Can We Choose? Easy or Hard?

I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s take earlier and then found Tim Ferris’s joining in with “What would it look like if this were easy” … kinda mindblowing.

And now one of my favorite dudes, Oliver Burkeman chimes in…

What?

Frankly, I’ve never considered approaching what seems difficult… as possibly easy?

Love it!

And it is something I am truly going to ask myself on a regular basis!

Join me!

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What if This Were Easy?

By Oliver Burkeman, The Imperfectionist column

I often write about the importance of learning to tolerate discomfort – of accepting the truth, as Scott Peck puts it in the opening sentence of The Road Less Traveled, that “life is difficult.” If you can’t cope with at least a little difficulty, you risk living life on too small a scale, shirking challenges you could have handled, or throwing in the towel as soon as some new endeavour starts to feel slightly uncomfortable.

Because the truth is that meaningful work often just does feel difficult (and “writer’s block”, specifically, is just another label for the normal experience of writing). Being a finite human just does require making tough, unpleasant choices about time. Stepping off the busyness treadmill just does tend to make people feel anxious and antsy at first, rather than happy and relaxed. And so on.

But in recent days I’ve found myself thinking about the flipside of this, encapsulated in the quote from Elizabeth Gilbert that’s among several pinned above my desk: “Be willing to let it be easy. You might be surprised.”

No question, life can be difficult – but when I really honestly examine why I don’t always do the things I know I want to do, it’s often not because they’re difficult and I’d rather not experience discomfort. Instead, it’s because I’m adding an additional level of difficulty, in my mind, that isn’t objectively there at all.

For me this frequently manifests in a perverse kind of absolutism: if I can’t do some given thing fully, regularly, and excellently – if I can’t become “the sort of person” who does that thing all the time – then I don’t want to do it at all. I’ve been known to put off, say, diving into an interesting book – despite wanting to read it and having the time to read it – because there’s a whole lot of other books in my to-read pile I fear I won’t have time for. And if I can’t clear the whole pile, I’d frankly rather not start.

Someone else told me the other day how he’d wanted to establish a consistent daily practice of sending people notes of thanks or appreciation – and, as a result, had held off sending several actual notes of thanks or appreciation, because he didn’t currently have time to build the full habit. This behaviour makes, of course, precisely zero sense. It stops you doing easy things, that it would make you feel good to have done, by adding an imagined level of difficulty you won’t ever actually encounter.

Tim Ferriss asks the question slightly differently: “What would this look like if it were easy?” That puts the focus on specifics, on actions you could undertake. And the point, obviously, isn’t to imagine a parallel universe in which things were easy, but to raise the possibility that they might in fact be easy, here and now.

It’s amazing, frankly, which projects end up getting classified as difficult, if you don’t pause to remind yourself they might not be. I’m responsible for a five-year-old’s birthday party this weekend, and I’ve found myself getting all furrow-browed about it. Yet all the evidence suggests that keeping a bunch of five-year-olds entertained for two hours is incredibly easy, provided you’re allowed to use cake, pizza, noisy games with prizes, and balloons with LEDs inside. Approaching this as a daunting challenge isn’t a reflection of any objective facts, but more like a default bad habit, one I can drop the moment that I notice I’m doing it.

The irony of what’s going on here is that this prospect – that something meaningful might prove easier than you imagined – can itself be a source of discomfort. Many of us were apparently raised to believe not just that important things can feel difficult (they can!) but that they must feel difficult; that the measure of an accomplishment is how much effort it took. And, moreover, that effort is a measure of self-worth – that if an achievement comes easily to you, you must somehow be cheating, or that you just got lucky.

It feels somehow illicit to consider the alternative: that you might already have all it takes to achieve a perfectly good-enough result.