We, as a society, are becoming more and more lazy. The content we consume is shorter, the dopamine hits are harder, and everything (including our own thinking) is being automated away. There’s no way this is healthy or positive in the long term, and I’ve come to realize that there’s a secret hack to life that puts you ahead most people without having to do anything special - doing hard things.

We’re getting too comfortable, and less capable

I get it, we all want to naturally settle into our “comfort zones.” We’re overworked, underpaid, burnt out, racing towards who knows what…but this is all becoming a negative feedback loop to our own detriment.

As we get more comfortable, as we watch more short-form content, as we ingest more headlines without reading the actual bodies of the articles or papers those headlines are attached to, we’re feeding algorithms and signals back to the machines and people with the message “this is what I like. Give me more of this, please!” And then the cycle continues.

Almost everything today is engineered to grab our attention and hold it - engagement is the only currency worth anything anymore, and it’s quite literally making us lazy and unmotivated. But hey, at least it’s profitable!

Breaking free of this cycle is noticeably life-changing, and makes you feel awake in a world where everyone else appears to be asleep.

What doing hard things gives back to you

Rather than taking the easy path (e.g. “I’ll do it tomorrow,” “Someone else will take care of it”), doing hard things unlocks potential in yourself that you either didn’t know existed, or haven’t seen in quite a long time.

First, it honestly makes you feel like you can do anything. Like anything that you want to achieve can be done, as long as you just keep working towards it. And that feeling makes you feel superhuman because you realize that it’s actually true - it just takes time to get there, and some things take longer than others.

Feeling superhuman has an unsurprising effect of rocketing up your self-confidence. You no longer care that you don’t know something, or that you made a mistake. Because not knowing something means that now you just learned something new (presumably you actually looked up that thing you didn’t know), and making a mistake means you probably won’t make that mistake again (you’re on your own if you’re one of those other people, I really can’t help you).

Not to mention the accomplishment you feel when you actually achieve something difficult - it’s a feeling that can’t be explained. Have you ever felt accomplished when something was just handed to you? No, probably not. There are people who ACT accomplished when things are handed to them, but their actions will tell you that they don’t FEEL accomplished. That feeling is what we should strive for, and what everyone should experience. It’s addicting, and leads to more and more accomplishments as you go.

How to do hard things

Doing hard things isn’t easy, which is why most people choose to avoid them. But it can actually be made easy if you just approach hard things from the correct angle.

First, don’t EVER bail on something because you “don’t know how.” That’s absolute bullshit - and you can probably figure it out. Look it up, think about it, give it some attention, and you’ll probably develop an understanding of it within a very short timeframe.

Second, break big things into little things. This is the biggest takeaway that has changed my life, and is usually the speedbump that turns most people away from doing hard things. Hard things can’t be accomplished in one sitting. They can’t be accomplished in multiple sittings. They ususally take a lot of time to complete, so you’ll need to break them up into a bunch of small tasks that, on their own, can each be accomplished in a single sitting.

Think of yard work, for example. If you have a large area of land that is completely overgrown with brush that you need to clear out, you won’t be able to do it all in one day. But, you can probably clear a 10’x10’ area in an hour or so. How many 10x10 areas take up the entire project? Now you know how long it’ll take you to do the whole thing. And, when you come back tomorrow, you will see actual progress towards the end goal - those 10x10 sections used to be overgrown, and now they aren’t. It’s the same thing with any other hard task.

Finally, track your progress. Doing hard things can take A LOT of time, and you’re bound to have bad days where you feel like you’ve done nothing at all or wasted your time. If you keep track of your progress, you can look back at your progress to remind yourself of how much you’ve moved towards the goal, and how much you’ve accomplished so far. It’s a reminder that you’re still moving in the right direction, and that if you keep going, you’ll eventually get where you’re trying to go.

When avoiding hard things makes you incapable of dealing with true hardship or struggle, the cure to feeling like you can “do anything” is to actively seek out hard things to do. You don’t need to cure cancer (although I’m sure many people would love it if you did!), but you do need to put in enough effort so that you actually earn your dopamine. You’ll find that, as time advances, the things you set out to do will increase in difficulty, and you’ll look forward to them rather than dread them.