Track 14

If You Want to Fly, You Have to Try

October 23, 2026

What if struggle is not something to survive......but something to require?

I was watching a TV show the other night. In it a character was telling this story to a little girl. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

A man is walking through his garden and finds a chrysalis hanging from a branch. He stops. Watches. A small opening has appeared and the butterfly inside is fighting to get through it, twisting, pushing, working against the tight walls of the only world it has ever known.

He watches for a long time. Hours. And then the butterfly stops. It looks stuck. It looks like it can’t go any further.

The man feels sorry for it. So he takes a small knife and gently slits the chrysalis open. The butterfly falls free into his hand.

And it just......lies there.

Its body is swollen. Its wings are tiny and shrivelled and wrong. He waits for them to open, to fill, to catch. They never do. The butterfly spends the rest of its short life crawling. It never flies. Not once.

What the man didn’t understand, and what I didn’t understand for most of my life, is that the struggle was the whole point. The tight opening, the resistance, the fight to get through something that seems too small to survive......that is nature’s way of forcing the fluid from the butterfly’s body into its wings. Without the struggle, the wings stay empty. The butterfly lives on the ground.

Yup......thanks River.

Hmmm......this got me thinking even bigger. Like when I’m at the gym. If I want bigger arms, a bigger chest? I have to tear the muscle fibre to build it. You keep adding weight. More resistance, more growth. I kept thinking: is that just muscle, or is that everything with us humans?

So Leo and me went and looked into it, and here’s what we dug up. That tearing-the-muscle thing I had in my head? Turns out it’s not the whole story. ✱1 What actually grows muscle is tension, the load. Lift something heavier than you can handle right now and your body gets the message to build more. Then you have to keep adding to it or it stalls out. Less weight, less push. Less push, less growth. Your body won’t build something it has no reason to build.

I then had even more questions.

What actually happens to the butterfly if a human helps it out of the cocoon? Does it die, does it never fly, or does it just get stunted?

The push is a step. That took me straight back to a seminar I went to once. The speaker told the room to stop saying “I’ll try.” He said the word itself is an invitation to struggle......that’s literally what it means in Greek. His whole point was that we should remove it from our language, stop inviting the hard thing in.

And I’m sitting here today wondering if maybe he had it backwards. Not wrong about the meaning. Wrong about the conclusion. What if the Greeks weren’t warning us? What if they were telling us something?

So Leo and me dug into that next, and this is where it got good. ✱3 In Ancient Greek, peira, the root of our word try, literally means a piercing. A test. Putting something to the proof by pushing against it. The verb peirao means finding your way through by testing against it. And that same old root gives us the word empirical, knowing something because you went through it, not because you read about it.

The seminar guy heard that and said stop saying it. I heard it and went......wait. What if that’s the whole point? What if “I’ll try” was never a soft offer? What if it was always a declaration? I’m choosing to put this to the test. I’m walking into the resistance on purpose.

The Greeks weren’t warning people off the word. They built chosen struggle right into the language. Trying was always the struggle. The question was never whether to use the word. It was whether you were willing to mean it.

So here’s where it goes next in my head. If the butterfly HAS TO do it, and nature keeps repeating this pattern......bone, muscle, immune system......is there an argument that we as humans were actually wired to face struggle? Not just survive it. Need it?

Like, is there a part of the human condition where we are actually meant to struggle, where resistance and overcoming it is what produces the best growth?

Leo and me kept digging, and it turns out there’s a whole field of psychology built on this stuff. In the mid-1990s two psychologists, Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, gave it a name, Post-Traumatic Growth. People who go through real struggle often come out the other side with growth you can measure. Growth that wouldn’t have happened without the struggle.

✱5 They found it shows up in five places: better relationships with other people, seeing new possibilities in life, feeling stronger as a person, spiritual growth, and a deeper appreciation for life. Somewhere between half and two-thirds of trauma survivors say they grew from what they went through. And here’s the part that got me. That’s not resilience. Resilience is bouncing back to where you were. This is ending up somewhere new.

Tedeschi called it “psychologically seismic restructuring.” When the whole foundation of who you are gets shaken, that’s when you’re in the best spot to build something new. A Polish psychiatrist named Kazimierz Dabrowski had his own name for it, positive disintegration. Sometimes the old you has to come down to the studs before you can build it right.

