Lowell Ganz

The real wisdom here isn't about suppressing emotion—it's about the peculiar contract we make when we enter certain spaces, where we agree to channel our disappointment into action rather than dissolution. When a batter strikes out, falling apart at home plate solves nothing; the game continues regardless, and so must he. In our own lives, this applies less to baseball fields than to boardrooms, family dinners after bad news, or hospitals where steady hands matter more than honest tears—places where giving way to despair abandons those depending on us. Ganz captures something about masculine honor that's worth keeping even as we've learned (rightly) that crying itself isn't shameful: the notion that our feelings don't exempt us from responsibility.

What makes this observation stick is its inversion of how we usually talk about achievement—we celebrate the *result* as great, then work backward to explain its difficulty. Ganz points us the other way: greatness isn't despite the struggle, but *because* of it. The difficulty itself is the ingredient. A parent who stays up all night helping a child through a crisis, or a musician who plays the same passage ten thousand times until it becomes effortless, discovers that the sleeplessness and repetition aren't obstacles to overcome on the way to something worthwhile—they're where the worth actually lives. Remove the difficulty, and you haven't streamlined the path; you've removed what would have made the thing matter.