There is a woman I know who spent the first thirty-five years of her life inside the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She served in auxiliaries, raised her son in the faith, kept a year's supply of food storage in her basement, and did all the things faithful members do. Then, after a long and painful faith transition, she left.

She will tell you it was the hardest thing she ever did.

She will also tell you, if you catch her in a reflective mood, that she may have made life a little too easy for her son after she walked out the door.

Here is what she noticed at a family reunion a few years back. Her nephew, who had served a two-year mission in Peru, came home speaking Spanish, capable of managing rejection on a daily basis, and somehow more confident than any twenty-one-year-old has a right to be. Her niece had organized a week-long service project, coordinated volunteers, navigated a church bureaucracy, and delivered something real to a real community. The Mormon kids, she said, looked like adults. Capable, stretched, road-tested adults.

Her son? He had a great gaming setup and a very relaxed schedule.

She was not bitter about it. She was honest. "I was so relieved to be out from under all that obligation," she told me, "that I didn't replace it with anything. I thought I was giving him freedom. I was giving him drift."

The Costume Changes. The Medicine Stays the Same.

 Here is the thing about the LDS Church that its critics and its defenders tend to argue about without landing on the most interesting point: it is extraordinarily good at packaging hard things.

A two-year mission is hard. Door-to-door rejection every day, living with a companion you did not choose, navigating a foreign culture, learning a language, managing your own time and budget and emotional state. The theology may be contested. The growth is not.

Service projects are hard. Youth conferences push kids into uncomfortable leadership roles. The whole structure of the faith is built around expectation and accountability. Show up. Lead something. Sacrifice something. Report back.

You can debate whether the doctrine is true. What you cannot debate is that a young person who has been asked to do hard things regularly comes out the other side with something the comfortable kid does not have.

The mom's mistake was not leaving the church. It was not seeing the value of finding new "hard things" on the other side of the transition.

Because here is the reality that applies whether you are seventeen or seventy, whether you are religious or secular, whether you live in Provo or Portland or Quito: humans need growth that comes through challenge.  Remove the challenge long enough, and what you get is not peace. What you get is atrophy.

What Happens When Nothing Is Hard

 The research on this is not subtle. Psychologists call it the concept of "productive struggle." The education literature is full of it. When students are given problems that are just beyond their current ability, the learning that sticks is exponentially deeper than when they are given problems they can already solve. The brain, it turns out, consolidates information under stress, not during ease.

Muscles work the same way. You do not get stronger by lifting weight you can already lift without effort. You get stronger by lifting weight that makes you question your life choices somewhere around the fourth rep.

And identity works this same way, which is the part people talk about less.

Who you believe you are is built from evidence. Every time you do something hard and survive it, you add a piece of evidence to the file. Over time, that file becomes your self-concept. People with thick files of hard things are not harder to knock down. They are harder to keep down. They have a reference library. They know what they are made of because they have tested it.

The boy with the gaming setup had a thin file. Not because he was not capable, but because no one had handed him anything hard enough to build one.

Hard Things Do Not Care How Old You Are

 This is where I want to stop talking about teenagers and start talking about you.

Because there is a peculiar idea in our culture that hard things are for the young. That after a certain age, you have earned your comfort, your routine, your well-worn groove. You have done your time. You deserve the soft chair.

I have watched that idea hollow people out faster than almost anything else.

The older adults I know who are genuinely alive, engaged, and sharp are not the ones who found their groove and stayed in it. They are the ones who keep picking up new instruments, learning new languages, starting new businesses, moving to new countries, signing up for things they cannot yet do. They are uncomfortable on a fairly regular basis, and they will tell you, if you ask, that it does not get easier. It just gets more familiar. And that is enough.

The retired executive who took up Brazilian jiu-jitsu at sixty-two. The grandmother who enrolled in community college at seventy to finally get the degree she put off in 1971. The sixty-year-old who left a comfortable job to start something that might fail. These people are not masochists. They are just paying attention to what the evidence says about growth.

Comfort, over time, is not neutral. It is corrosive. The absence of challenge does not keep you where you are. It slowly reduces the territory of what you believe you can do.

The Costume Question

 The mom from the beginning of this story asked me something I have been thinking about ever since. She said, "So what do I tell my son? I am not going to tell my son to go serve the Lord. That is not my world anymore. But how do I help him grow?"

Great question.

The hard thing is the point. Sports? Peace Corp? Volunteering at an animal shelter? He can chose based on his values, not the organization's interests.

The LDS Church dresses hard things up in theological clothing. The military dresses them in patriotism. Sports dress them in competition. Great educators dress them in intellectual challenge. Great parents dress them in family expectation.

The vehicle does not matter. What matters is that there is a vehicle.

Because the evidence is very clear on this. On the other side of hard is capable. On the other side of uncomfortable is confidence. On the other side of the mission, the project, the stretch assignment, the language you cannot yet speak, the instrument you cannot yet play, the conversation you keep avoiding is a version of you that your current self does not have access to.

The mom's son, by the way, is doing better. She signed him up for a wilderness leadership program the summer after that reunion. He hated the first week. He came home different.

Hard things have a way of doing that.

Quinn Price is the founder of the Change Capability Institute and the author of more than sixteen books on organizational effectiveness, resilience, and change. He consults with organizations worldwide and occasionally does hard things himself.