The Best Feeling in the World Is When a Hard Thing Starts to Feel Easy
When we feel progress we come alive.
There’s an ‘easy’ epidemic right now.
Everyone wants things to be easy. Dopamine-fuelled social media makes everything sound so damn simple. It’s purposely designed that way so you’ll buy, buy, buy.
But easy is a nightmare.
I don’t want anything to be easy. You shouldn’t either.
The huge downside of “Easy like Sunday morning”
At sound engineering school we had to build stereo systems from scratch.
To test what we’d built the teacher would give us a Lionel Richie CD with the song “Easy like Sunday Morning” on it. If we could get Lionel to sing the song using our speaker creation, we’d pass our exam.
The song stuck with me.
Sunday mornings are easy. There’s nothing to do. Kids are sleeping and your partner is chilled out. If only life could always be like this.
Advertising recreates this easy version of life to lure people into a bear trap. Then the clamp comes down and your leg metaphorically gets sliced off clean. Before you know it, you’re in consumer debt. Congrats.
Easy is a schmuck’s game.
The easy life games aren’t worth playing. What we want in life is to feel joy and happiness. This comes from setting goals and making progress on them.
When we feel progress we come alive.
Easy games don’t have that same feeling. The progress comes too fast so there’s nothing to aim for or crave.
There’s no competition
Easy games are full of losers.
The playing field is saturated. Just look at TikTok. It’s so easy to create 15-second cat videos that every man, woman, dog and child is making.
As such, the app is drowning in low-quality content that is worse than me filming a video of me taking a morning piss. The content is literally that boring.
Many of the TikTok videos actually feel like tv ads.
Because everyone is selling something and they’re all doing a bad job at it. Why would you want to play these kinds of easy games?
The real fun starts when you exit the flock of sheep. When you choose the hard path that most people avoid because there are too many barriers to entry.
Business is one such field. Anyone can start a business but most people don’t. The risk of failure or bankruptcy is enough of a deterrent.
Business works like this:
Your first three businesses will probably fail
You’ll lose a lot of money
Bankruptcy is a real possibility
The stats say around 9/10 will fail
It could take 5 years before the business collapses
These are some pretty grim outcomes. People who succeed in business are happy to play this game multiple times before they win.
The reason most people are employees is that they don’t want to play the hard game of being a business owner and go through these guaranteed failures.
I’ve been lucky to fail many times at business, which is now why I operate a successful one. When the business failures happen, I smile, because I know they’re part of the process.
Not long ago I had over a million dollars stolen from me.
I’ve never been so happy. People thought I’d become a psychopath. Nope. I know the game of business is hard, so unless I have some catastrophic failures, there’s no chance I’ll ever move up to the harder levels.
I lost $1M+ to enter the world of business that makes $10M+.
That feels like a good investment to me – yet most won’t see it that way. They’re focused on the loss, not on the game.
The game of business is to lose so you can eventually win.
My playbook to turn hard into easy
Hard things don’t stay that way forever.
Eventually hard things become easy. Then you either stay on easy mode or keep chasing the next version of hard. I’m a progress junkie so I like to stay on hard.
Without hard, life feels the same and it makes me bored. I want the randomness of hard overlayed with the rewards on offer.
Use these tools to make hard things easy and tap into the best feeling in the world.
1. Choose your hard activity
If you’re going to chase hard you at least want to do things you’re interested in.
I like hard activities that happen on the internet because there’s in-built leverage. If I succeed then the output can be automated with software.
Maybe your interests are different. One of my friends is a crazy history lover. So I got him to challenge himself by turning history events into short Twitter Threads with interesting images.
Check your internet browsing history for clues on what activities you like.
What do you google a helluva lot?
2. What would this look like if it were easy?
The brain is a lazy son of a gun.
If your brain thinks you’re about to do something hard, it will hit every abort button it can find. The trick isn’t to make your activity easy. It’s to fool your brain into thinking it will be easy so you can get past the initial resistance.
Once you get started the brain forgets the difficulty level of the game you’ve chosen.
The question “What would this look like if it were easy?” lets you set constraints at the start so the brain will believe the goal is possible. Sucker!
3. Google to the rescue
I recently moved from Microsoft Outlook to Google Workspace.
Best decision ever. Google has Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sheets and Meet. Each app is powerful. The best one though is Google Calendar.
When you have a hard goal it needs a kickass calendar to track compliance and make time for execution. I place hard things in my calendar. My ideal scenario is daily. If I’m busy or the activity is enormously hard then my minimum is weekly.
Either way, if it’s not on the calendar it’s never going to happen.
Most people aren’t consistent which is why they fail at hard games that produce all the joy in life. If you CAN master the dumb task of putting hard goals in the calendar, you’re 99% ahead of everyone else. I dare say, success is eventually guaranteed.
4. Every day for 28 days
Consistency needs a winning streak to work.
I find 28 days is the optimal time to practice a hard goal. It’s enough time to get into a pattern and see some results. But not too much time that your impatience takes over and poops on your parade.
5. Use this uncommon trick
Even smart people who understand the power of hard games stuff this one up.
Hard goals take a long time to master. Some people can last 90 days. Some can even do 1 year. But most people can’t last 5 or even 10 years.
I choose hard games and expect to play them for at least 5 years. With this mindset it’s easier to not let distractions or amateurs talk you out of your goal.
5 years is a commitment.
5 years lets you turn a goal into muscle memory.
5 years sets the expectations right from the beginning.
The truth is I often achieve hard goals before the 5-year mark.
But if I don’t, it stops me from going on Twitter and screaming into the echo chamber that nobody loves my work.
The best feeling in the world
Hard games feel bloody awesome.
The one downside is it can get lonely. Most people don’t play hard games because they’re stuck on easy mode, looking for hacks and shortcuts.
They think they can somehow cheat the system of life and leapfrog ahead of everyone else, without doing hard things first. What they miss is this feeling of progress.
Chasing hard goals is addictive. It becomes an obsession. And obsession leads to achieving the sort of results most can only dream of. When you’re obsessed you don’t need motivation. Hard IS your motivation.
Choose hard. Become obsessed. Join the top 1%.
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There was a great thread on Twitter the other day where a guy assigns potential clients a book to read before going any further. Something like 90% of them never do-and they’ve already paid!
The interesting part was the comments; people were clearly missing the point and still asking him for free advice.
Love this mindset. Whether people realize it or not they end up choosing their hard. It’s hard to get up and workout each day, it’s also hard to be out of shape and have chronic diseases. It’s hard to build a budget for your family and research how to increase savings, but it’s also hard to live paycheck to paycheck and succumb to a mountain of debt. Choose which hard you want in your life.