When I look back at own life and mark the heights of personal growth, I notice a pattern of growth being accompanied by challenges, failure, or loss.  Of course there are those struggles that have not yet produced the fruit of growth.  I’m curious about how these particular difficulties that did produce growth differ from those that have not yet yielded growth.  It turns out that this phenomenon (growth through how one responds to difficulty) is identified as a key component to long-range happiness in a longitudinal study of 268 men who were at Harvard together in the 1940s.