673. How Can Struggle Lead to Joy? The Powerful Lesson From Olympic Champion Alysa Liu

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of The Way the World Works. Today I want to talk about joyful struggle and what a joyful struggle is, and I want to use the Winter Olympic Games that just happened to talk about that. And I want to preface by saying if you've been listening to this podcast for years, you know that I have actually talked before about some negative critiques about the Olympics in general because economically sometimes they leave the host cities more often than not.

They leave the host cities in a little bit of a financial strain. People think of them as being this big economic boom that helps the cities. That's not always the case.

And then, you know, they're always in debt except for the one year is privatized. I'm going to put all that aside. So if you have listened to that episode and then you're listening to me now talk about how great the Olympics are, there are reasons to go back and listen to that one of what I was talking about economically.

But I want to talk about something different. I want to talk about why for the first time since honestly 1996, which your parents might remember as the Atlantic Games, when the U.S. female gymnastic team was just rocking it and it was so cool to watch. This was the first year since then that I have been just so excited about figure skating.

And the reason is because Alyssa Lou, I'm sure you guys have all heard her name by now, but she has just taken the country and the world by storm. So why are we all just kind of obsessed with Alyssa Lou right now? Not only is it because she's a fantastic skater, but listening to her speak, listening to her interviews, I am falling more just in love with this girl, the more I hear her and the more I'm thinking it's so important for kids to hear her message and for adults too, because I think a lot of adults don't really understand the message she's here to show us. So Olympics, Olympics are a time where we see all these really, really top tier athletes perform.

But if you've ever watched, especially I think figure skating, just because not in not in every sport can we see their faces, but in figure skating, it's a performance on like, you know, skiing or something like that. So we can see them, right? It's a very visual performance. So we see these ice skaters and what do they do when they step out onto the ice? You see a lot of like, you know, they have to catch their breath.

You can tell that they are so nervous. Sometimes I'm nervous. We're all nervous watching them.

We see it and we see them get in the ice and we see them perform things that most of us would never ever be able to do. Right. But we see them looking very serious.

Sometimes they'll smile at the camera. You know, that's performance. They are performers.

But for the most part, you can see this, this deep concentration and this deep, you know, this is my moment. I don't want to mess it up kind of feeling. And I think anybody who's competed in anything before kind of knows that feeling.

So that's what we're used to seeing. Then you see Alyssa Lou step out on the ice and oh my goodness, she radiates joy. Does she not? I think we can all just see that.

I mean, somebody like me who doesn't, I'm not an athlete. I don't really care about sports anymore, but I was going through TikTok and I see a video of her performance kind of come on my screen and I just couldn't look away. And I was smiling before I knew it because there's something so joyful about it.

She makes it look easy. And I don't want to say that because obviously it's not easy. You should see me on the ice.

I would fall down right away, but she makes it look effortless. She makes it look fun. And we don't see a lot of like joyful, fun competitiveness when we see things like ice skating.

And I don't blame them. Right. They're so focused and they're so in the game.

And then she ends up doing this beautiful job. She skates the way she moves. It's it's like she it's like she's in her element.

It's like she was made to do it. It's so loose. It's just it's it's joy.

It's just pure joy. And of course, she won the gold medal first time, I think, since 2002 that an American female has won the figure skating event. So it's it's really cool to see her do all this.

And then that would be cool enough on its own. But then she has this really great back story. So she was in the Olympics at 2022 when she was, I think, 16 years old.

And she first became a national champion, I think, 13 years old. So she has been doing this for a long time. She's now 20 years old, which to me is still very young, but I know might seem grown up to some of our listeners.

But she was, you know, her whole life was educated, even to the point where she gave up public school and was even homeschooled for a little bit because they needed to make sure that she was getting in all the skate lessons that she could whenever she could. So she makes it to the Olympics. And what happens? She is burnt out.

She is struggling. But what is she struggling for? She's struggling for something that isn't bringing her joy, something that isn't fun. There's no meaning.

It's just not fun for her. Her coaches are telling her what to do, what to wear. And she says, stop.

I'm going to step away from this. I'm going to go figure out who I am. I'm going to go, you know, just step away from skating and have fun for the first time in my life, because being a child who is that devoted to your sport, you know that that's your whole life.

She wanted a life outside of that. So she steps away. She's burnt out.

No one thought that she was going to be able to get back to where she is today. In fact, when she called her gymnast, her coach, her gymnast, her ice skating coaches, when she called them two years ago to say, I think I'm ready to get back into skating after her two and a half year break, they were like, you can't do it. Don't do it.

