Think about the leader who shaped you most. Not the one with the best title. The one whose voice you still hear when things go sideways.
I'd bet good money you don't remember them for a launch party. You remember them for a bad week. The week the deal fell through, or the system went down at 2am, or someone on the team lost a parent. You remember what they did next.
When I talked with James Ferguson on Corey-osity Unleashed, he put it in six words I haven't stopped thinking about since: inspiration is built on hard days, not best days.
Nobody Learns Anything From Your Victory Lap
James spent years running hotels and won awards for it. Then cancer arrived and rearranged his life. I wrote about one part of his story in What You Do When You Don't Have To.
Here's the part I keep coming back to. During treatment, James wrote thank-you notes to his cancer nurses every Friday. Filled with confetti. He celebrated them, the journey, and his own small wins along the way.
Read it again. A man in the middle of chemotherapy, sending confetti to the people looking after him.
Those nurses see patients on their best days and their worst. I'd guess they remember the Friday notes far longer than any discharge day. Not because the notes were grand. Because of when he wrote them.
Your best day teaches people nothing they didn't know. Everyone looks good when the numbers go up. The hard day is the only day your behaviour carries information.
The Research Agrees With James
This isn't only a nice sentiment. There's evidence for it.
In 2016, researchers at Teachers College, Columbia University gave 402 ninth and tenth grade students stories about Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Michael Faraday. One group read about the scientists' great discoveries, the textbook version. Two other groups read about their struggles: the failed experiments, the poverty, the lack of support at home.
The students who read the struggle stories got better science grades in the six weeks afterwards than the students who read the achievement stories. The effect was strongest for the students who were doing worst. And far more of them said they felt connected to the scientists. You'll find the full paper, Even Einstein Struggled, on the Teachers College site.
Think about what this means. The polished success story did less for these kids than the messy one. The genius on a pedestal pushed them away. The genius who failed pulled them in.
An older study points the same way. In 1987, Dale Schunk and his colleagues had children who struggled with fractions watch other kids work through the same problems. Some watched a "mastery model" who got it right straight away. Others watched a "coping model" who made mistakes and improved bit by bit. The children who watched the coping model ended up with higher confidence and better skills, and saw themselves as more like the model. The study is in the Journal of Educational Psychology.
So people don't draw strength from watching someone who never struggles. They draw strength from watching someone struggle and keep going.
Why Leaders Hide the Hard Days
If this is true, why do so many managers hide every hard day from their teams?
I've done it too. For a long time I thought my job was to be the calm surface. Keep the panic upstairs. Show the team a confident face and a tidy plan.
What I taught them was this: struggle is shameful, and you hide it. Then I wondered why nobody told me when their own work went wrong.
My own research at Step It Up HR found 99.5% of people have had one or more types of bad boss. I'd wager a fair few of those bosses weren't cruel. They were hiding. They stayed in the office with the door shut on the bad days and came out smiling on the good ones. The team learned nothing from either.
My Own Hard Day
In 2017 the company I worked for went through a big restructure. They cut my job along with plenty of others.
I'd been on both sides of redundancy before. I'd lost a job, and I'd had to tell other people they'd lost theirs. A lot of my colleagues were going through it for the first time.
So I wrote down ten things I'd learned and shared them. My post on being made redundant is still on this site. It isn't polished. It's a bit cheeky in places. Point one was "This is not targeted at you." Point two was to keep doing good work until the contract ends, because every industry is a small world.
I wrote it for colleagues, not for an audience. Nobody asked me to. And looking back, it's the most useful thing I did in my last months there. Someone rewrote the code I shipped years ago. The advice still gets read.
I didn't plan to inspire anyone. I was sad and a bit angry and trying to be useful. It turns out those are the moments people watch most closely.
Hard Days Tell the Truth
There's another reason hard days matter. They're the only days your values get tested.
Anyone keeps their promises when keeping them is free. The question is what you do when the promise costs you something. When the client is shouting and it's tempting to blame the junior developer. When the budget gets cut and it's tempting to quietly drop the training you promised. I wrote about this gap in Everyone Thinks They Have Integrity. Pressure Tells the Truth.
Your team is watching those moments. Not to catch you out. They're watching to learn what the rules are around here. Your hard day becomes their rulebook.
How to Lead on a Hard Day
You don't need cancer or a redundancy to put this into practice. Hard days show up every week. Here's what I try to do now.
Say it out loud
Name the hard thing. "This week went badly. I'm frustrated too." Your team already knows. Pretending otherwise costs you their trust.
Show the next step, not the whole plan
You don't need a fix. You need a next move. The coping model in Schunk's study didn't solve every problem at once. They worked through one problem at a time and kept going.
Celebrate small wins in the middle of it
James sent confetti from a chemo chair. You don't need to wait for the project to land to thank someone. I wrote about this in Hard Times Don't Need Big Wins. They Need Glimmers. The hard day is the best day to say thank you, because nobody expects it.
Tell your struggle stories
Stop telling the team about the time everything went right. Tell them about the time you messed up, what it cost, and what you did next. The Einstein study shows people learn more from the struggle than from the triumph.
Don't fake it
There's a difference between showing a hard day and performing one. People spot staged vulnerability a mile off. Be honest, keep going, and let them see both.
The Days Nobody Posts About
Social media shows us everyone's best days. The promotion. The award. The finish line photo.
James's lesson pushes the other way. Your best day is a photo. Your hard day is the story.
So here's my question for you. Think about the hardest week you've got coming up. Who's watching how you handle it... and what do you want them to learn?