Easy decisions, hard life. Hard decisions, easy life.
~Jerzy Gregorek, from this piece by Shane Parrish:
Short-term easy is long-term hard. Short-term hard is long-term easy.
I was reminded of this when one of my kids came home with a grade that wasn’t up to his standards. Rather than look at the feedback and dive in, he said, “oh, I understand it now.” I called his bluff. When I asked him to “explain it to me” because I didn’t understand it, he stalled. He didn’t understand. This lesson isn’t just for kids.
We’d rather do the easy thing than the hard thing. That’s natural and normal. I call this the mountain. You can climb it, or you can avoid it, but it’s not going away. There is always a mountain. There is always something in front of us that we know we should do, but it just seems so … hard.
On any given day, we can avoid the climb. We can stand at the bottom, look up, and say, “I’ll wait. Hopefully, the mountain isn’t here tomorrow.” But we all know the mountain is still there tomorrow. And instead of looking smaller, it’s even larger. When I talked to Jerzy Gregorek about the mountain, he said. “Easy decisions, hard life. Hard decisions, easy life.”
The easy path today makes a hard path tomorrow. The hard path today makes an easier path tomorrow. The choice is yours, but the mountain isn’t going away. The longer you put off the hard thing you know you need to do, the harder it becomes to get started.
The climb is the fun part.
Every client I have ever worked with will have heard me say (and more than once). “When you get clear on the WHY, the HOW is easy”. I’ve also written about it several times (good ideas are worth repeating over and over in different forms!). I also like that Jerzy Gregorek equivalent, as well as Shane Parrish’s “short-term easy is long-term hard. Short-term hard is long-term easy.
On a personal and professional level, I redesigned my work a number of years ago, consciously making the leap from CEO of a global business to an independent advisor with a laser-like focus. It took several years of focus, design and effort to establish and cement this change, but the WHY was always clear, so though the HOW was quite a shift, it always felt “easy”. My thoughts from the post “Get clear on the WHY and the HOW is easy“, from back in April 2019:
“Les pierres du chantier ne sont en vrac qu’en apparence, s’il est, perdu dans le chantier, un homme, serait-il seul, qui pense cathédrale.”
This is a quote from Antoine Saint-Exupery, author of one of my favourite books, The Little Prince (my post on that book here). I’ve shared the original French here too, as it can be translated in multiple different ways depending on the viewpoint of the reader.
All too often the work we do in life can all too easily feel like a pile of rocks to move, to pile up. We can do it, follow instructions. do as we are told, but hardly stimulating work.
However, if we recognise that we are part of building a cathedral, where our role within the overall purpose is to move those rocks, then we can feel part of that higher purpose. We can then feel aligned, engaged and motivated.
Even more, collectively when we are all clear on our WHY then we can also trust each other on the team to work out HOW to achieve it. The phrase I use often around this is:
“When you get clear on the WHY, the HOW is easy”
So, looking at that second thought, when you feel you are, as a business, a group, a team, stuck on moving something forwards and perhaps even arguing back and forth, I recommend you pause, take time to get clear on WHY you are doing what you are doing and the problem you are seeking to solve.
In other words, get clear on the WHY.
It may take some time to get that clarity, but in my experience when you do, working out WHAT to focus on next then HOW to achieve it becomes so, so much easier.