We Can Do Hard Things

My conversation with Glennon & Amanda Doyle and Abby Wambach

Hello, friends:

I hope this finds you well. First of all, a hearty welcome to new subscribers—particularly those who arrived by way of We Can Do Hard Things, the podcast hosted by Glennon & Amanda Doyle and Abby Wambach, on which I’m thrilled to say I recently was a guest. (You can listen to the entire conversation here and here — it was a double episode!)

I’m also thrilled to see that Substack’s algorithm has chosen to randomly feature this specific frame from this video clip—I had nothing to do with this, but wow: delight!

In which we talk about the right to have fun, how Abby makes bill-paying more fun for herself, how (and why) Amanda forces her family to dance in elevators, and why prioritizing fun can bring us together—and make doing hard things feel less hard

The timing of the episode’s release felt very appropriate for me personally, because the past few weeks have indeed been hard (which is part of the reason I haven’t been writing as much as usual). My husband and I have been dealing with a constellation of family health issues and professional challenges that have left us feeling exhausted, anxious, overwhelmed, and out of control. I’d hoped today might be a reprieve, but I’m actually waiting for a call from the school nurse right now to see if our daughter broke her tailbone on the playground today (which of course happened while my husband is across the country in Los Angeles on a work trip).

It’s made me think about how part of “feeling alive” is feeling the un-fun parts of life, too —the stress, the worry, the anger, the grief. And it’s also made me reflect on how this makes it all the more important to seek, prioritize, and savor moments of fun, joy, and delight when we do experience them. They’re what get us through the hard moments and, ultimately, help create our most precious memories. We need them—and we deserve them. This is something we touched on in the podcast, too.

In this clip, Abby reflects on what she’ll be thinking about on her deathbed (hint: it’s not her athletic record), and we talk about how one of the top regrets of the dying is that they wish they’d let themselves be happy

---

One of my other favorite moments was this conversation (below) about what happens when the thing you do “for fun” (because you love it!) becomes your work. This is, of course, a real privilege. But also: if your passion turns into your main source of income—and you start to have to “perform” for others in order to be paid—then how do you prevent the fun from being sucked out of it? Glennon and I shared our experiences as writers—she said that she doesn’t find writing fun any more, specifically because she knows that anything she writes will be read (and judged) by millions of strangers, and I explained how I started this Substack to see if I could fall in love with writing again and make an income from it.

---

---

I also had a chance to ask Abby something I’d been wondering, which is whether, as a professional athlete (Abby is a two-time Olympic gold medalist and FIFA World Cup Champion, so she knows a thing or two about turning a passion into a profession), soccer still felt fun to her. Short answer? It does not — and she explained why this has made her so committed to protecting her current passion (golf) and not turning it into a job (or even a side hustle), even though she probably could.

Now, obviously most of us are not world-class athletes or (in the case of Glennon) a NYT #1 best-selling author. But I feel like we’ve all probably had experiences where we tell a friend that we’ve gotten really passionate about something (say knitting, or baking, or writing, or playing music) — and they encourage us (or we feel internal pressure) to turn it into a side-hustle, ideally so that we can make money from it. But why must we always turn our interests into commodities and performances? To me, at least, doing so often destroys the fun. Don’t get me wrong: I certainly want to enjoy what I do for work. But I also want to save some things just for me.

We also touched on the fact that, as contradictory and perhaps oxymoronic as it might sound, sometimes the secret to having fun isn’t freedom, but boundaries and structure. This also was the moment when Glennon seemed to discover that she actually enjoys being outside, which shocked both her wife and sister.

And lastly (okay, not lastly, but lastly for the sake of this newsletter!), I really appreciated this exchange about how, when we have fun, we are our most authentic selves, how we can become better at having fun with practice, and how, if we all could experience fun and joy more often, the world would be a better place.

“These moments of playfulness, connection, and flow, they’re when we remember what we’re fighting for. Like, what is any of it worth? They’re what we remember, what we’re living for, what the point is. If we take fun away . . . if we all slowly die inside, we forget why it matters.” —Glennon Doyle

And so, with that, I wish you all a weekend that, even if full of hard things, also has small moments of fun and delight.

To scrolling less and living more,

Catherine Price

PS: Thanks to everyone who listened to my podcast episode with Charles Duhigg (author of Supercommunicators and The Power of Habit) about how to avoid small talk. Coming up soon: my conversation with Ross Gay (!), author of The Book of Delights (new subscribers: be sure to check out our group delight chat), the next installment of my “Fun at Work” series with Devin McNulty (author of

Fun at Work by Funmentum Labs

), and more of my thoughts and suggestions about what to do about kids and phones.