and leadership “fluff.” I’ve wasted numerous hours reading “coaching books” that offered zero value. These 2 books are different. I recommend reading both.
Sharing the struggle does a few things:
It makes you relatable
You aren’t some superhuman that had this one plan and executed it perfectly like we are lead to believe reading “mainstream pop leadership books.”
People can learn from where you went off the rails
It does a whole lot more good to hear about trials, missteps, iterations, and mistakes than it does for us to read another book about this “perfect season” where everything goes right. I’m done reading those books. It’s a fairytale.
In my next 13 posts, I will share my struggle and the lessons I learned from becoming a head coach in junior hockey at 26 years old and my personal experience with “The Struggle” or “The Weight.”
Hopefully, you can see where I’ve been and then use inversion to avoid it on your own path. Find out what you don’t want and avoid it.
See you in a few days.