Because usually when people take breaks and come back, they don't have the same success they had before. And then it leads to, you know, making them kind of feel bad. And it's it's a big emotional stress.

And she said, no, I'm ready to come back. I'm going to do it. But I'm going to do it on my terms.

I'm going to do it because I want to do it, not because I feel like I have to do it, not because I need to win a medal to prove something. I love it. I love my art.

She says. In fact, she says she's not really even though she is an athlete. She says, I consider myself an artist and I'm on the ice to show my art.

And that's what I'm here for. That's what I want to compete for. So she redefined why she was doing what she was doing.

She was doing it for the right reasons. She was doing it because she had brought this meaning to it, that this is a place for her to share her art with the whole world. And on her term, she said, I'm going to skate to the music I want to skate to.

You know, I'm not going on these strict diets so that you guys think it can, you know, fit into these costumes. I'm going to wear what I want. I'm going to do what I want.

I'm going to have really crazy bleached hair and I'm going to do it because that's who I am. And I'm going to go out here and I'm going to do my best. But here's the thing.

It was not easy for her. She had to struggle. There's that word.

She had to retrain herself because you have to remember when she started skating, she was seven inches shorter than she is now. She is a grown up body now. So she had to relearn how to do all these, you know, I was going to say flips, but I don't think they're flips, but spins and turns and all these things on the ice in a bigger grown up body.

So she she struggled really hard. And there's a great 60 minute interview. And this is where I just, oh, I think she's such an incredible girl.

They're showing her trying to do one of her triple axel, one of the things where they spin up in the air. I'm not going to pretend like I know the names of everything, but she keeps falling and she keeps falling. And the interviewer is like, oh, my goodness, I keep watching you out there and you're not ready to stop even though you keep falling.

And she said, oh, I love this so much. She said, I love to struggle. I love to struggle.

It makes me feel alive. I love that because that is a lesson so many grown ups and kids, you know, we don't understand. We think we live in a very comfortable world.

And so when something is hard, we don't want to do it. You know, we have everything at our fingertips. We have we can order food on our phone and have it to our front door.

We don't have to see the person delivering it. We have all these things, all these these comforts. And so when we have to struggle for something, we don't want to do it.

We give up. But she's out here purposefully struggling. She chose to struggle, but she chose to struggle because the outcome, the meaning of it was so important that it made the struggle worth it.

And for her, it wasn't winning a gold medal. It was just performing. And here she is winning a gold medal because of that mentality, because of that mindset.

But so many of us either struggle because we are forced to, you know, what she used to do when she felt a lot of pressure to skate before, before she she quit. We feel we either are in a struggle for reasons we don't want to be in. So there's no real meaning to us or we don't even want to struggle because why would we do something hard? It's hard.

It's hard to do hard things. And that's that's a very human thing. But when we look at people like Alyssa Lou, these these superior athletes and artists, as she calls herself, who are willing to literally fall and get back up again and keep trying and keep trying, but love the struggle, love the journey of it, love what it is that we're learning as we're falling on the ice.

And that's so symbolic for life because you're going to fall metaphorically in life all the time. Life is going to be hard. Life is going to give you challenges.

But if you find the meaning in that and if you say, you know what, I'm going to struggle a little bit and I'm going to get through this and it's going to make me tougher for the next struggle. And I'm going to be tougher for the struggle after that, because I hate to break it to you as much as we tried to avoid struggle or avoid hard things. Hard things are going to find us.

It is the nature of life. And so you need to be ready to face those challenges. Now, like I said, it's when you're doing a sport, you're probably going to be it's going to be more worthwhile to struggle if it's something you choose.

Like when Alyssa came back to ice skating in life, you don't really always get to choose what your struggle is, but you do get to choose how you meet that struggle. And, you know, and I watch her go on the ice. I think I were watching her meet that struggle with pure joy, pure joy.

And it's just it it has really got to me. Like I said, I've been watching tick tocks of her interviews and her ice skating when this is not an area that particularly interests me. I was very bad at ice skating lessons when I was eight.

I have not gone back since. But watching her, it's just you can't help but smile. You just can't help but smile.

It's it's it's really fun. And it's a real breath of fresh air because there's so much doom and gloom in the world today. And there's so much, you know, oh, this is hard.

This is hard. And it's like, you know, it's hard getting to the Olympics again after, you know, giving up for two years. And she does it with so much grace.

