On doing hard things
A short reflection on why difficulty is often the point, not the cost.
There’s a category of advice I used to roll my eyes at: do hard things. It sounds like a slogan on a gym poster.
I’ve come around to it, mostly because I’ve noticed the pattern in my own life:
- The skills I’m proud of came from work that was, at the time, somewhere between uncomfortable and miserable.
- The decisions I respect myself for were the ones I almost didn’t make because they were inconvenient.
- The relationships that matter required conversations I would rather have skipped.
The shape of the pattern is: the cost of the hard thing is usually paid up front; the reward is paid out, with interest, for years.
Easy things have the opposite shape. The reward is immediate and the cost is paid quietly, in the background, in the form of a life that doesn’t accumulate.
“The obstacle is the way.” — Marcus Aurelius (and roughly half of the self-help section)
I don’t think hard things are good because they’re hard. The difficulty isn’t magical. But difficulty is often a useful proxy for importance — the things that compound usually require something of you that the easy version doesn’t.
So: when I find myself instinctively choosing the easier of two paths, I try to at least notice it. Sometimes the easy path is genuinely the right one. But if I can’t articulate why it’s the right one, the difficulty itself is signal.