Escaping the Prison of Doing Hard Things

Accessing the Genius of Laziness and Inner Rebellion

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Hi. My name is Justin and I’m a try hard.

I’m on the road to recovery, and doing my best not to try hard at recovering. I’m not perfect, and I fall off the wagon on a daily basis.

This piece is meant to serve as a reminder for you, for me, and for many, if not most, of the ambitious people I know.

If anyone you know is a fellow try hard, consider sharing this piece with them so we can recover together.

“Sometimes, you just have to do hard things”. 

What an alluring belief.

I hear it espoused by folks who love the grind and folks who take a more gentle approach to work.

We, as a culture, believe that it is absolutely necessary to do hard things.

I have a voice in my head that is all-in on this belief. Lately, I’ve started calling him “Captain Discipline”. He is an amalgamation of David Goggins, Jocko Willink, every self-improvement book I’ve ever read and every guest that’s ever been on the Tim Ferris show. I know he’s activated when I find myself thinking:

• “You just need to work harder!”

• “You’re so lazy today. Your peers and client aren’t lazy like you. You’ll never be successful if you’re lazy like this.”

• “So what you don’t feel like it today. You need to be disciplined and consistent. Do it anyway.”

Sound familiar? I imagine you have inner voices like this. Tune in - what does your version of this part of you say?

Got it? Great. Let’s play.

I want to be controversial today. In fact, I want this piece to (lovingly) drive Captain Discipline absolutely mad. Here we go:

No, you don’t have to do hard things. None at all. You never have to do a hard thing ever again if you don’t want to.

…

Okay. I said it. How you feeling? Angry? Scared? Relieved?

I want you to know that I’m dead serious. You never have to do a hard thing again if you don’t want to. Because the idea of a “hard thing” is total bullshit.

“Hard” is a story

Let’s get something straight. Unless we’re talking about rocks, there’s no such thing as a “hard thing”.

Stay with me here. What do you mean when you say something is “hard”? What’s going on for you?

Do you mean to say that this task would feel hard for every single being in existence? Is there a single person or being you could imagine it not being hard for?

If there’s even one, then the thing isn’t hard in itself. There’s something going on with you that makes it feel hard.

Which comes to my first point: “Hard” isn’t a fact. It’s a story.

Now you might be saying, “that’s just semantics, Justin!” To which I go- yes it is semantics, and no, it‘s not just semantics. It’s the difference between reality and our projections onto reality. It’s the difference between a dead end and rich source of inquiry.

If hard is a story, then there’s no such thing as a “hard” thing. There are only things that feel hard to you. More specifically, and this is where semantics really matter, hard is a label you use to describe things that make you feel a certain way. Probably a way that you don’t want to feel. A way that you’re resisting feeling.

So nothing is hard. Hard isn’t a property that’s inherent to a given task, project, or mission. 

Instead, “hard” points to a certain way that you feel when you think about that task, project, or mission.

What’s the story for?

So hard is really a label we use when we’re feeling a certain way.

Try that on. What’s been feeling hard for you lately? When you think about that thing, what emotions and sensations do you feel in your body?

Oooooohhh tightness. Contraction, fear for me. And I notice another thing — I want those emotions to go away. I don’t want to feel them. I resist those feelings.

What’s actually going on when you say “sometimes you just need to do hard things”?

Frequently, what you really mean is “sometimes you need to do things that you don’t feel like doing.” You’re trying to get yourself to do something despite feelings that are in the way of doing it.

When I say something is hard, what I’m really saying is it makes me feel things that I want to resist feeling. And when I say “sometimes I just need to do hard things” what I’m really saying is “I want to force myself to do the thing and not feel what it brings up. I want to do it in resistance of my feelings.”

The Origins of “Hard”

There are clearly pros and cons to this strategy.

The pros are obvious: I do stuff regardless of how I feel.

Scared? Don’t care, do it anyway.

Frustrated? Don’t care, do it anyway.

I do the things that I tell myself to do.

When I think about where this came from for me, I think of myself as a kid enrolled in lots of extracurriculars, and only liking some of them. I felt a lot of fear and frustration around many of them (even the ones I liked), and I didn’t have people around me who knew how to help me be with, feel, and understand those feelings. So they told me to “just do it anyway”.

Thus, Captain Discipline was born. My inner voice of “Do it anyway.”

So this forcing is a valid strategy. You can see where it comes from and what purpose it served/serves. But let’s take a stroll down another, often uninspected lane: what’s lost when you force yourself to do hard things and ignore your feelings?

Well, a lot. If we take emotions to be useful data, then doing hard things means losing out on the intelligence of your emotions. Emotions frequently point to inner and outer truths that lead to better solutions. Solutions that are more effective, and more enjoyable for you.

If doing hard things is about forcing yourself to do stuff without consulting your emotions, what it really means is executing toward sub-optimal solutions.

Ouch.

And this doesn’t even factor in massive hits—to energy and attention—that happen when you resist your emotions.

