You can do hard things. My wife and I repeat this to each other when navigating difficult weeks. This phrase came out of my 2022 sentence summaries, for those who are familiar with engaging in personal audits. (I recommend the excellent YearCompass, as a template).
You can do hard things.
The sentence stuck with me because I was surprised by how much I recoiled and even railed against it. It is not an inherent virtue of mine to chase difficulty or pursue paths of most resistance. Comfort zones are named for a reason, and it takes strong conviction to move beyond what feels comfortable.
Even changing one’s mind can feel like effort. Cognitive laziness, it’s called: the preference to retain one’s current opinion rather than grapple for the truth with another. Change is hard.
And yet progress is impossible without a willingness to change; to improve. As George Bernard Shaw said (no relation, alas!) –
“Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
Change is fundamental to excellence. And hard work is the necessary conduit to achieving it. If one wants to excel, hard work is not enough. You have to be willing to change direction. To explore new paths and engage in fresh thinking.
I believe that we should pursue these things. Especially things that require hard work. Not just to prove that we can do it, but because we should do it.
Hard work is difficult. But it’s also the surest way to reach a level of excellence.
Important to remind myself was that difficult is not wrong. Hard is not inherently bad. These are life lessons I increasingly repeat with conviction.
Nothing worth having comes easy and without personal challenge, rewards are scarce, and self-respect can become scarcer. We each day are gifted the opportunity to become more interesting and experienced, and only you know whether you’ve taken today’s shot.
Safe decisions on the other hand may avoid hardship today, but tomorrow’s progress is resultantly sacrificed as the behaviour compounds away from change and challenge, into routine and comfort.
I’ve met people who see value in a lifestyle they describe as going with the flow, and many still flow the same way they did ten years ago. They now see counsellors because managers don’t understand them and have lost friends who have moved on from their weekly partying.
Contrast this to the twice-failed founder who was derided and mocked for having to live back at home but now runs an international business. He is backed by the investors who had originally lost alongside him. They now together reap the rewards of doing the hard thing: of starting again, of learning from what went wrong, of taking another risk. Of doing the hard thing.
They live in relative freedom – and not a little superiority – earned through the hard things they’ve done to get there. They’ve channelled challenges to motivate change. This is why we should aim to do the hard things. They forge and better us as we rise to meet them.
This starts with hard thinking; applying discipline to how we think.
This is to rely on no assumed knowledge, learning humbly from scratch and from first principles. Again, it’s hard work.
It’s easier to build onto a current way of thinking and selectively add to one’s knowledge. When new thinking – that dares to challenge my collection of protected, nurtured knowledge – I am prone to respond defensively or to dismiss it entirely.
This underlines the opportunity all entrepreneurs have in disrupting new sectors. They challenge every assumption, test every truism and wrestle incumbents into forced clarity over business model. Oftentimes the incumbents are proven right, and win. Rarely but spectacularly the entrepreneur succeeds, and an industry is upended.
This stems from carefully doing the hard thinking.
A similar example can be found at the office. A new co-worker arrives from a different field. She has no work experience, and the manager was crazy to hire her. Six months later her output outstrips your own because she learns rapidly, asks to understand and appears bored by doing anything inefficiently more than once. She had the chance to build out her career elsewhere, but chose to start again, in pursuit of a higher mountain to climb.
Too often we would attribute her success to luck, timing, or even favouritism. These may well play a factor in select cases but more often we are witness to the benefits of hard decisions, compounding positively and resulting in excellence.
Adam Grant writes in Think Again that answers which are simple (but wrong) are more easily accepted and adopted than when complex (and right). This forces me to examine my own thoughts on hard work because my writings can stray toward the simplistic. It would not be correct to conclude that hard equals good.
This is because the context in which this is true remains narrow.
We don’t all believe we’re the best basketball player, or vocalist. Neither should we presume that for the reason that running is hard every child ought to train for the Olympics. Doing hard things should be in pursuit of the challenges leading to the life of freedom. A life that each of us pictures differently.
You should do hard things reminds me that in the pursuit of excellence, challenges are inevitable. And that is a good thing. Doing hard things requires the sacrifice of comfort, of time and of hubris. In my estimation its rewards are wholesome and worthwhile, and a fair train for painful repetition, making and correcting my own mistakes, and fighting not to quit. It’s hard. And it’s necessary.
You should do hard things.
July 2023