Two images went viral this week from the Milan Olympics. One is grace. The other is grit. Both reveal how important joyful struggle is to our development, particularly for kids.
I want to talk about why this matters more than you think.
The two pictures are the same picture
You might look at the two images and see beauty in one, brutality in the other. I think both photos are similar.
Hughes got his teeth knocked out and kept playing. Less than two minutes into overtime, he buried the golden goal and ended a 46-year American drought in men's hockey. His first words after: "I'm lucky I'm from the best country in the world, and we've got great dentists there, too."
Liu's path was longer and arguably more brutal, just in a way you can't photograph. She became the youngest U.S. national champion at 13. By 16, after the Beijing Olympics, she was so burned out she could barely look at an ice rink. Her father said she was traumatized. She retired, tossed her skates in a closet, enrolled at UCLA, and hiked to Everest.
Two years later, she called her old coach and said she wanted to come back. His response: "Why would you do this to yourself?"
She came back anyway. Won the World Championships. Then, in Milan, delivered a nearly flawless free skate to win double gold. When she stepped off the ice, she told the camera exactly what she was feeling: "That's what I'm f---ing talking about!"
The missing teeth. The golden dress on the ice. Both of these are portraits of the same human phenomenon: the moment when all the suffering becomes worth it. When the pain transmutes into something that looks, from the outside, like pure joy.
Because it is pure joy. And it was purchased at a cost.
It’s the same truth we try to illustrate in The Tuttle Twins and the Search for Atlas—the treasure only matters because of the trials required to reach it.
No struggle, no story. No cost, no meaning.
The version of your life that will never exist
There is a version of your life that will never exist because you would not endure the pain required to reach it.
Liu almost never came back. She was done. The sport had hollowed her out. If she'd stayed retired, nobody would have blamed her. She'd already been an Olympian, a national champion, a world medalist. (A perfectly respectable career by any measure…)
But there would be no golden dress on Olympic ice. No two gold medals around her neck. No moment of stepping off the ice knowing she had done the thing she was born to do, on her own terms, in her own way.
That version of Alysa Liu would have been fine. Comfortable enough. And it would have been a tragedy she'd never even know about, because the life you don't live doesn't send you a postcard showing you what you missed.
Hughes could have come off the ice after his face got rearranged. Nobody would have questioned it. A four-minute power play was already secured. Let someone else finish the job.
Instead he stayed. And now his toothless, bloody, flag-draped grin is being called the defining image of the 2026 Olympics.
My takeaway in all of this? The gap between "fine" and "extraordinary" is almost always filled with something most people refuse to walk through.
Joy and suffering are not opposites
Our postmodern, consumerist world has sold a lie that most people have bought: that the good life is the comfortable life. That happiness lives on the other side of removing all friction.
Liu's story obliterates this.
When she was 16, skating was all struggle and no meaning. She hated it. It had been her father's plan for her life more than her own. She was grinding through it because that's what she'd always done. The result was burnout so severe she couldn't even remember competing at junior worlds. Her coaches said she'd compartmentalized everything.
When she came back at 18, everything was different. She chose it. She controlled the music, the choreography, the costumes, the terms. The technical difficulty actually went down as she dropped the quad jumps and triple axels that had been destroying her body.
And she started winning everything.
She was skating from a place of joy. While other skaters were trying not to lose, she was out there sharing her art. Her own words after winning gold: "I was peak happiness when I was out there on the ice. Nothing could bring me higher than that."
It's important to realize that the struggle didn't disappear. She still trained relentlessly. She still had to be one of the best technical skaters on earth. She still had to deliver under pressure that would paralyze most humans. But the struggle was now in service of something she genuinely loved.
That’s one of the themes underlying all of our books! We want kids to understand that freedom doesn’t remove difficulty. Instead, it gives ownership over it. The reality is that chosen hardship transforms into purpose while imposed hardship usually just becomes resentment.
That's the unlock. Joy and intensity are not opposites that cancel each other out. In the best performers, they coexist. They feed each other. The suffering becomes meaningful because you chose it, because it's connected to something you can't not pursue.
Hughes plays through missing teeth because he loves hockey and he loves his teammates and he loves his country, and the pain is just the price of admission to the moment he's been chasing his whole life. Liu skates with a grin because the ice is where she creates art now, not where she follows others' orders.
Strugglemaxxing is the point
Evie Magazine told us that we should "Embrace the joy of strugglemaxxing," Their post was meme-worthy, no doubt… but memes often carry more truth than essays. (Ahem.)
Because here's what the Olympics often show us: excellence is the capacity to take pain and transform it into something beautiful. The people who reach the highest levels aren't the ones who avoided suffering. They're the ones who found something worth suffering for.
There is no separation between the joy and the pain. They need each other to exist. Liu's golden moment on the ice means little without the two years in the wilderness. Hughes' bloody grin means far more after getting a stick to the face. The ecstasy is proportional to the struggle that preceded it. Always.
So yes. Strugglemaxx.
Find the thing you'd bleed for. The thing you'd walk away from everything to come back to. The thing that makes you forget you're missing teeth because you're too busy being alive.
Then go suffer for it joyfully.
The harder question
Everything I just wrote applies to you and me. To our own lives, and our own choices. But it gets harder when we're talking about our kids.
You can't hand someone else their joyful struggle. You can't sit your ten-year-old down and say "go find the thing you'd bleed for." Kids don't find meaning through lectures. They find it through environments.
The real parental art is observation followed by engineering. You watch what your children are drawn to. You notice what lights them up. And then you find or create environments where that interest can be pursued with real rigor, real feedback, and real stakes.
That’s why in The Tuttle Twins and Their Spectacular Show Business the kids don’t just talk about entrepreneurship—they actually do it. They face criticism. They deal with failure. The struggle is real. The risk is real.
And that’s the point.
The kid who loves rockets gets enrolled in a robotics program where the expectations are high and the work is demanding. The kid fascinated by animals spends a summer working on a relative's ranch with actual responsibilities. The kid drawn to making things gets supported in starting a small venture where customers provide unfiltered feedback that no parent could replicate.
The key is that struggle without meaning produces resentment, not resilience. We've all seen examples, like the kid forced into piano lessons they hate, grinding through scales while dreaming of escape. The teenager placed in a summer role at the family business because it's "good for them," counting days until it ends. That kind of friction doesn't build character. It often teaches kids to avoid hard things entirely, because hard things have only ever been associated with misery.
For Liu at 16, skating had become struggle without meaning. Someone else's plan for her life. She didn't just burn out, she was basically traumatized. It was only when she came back on her own terms that the same grueling sport became a source of joy.
The formula requires patience: find what they love, then make it hard. Not hard as in punishing. Hard as in demanding. Put them in rooms where they're not the best. Give them coaches who won't coddle them. Let them fail when you could easily intervene. And when they want to quit (they will), help them see the bigger picture without removing the difficulty.
This week, we’re celebrating Family Reading Week by highlighting our new Tuttle Twins Book Club.
It’s the perfect way to build your Tuttle Twins library with two of our best-loved books arriving in the mail each month. Our books have always focused on teaching kids that they can do hard things and that struggle is worth it in the end.
You may not be trying to manufacture a gold medalist, sure—but you're doing something far greater: helping build a human who has evidence, real evidence from their own life, that they can do hard things. Every completed challenge becomes a reference point they carry forward.
A named moment they can return to when the next hard thing shows up.
Because life will eventually demand something hard from them. It always does. And when that moment arrives, they'll either have a portfolio of evidence that says "I've done hard things before" or they won't.
That part is up to you.
— Connor