Viktor Frankl put it plain: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

I know this one from the inside. For years I had a system. Someone pushed against me in a way I couldn’t handle and boom......they went in the box. I called it the gator box. Quietly disappeared. Problem solved. Except it wasn’t. Every person I disappeared was a struggle I never had. Every boundary I never held was a wing that never filled. I wasn’t protecting myself. I was cutting the chrysalis. I was making sure I never had to grow.

So here’s what I keep coming back to. Too much struggle without enough capacity and you don’t grow......you just suffer. Too little struggle, too much help, and you never fly. The move is not maximum struggle. It’s chosen struggle. On purpose. For the right reason. Choose your battles, but choose them toward something, not just away from something.

When Leo and me put it all together, here were my 5 main takeaways:

1. Struggle isn’t a side effect of growth. It’s how growth happens.
2. Take the struggle away and you don’t stay the same. You go backwards, or you never grow in the first place. The butterfly that doesn’t push doesn’t just get small wings. It gets no flight.
3. Too much of it fails too, if there’s not enough in the tank. Overtraining breaks the body, it doesn’t build it. It’s not about the most struggle. It’s the right amount, enough to make you grow, not so much you can’t recover.
4. Choosing the struggle is the top of it. The butterfly doesn’t get a choice. You do. Walking toward the hard thing by choice is something the butterfly only does on instinct. Do it enough and you will too.
5. Chasing easy is a growth-stopper. The fastest way to stop growing is to take all the resistance out of your life.

✱6 And what we found backs up both ends. Push too hard with too little recovery and you don’t grow, you break. When the NHL crammed more games into fewer days, injury rates went up. ✱7 Overtrain and your immune system drops too. Heavily trained athletes catch more colds and throat infections, and the body’s stress hormone response goes flat. In psychology it’s the same. ✱8 Trauma without enough support can turn into PTSD instead of growth. The sweet spot needs enough challenge to shake things up, plus enough in you to handle the shake. I’m not saying go suffer. I’m saying quit dodging the hard stuff you actually need.

My NHL team, the Leafs......Go Leafs Go!......have almost a 30-person health staff nowadays. When my Dad was watching them in the ’70s, they had one doctor and he probably smoked. There’s a reason NHL teams today invest so heavily in watching their players. Yet most of us out here in the real world just push through everything until something stops working. We call it “my back went out.” It was probably lack of maintenance.

Which brings me to a final thing guys.

Society has been training another struggle out of us men. Not the physical kind, the other kind. Vulnerability got renamed weakness. Asking for help got renamed failure. And the result is exactly what you’d expect from a butterfly that someone cut out of its cocoon too soon, a man who looks intact on the outside and can’t fly.

The hard thing you pick on purpose? That’s the only thing that builds the kind of strength nobody can take off you.

My hope with this article, same as all of them? One guy reads it and quits treating the hard thing in front of him like something to get out of. Sees it for what it is. The opening. The push that fills the wings.

Everything I write comes back to one line. Reducing the global rate of loss by suicide......one tough conversation, one laugh, one love at a time. The tough conversation is the struggle you choose. The laugh is how you get through it. The love is the one who doesn’t do it for you.

Nobody should cut you out of your cocoon. Nobody should leave you alone in it either. Find the people who’ll pull up a chair while you fight your way through it, enough ground under your boots that the push doesn’t crush what hasn’t had the chance to set yet. Then go be that guy for someone else.

This one’s for every man ready to try......because trying, as you now know, was never the small word they told you it was.

And to help you do just that, I had Ruby prepare some takeaway work to get you started.

Anyways cats that’s what I have cookin’ in my scene. Remember it’s your life and there’s always a choice to be had. If something isn’t groovy throw some chaos at it. Go play and see you on the flip side.

—Jhöl

The Mensdate Project  ·  NFP #1801160-5  ·  Privacy

AI Use

Voice-first authorship. It starts on my phone. I talk, and what comes out is the wire......the shape of the thing, bent by hand. My agents pack the clay onto it. Then I work every inch of it back down myself, and nothing goes out that I haven’t. The thinking is mine and so is the last pass on every line. Full session records on request.