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.