Instead of looking towards finding ease and comfort, embrace and work around the fact that your “great loves”, things/projects/people/goals that you really care about and want to pursue, are going to be hard. Knowing that "things will not get easy", will allow you to enjoy the moment more (instead of looking towards the future) and enable you to figure out how to approach those hard things.
This is a quote from a Persian poet that makes a lot of sense now.
Three friends and I have brought back our frisbee days. We played earlier in the summer and it was amazing but then we got lazy and complacent with our unconvincing arguments.
When we are watching funny videos in the evening as a reward for a day full of hard work, around 10:30 we have to call the whole deal a day. How else do we get our eight hours of sleep in?
Then we wake up at 7:30 every day to “be by the golf cart at 8 am”. We then drive to the field and play.
When we get to the field and start throwing around the frisbee, we are sluggish and dropping frisbee left and right.
We definitely regret stupid funny videos from last night.
Then we run for like 30 minutes under the blazing sun, with the sun in our eyes. At the end of the game, we are all sweaty, usually arguing about who bumped into who.
Everything so far sounds like a sacrifice, pain, discipline, and a strict schedule. Who even likes that?
Let’s see the other side.
Firstly, the other side is briefer, although hopefully more long term. The other side is brief but extremely fun moments of frisbee. Pure joy. Running after the frisbee when you think there is no way to get it and you then dive and actually get it. Being on a team is so cool. Coming up with nifty tricks to get around defense. Honestly, just getting your body moving and active in the morning feels amazing.
So frisbee is a “great love” for us. This is the only reason why we still go through the pain of scheduling, commitment, going to bed early. Because we have a great love that is making it work going through. Now, of course, we want to design the system in a way that excludes as much of struggle as possible. We want to make it easy and enjoyable to play frisbee.
I think this example, however, shows that hard things are not necessarily going to become a breeze. They are meant to be hard. Walking into an idea of doing something great and worthy, like playing frisbee with your friends every morning or becoming wealthy, or building a great company should not be associated with it being easy.
If the bets are placed on how easy something will become, then I am running a high risk of getting disappointed. It definitely becomes easier with time and once you set your habits in place, they work for you for the rest of your life. However, it’s not like running in the morning becomes a piece of cake. It’s still hard. It’s just that you have taught yourself to start running, trained yourself mentally to not stop and these skills help you with a task that is hard.
Feels amazing to be back to writing....oh, I just thought of how even writing this blog is a good case study for this topic. It is a great love for me but it doesn’t mean that it becomes absolutely easy. It’s still challenging. Firstly, I design and redesign my system to make it easier for myself, removing as many inertia points as possible. Secondly, I am also able to “embrace” the hard parts because the outcome is really worth it.
Think of any great achievement. Being an athlete, an accomplished scientist, CEO. It is not easy "on the other side". Those people embraced the realities of hard endeavors. They not only found once but are continuing to find ways to manage those hard endeavors every day.
See you guys tomorrow,
P. S. The hack for me making sure I write every day is making these emails shorter. I’ve been missing for a couple of days because of work overload and not having a spare hour...but hey, I definitely can make a spare 25 minutes. 😉