And Alyssa Lou really teaches us and other Olympic athletes, too, that to get to this great thing, to become this this better version of ourselves, to become really great at your craft or even to just come out on top to have a better life. You have to be willing to go through the work, to go through the struggle that sometimes precedes that, because nothing is nothing that comes easy is really going to be substantial. Right.

You have to really work for it. And, you know, I think one way we can say it is that excellence isn't the absence of pain. It's the ability to transform that pain or that struggle into something really, really beautiful.

You know, in economic terms, sometimes there's this this term of like creative destruction. And that's a little different. But I like it because it's like this.

You have to kind of break down who you were, break down the way you were thinking and be transformed into this this new person because of that struggle. A little different than actual creative destruction, but I kind of like that, that metaphor of saying it. And I want to read a line from an email.

If you guys are getting the Tettle Twins emails from Connor, the founding father of Tettle Twins, the author, I want to read something he said about this in an email that is just so great. The gap between fine and extraordinary is almost always filled with something most people refuse to walk through. And that's that struggle walking through the hard thing.

And I think Connor sums it up so perfectly there, because that really is what what changes someone from being fine, okay, being good at, you know, what they do and from somebody who's truly great, because everyone who stepped on that ice deserve to be there, right? Every ice skater who went out and gave it their all looked amazing. Again, did things I'd never be able to I can't even I can't even skate on the ice. So they're all talented.

They're all incredible. But they didn't bring that joy. We rarely see that kind of joy.

And so it's just this, oh, man, I mean, it's such a good lesson. And I think it's such a great way to start out the year because, you know, February is still the beginning of the year. And it's just, to me, sets a tone and sets something that we can take with us.

And maybe something is some people set goals or some people, you know, want to start fresh in the new year. And maybe we can tell ourselves to do hard things. I did an episode on that a little bit ago or struggle, right? But pick pick these struggles that are really meaningful to us.

Don't struggle. Don't choose to struggle just because you want to prove you can struggle struggle for something good struggle because you want to get up earlier and go to the gym and work out maybe or struggle because you want to really study for a math test. You haven't been that great at math.

You really want to get great at math this year. Things like that things that have an outcome that really make you happy and are personal to you. Because here's the really important thing.

If you avoid hardships or you avoid struggle or you avoid doing something that's hard because again, it's hard, of course, we don't naturally our bodies don't want to deal with struggle. We don't want to have to do that. But if you avoid that, you are missing out on a version of you that you may never get to know.

You know, Bastia talks about what is unseen, these unseen consequences of actions that either happened or didn't happen. And that's that's what this this missed opportunity could be. You know, maybe I think it's too hard to get up in the early or get up early in the morning and go to the gym.

And so I don't. But man, what if I didn't? What if I had done that every day? I wonder what kind of person I could be in a year and in a year when I'm looking back, I can think like, oh, I'll never know. I'll never know what would have happened if I would have fixed, you know, this behavior sooner.

Or what if I'm I really want to start playing the piano, but man, I don't know how it might be really tough. And it's going to be really hard to have to learn. And it's going to be frustrating.

And there's going to be times I want to give up. But if I put it off or I say it's too hard now, then a year from now, I'm not going to know what would have happened. But if I start today and I struggle and I really try to become good and I dedicate however many hours a week that I can to do it, imagine the person I might be in a year, but I'm never going to meet that person if I don't choose that struggle or I don't choose to to pick something, pick a challenge.

So I think it's such a great lesson that we can take with us. If you have not seen Alyssa Lou Ice Skate, you'll know exactly as soon as you watch it, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about, because it's not that she is the best skater that ever existed. Right.

I've seen skaters pull off very difficult moves. I've seen you know, we've seen all this, but I've never seen never have I seen a figure skater step on the ice and just radiate joy. Happiness isn't even the right word to say joy.

And it was really fun because when she got done with one of her I think they're called programs like one of her competitions, one of her I was going to say dance, but I don't know if that's what's called. I think program. When she got done, she was just kind of like, yeah, like she knew that she had done a good job and she knew because she was loose, because she was just really feeling the music.

And again, so great to watch. So if you haven't, guys, go as a family, watch her do that. Maybe even watch that 60 Minutes interview, because just listening to her talk, she has such an amazing attitude for a 20 year old.

And it's just really inspiring. So remember, don't avoid hard things. Don't avoid struggle.

If we can struggle and we can do it joyfully, if we can struggle knowing that our struggle is going to mean something, that the outcome is going to be amazing. Let's do it, guys. We'll stop avoiding it.

So I will leave it there. As always, don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast and share with your friends. And until next time, I will talk to you later.