Should It Feel Harder or Easier?
I firmly believe that starting anything new is a very hard process. It takes a tremendous amount of energy and focus and luck. Especially luck. