“The hard things got easier the more you did them.”
That’s a line from a novel I read once. The story is escapist/dystopian science fiction, not really related to anything in my daily life, but that line has stuck with me. It succinctly encapsulates a fundamental truth: Doing hard things makes those things easier.
This is true in lots of areas. Walking is hard when you’re a toddler, but after a few months of falling every time you try to take a step, you’re running around the house faster than your mom can handle. It’s tough asking that cute guy/girl out in high school, but you figure out how to approach the problem as you try (and fail) time and again.
If people avoided the hard things in life, there would be no growth. If you never learned to walk, you could never run. If you never managed to go on that first date, you’d never get married.
But hard things are, well, hard. They’re uncomfortable. They’re difficult. They force you to confront weaknesses or fears or uncertainties about yourself and your life. Most people spend a substantial amount of time and energy trying to avoid doing hard things. They feel a lot like the narrator of that novel felt:
“The hard things got easier the more you did them. It didn’t make it any more fun to do the hard things, though. [He] wished they would just be easy the first time.”
But if you want to become better at anything, if you want to change your life positively, if you want to even just feel a well-earned sense of accomplishment — all of these things require that you suck it up and do some hard work. The act of doing hard things is what makes those same things, and other hard things, easier. If you don’t do that — if you stick to the easy stuff — you’ll never make any change. You’ll be stagnant.
Actually, you won’t become stagnant from only doing easy things — you’ll decay. If all you do are the easy things, then your mental and physical muscles atrophy, and even those easy things start to become harder. Eventually, some things that used to be easy get hard, and you don’t do them any more. Your comfort zone, the circle of familiar and easy things that you surround yourself with, will get smaller and smaller.
In the words of Mark Rippetoe, author of Starting Strength, “Most of the problems with the bodies and minds of the folks occupying the current culture involve an unwillingness to do anything hard, or anything that they’d rather not do.”
The key to growth and improvement is simple: do the hard things. In your personal life, in your professional life, and in the gym, it’s the hard things that make you better. It’s owning up to your mistakes that helps you avoid them in the future. It’s putting in the extra effort that gets you the promotion. It’s getting in the WOD every day that earns you the PR back squat and the six-pack abs.
If you make the commitment to do the hard things, to not shy away from a task because it seems difficult or shirk a duty because you’re not sure you’re up to the challenge, you’ll see an incredibly positive effect on your life. To complete that earlier quote from Mark Rippetoe:
Most of the problems with the bodies and minds of the folks occupying the current culture involve an unwillingness to do anything hard, or anything that they’d rather not do. I welcome you to the community of people who have decided that EASY will no longer suffice.
Make yourself and the world better. Do the hard things.
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Foundation
Part 1
Bench Press
15 min to find 1rm
Part 2
15 min to complete:
2 x 10 close-grip bench press
2 x 10 supine-grip bent row
WOD
10 min AMRAP:
Run 800m
20 pushups
30 situps
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
