“Difficulties strengthen the mind as labor does the body.” — Seneca
One of the things men misunderstand most is the purpose of problems. We spend a lot of energy trying to eliminate them, treating every setback as a failure of planning, a sign something went wrong. That’s backwards. I’ve spent 25 years running companies and navigating some genuinely hard seasons in my personal life, and what I know now is that the problems weren’t interruptions to God’s plan. They were God’s plan. Not because life is cruel, but because the muscle you need for the life you’re asking for cannot be built any other way.
You don’t walk into a gym having never trained before and press 300 pounds. Your body hasn’t been prepared for that. And yet men do this constantly with the weight of leadership, of fatherhood, of recovery — they expect to carry something they’ve never been conditioned to carry, and when they drop it, they call themselves a failure. That’s not failure. That’s an undertrained muscle meeting an honest load.
The Seneca quote hit me this week because I wasn’t just reading it — I was living it. I’ve had a run of setbacks over the last two years that, if I’m honest, I wouldn’t have traded. Not because they were fun. They weren’t. But because of what someone close to me said in the middle of it. She said, “I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who can problem-solve as well as you.” And I sat with that. The question isn’t whether you’re a good problem solver. The question is: how did you get that way? For me, the answer is simple.
I’ve lived a life that required it.
Here’s what happened this week that drove this home for me.
I was talking with one of the men I coach — let’s call him Marcus. He’s running a company, doing the work, but he’s got an employee situation that’s been grinding on him. On one side, there’s a man who’s a solid installer. Good at the technical work. But the moment his tasks are done, he’s gone. Doesn’t help his teammates clean up. Doesn’t ask if anyone needs support. Just clocks out. On the other side, there’s another man — humble, appreciative, showing up fully. And Marcus wants to pour into him. He wants to invest in the man who’s reciprocating.
What’s the problem? Marcus wasn’t sure how to frame the difference. So I told him what I’ve learned after a lot of hard years building teams: you can’t pour into someone who’s only there to take. Not because they’re bad people — sometimes they just haven’t developed the muscle yet. The teams that function are the ones built on reciprocity. Give more than you expect to get back. When you’re in the right environment, it always comes back around. When you’re not, it becomes obvious quickly — and then you decide.
But here’s what Marcus said that stopped me cold. He’s former military, and he looked at me and said, “The company pays me to do a job at the highest level. They don’t owe me anything else beyond that.”
I told him to write that down. That context — that the organization owes you nothing beyond what you agreed to when you took the role (and vice versa) — will carry you further than almost any other frame I’ve seen in leadership. It removes entitlement before it takes root. It also commits you to be your best. And it builds the kind of man a team needs.
This week’s lesson: The muscle that carries you through hard things is built in the hard things. You can’t import it. You can’t read your way to it. You have to stay with the problem long enough to come out the other side having shown yourself something.
