Wooden isn't merely saying that hardship teaches us—he's suggesting that comfort is actually a kind of self-deception, a comfortable fog we live in. When everything goes smoothly, we never need to discover what we're truly made of, so we mistake our surface habits for our actual character. A person laid off from a long career, suddenly stripped of title and routine, often reports a startling clarity about what they actually value versus what they'd been defending out of mere momentum. That involuntary self-knowledge, however painful, is the one thing ease could never have given them.