Why Struggling Is the Point | David Epstein
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What are desirable difficulties and why are they important?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. You think you want everything to go your way. You think you want them to be easy. You think you want green lights. And I'm not sure that you do. Look, I'm not saying that some challenges aren't frustrating, that obstacles aren't painful. But obviously, a core idea in Stoic philosophy is that some forms of struggle and adversity make us better. Psychologists call this desirable difficulties. And it's actually the theme of today's conversation with the great David Epstein. We broke up his episode into a handful of sort of chunks rather than doing sort of one long episode.
And if you read his book, Range, which I loved, his book, Sports Gene, which is really good, or his new book, Inside the Box. I think you'll see it's a theme of his work, how certain kinds of limits and friction and challenges can sharpen us rather than hold us back. And that's what we're going to talk about here. An obstacle isn't always in your way. Sometimes it... is the way. And I think you're going to like this conversation. As I said, David Epstein is one of my favorite writers. I rave about his stuff all the time. He's a former reporter at ProPublica, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, and he's written for many years about performance, human potential, learning, and hidden advantages, sometimes in breadth and sometimes in specialization.
You can follow him on Instagram at David Epstein. You can get signed copies of Range and Inside the Box online. But let's get into this idea of desirable difficulties. You know what silently kills sales teams? The inability to see what's happening in their pipeline. And part of the reason they can't do that is because they use software or CRM that's so complicated that people don't even log in. I do this all the time. You get some tool and you're like, I'm going to use it. And then... then it's so complicated you don't use it. And that's where today's sponsor, Pipedrive, comes in. It's an easy, intelligent CRM loved by growing sales teams, and most important, actually used by them. Pipedrive gives your team one complete, trusted record of every customer and deal.
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They really love it because you can find vintage stuff and collectible stuff online. I was looking at some videos of people selling vintage band tees and records and watches. And it's real people selling. Like if you're going to an estate sale or a really cool, trendy shop, not, you know, overpriced stuff, not produced stuff. There's no ads, no marketing. And people are on there explaining their stuff, why you'd like it, what's cool about it, where they got it. Like I love buying stuff on auctions. So I think I'm gonna like Whatnot. And I think you will too. There are people making over a million dollars a year on Whatnot. In fact, that number has doubled in the last year. Whatnot is the largest dedicated live shopping platform, whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, even cookies.
Sellers are building real thriving businesses on Whatnot. Whatnot buyers spend more than an hour a day on the app and they're not just browsing, they're bidding and buying and coming back.
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