The Ascent Is The Work: Hardship Is The Way

Somewhere over the South China Sea, the cabin dipped gently. I looked out the window. Grey clouds rolled like stones, each one a quiet foreboding: the sky is rarely smooth all the way through.

I was flying home from a work trip in China, but my mind wasn’t in the clouds. It was on the weight I’d be returning to. Deadlines. Strategy. Uncertainty. That familiar anxiety, the kind that doesn’t announce itself, but settles quietly into your posture, had crept back in. The more I build, the heavier it feels. And lately, I’ve begun to wonder if I’m carrying more than I should.

It’s strange how easily doubt creeps in during these in-between moments. A flight, a quiet taxi, a closing laptop. These are the hours where ambition starts to ache. Where you ask questions you can’t quite voice out loud. Am I doing enough? Am I doing it right? Where is this all going?

But as the plane cut across invisible airways, my mind drifted, oddly not forward, but back.

I remembered a much younger version of myself: a junior barrister, neck-deep in paperwork, watching others take command of rooms I felt too invisible to enter. I remembered wearing thrift store suits bigger than myself, carrying files heavier than my confidence, I remembered how often I questioned whether I belonged in any of it.

One night, I was staying late at chambers. Everyone else had gone home. I was sitting at a desk with a file I didn’t understand, under fluorescent lights that made everything feel colder than it already was. I remember looking at the case notes and thinking, I’m not good enough for this. I don’t belong here. I felt small. Impostor. Fraud. Like I was pretending to be someone competent, while secretly drowning.

That night, I wanted to quit. I didn’t. I stayed. I pushed through. Not because I was strong, but because I didn’t know what else to do.

Back then, I used to think those years were a kind of punishment. Now, I understand: they were my shaping. I now realise something I couldn’t see then: any success I’ve had since was built on nights like that. Not on the wins, not on the applause but on the nights I felt lost and kept going anyway.

I didn’t grow in the moments I felt in control. I grew in the ones where I felt completely out of my depth.

The late nights, the uncertainty, the silent failures, the hardships, those were the chisels. They carved out grit. They demanded clarity. They taught me that composure isn’t the absence of pressure, but your posture inside it.

We want life to feel smooth. We expect our work to unfold in clean lines. But the truth is, meaning is rarely found on the surface. It’s found when you’re halfway up the mountain, legs burning, lungs short, and you keep going anyway.

The turbulence eventually passed. The seatbelt light blinked off. I looked down at the world, clouds below me now: beautiful, soft, unthreatening.

And I thought of what Marcus Aurelius once said, the Stoic emperor who carried Rome on his back:
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

Maybe we’re not meant to avoid the hard parts. Maybe the hard parts are the work.