Double ouch.

So… maybe we should stop doing hard things.

Because it’s not the things that are hard. It’s your resistance to your feelings that make them hard. Were you to acknowledge, welcome, feel, and love those feelings, things would cease to be hard. An easeful, joyous path would open itself to you

But wait. I’ve got more. A frightening, unconscious loop you can get into, forming a prison for your life.

When “Doing Hard Things” Becomes an Identity

Over time, the belief that “I need to do hard things” easily becomes “I am valuable because (and only because) I do hard things.”

Woof. Chill down my spine. Danger signals. Do you see it?

If your ego believes its value comes from doing hard things, you will need hard things to validate yourself. You’ll not only start to gravitate toward things that feel hard, but you’ll begin to make easy things feel hard to validate yourself. You’ll need things to feel hard to feel valuable.

Remember, hard is a story. So psychologically, you can make anything and everything hard it you want to. Correspondingly, you can also feel all of your feelings and make anything and everything easy.

Would you rather wire your psychology to make easy things hard, or hard things easy?

Let’s use a common example to demonstrate the downward spiral. Think of something you started doing just for fun, as a hobby, but then started to take it more seriously and tried to professionalize it. 

What happened?

If you’re like most, it switched from an act of joy to an act of obligation. And as a result, it became hard. The joy got sucked out of it. Rather than doing it when it felt joyful and easy, your ego told you had to do it, even when it felt hard. It got put into the land of the “professional”, where you “need to do hard things”, and therefore started becoming hard.

Nothing to do with the thing. Everything to do with how you’re relating to thing.

For me, it’s right about now that an inner voice kicks in, saying, “it needed to be hard for it to be successful!”

To which I ask that voice, is that true?

Would you really work less if you only did things when they were easy? If you felt all of your feelings first? If you only operated from creativity, ease, and joy? Would the quality really drop if that were the case?

How is it true that it would have been even more successful, if only you had been willing to let it be easy?

This is an important point. An ego that derives value from doing hard things has lots of stories for why things need to be this way. If you want to shift, you better be ready to confront those stories.

Are they true? How could the opposite be even truer?

Unleashing your lazy rebels

There’s a common pattern that a lot of startup founders I work with experience. After the initial surge of excitement wears off, they start to feel unmotivated and lazy. A part of them starts to rebel against the day-to-day grind of the startup.

Most founders I know reject these inner voices. They label them as weak or bad. They muscle through until their next vacation and come back feeling reenergized, saying they felt that way because they needed a break. 

Well, yes and no.

You did need a break.

But coming back from break and operating the same way is to get back on the fast track to burnout.

And this is why it’s so important to listen to your inner lazy rebels.

Your lazy rebels are pointing to a deep possibility for you. Laziness points to a more easeful alignment. It points to and rejects all of the ways that you’re unnecessarily efforting. It points to the possibility of things being much easier, if only you would be lazier about it.

A powerful question from my Conscious Leadership training: Are you willing to resolve your issues easefully and effortlessly?

Rebels point to the ways that you’re excluding important parts of ourself. Usually playful, creative, “unprofessional” parts. The rebel wants to bring the parts of you that you reject to the office.

Listening to these voices is scary. They confront you with enlivening possibilities that would require you loosen your grip on core identities: as people who do hard things, have it all together, are airtight leaders and CEOs.

And these voices point toward greater ease, flow, joy, creativity, and aliveness—if only you’ll do the scary thing and listen to them.

So ask yourself—are you willing for things to be easy? Are you willing to feel all of the feelings that “hard” pastes over, and take the path their messages point to? Are you willing to listen to your inner rebel and bring all parts of you—especially the rejects, to every avenue of your life?

My god, so much creativity, ease, and magic in these parts. But operating in them looks very different than the way Captain Discipline operates. Are you willing to run the experiment? To hold your inner disciplined parts and your lazy rebels as equally brilliant, and unlock greater alignment by resolving the creative tension between them?

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Writing this essay was a great example of this principle in action.

I had an entirely different essay planned for this week. It was on unlocking the wisdom of anger and was meant to pair with last week’s podcast on EQ.

I was excited about it at first. But then, it started to feel hard. Really hard. I was feeling lazy about it. I tried efforting hard to get it done, but it just wouldn’t happen.

When I finally tuned into what I was feeling under hard—I was bored. I’d lost interest in the subject matter. Days of attempts weren’t getting it over the finish line.

And then, this topic came up. It was alive, exciting, inspired. I typed it up in a note on my phone at 11:30pm in roughly 10 minutes.

It took another few hours the next day to expound on everything I wanted to say, and another hour the next to edit it.

Yes, it took time, energy, and attention. Hell, it even took took some discipline! But also…

It was easy. So damn easy.

It was fun. So damn fun.

And it authentic, alive. So alive.

The anger piece isn’t even dead. I may come back to it. But only when it feels easy and effortless.

Are you willing to do the same?

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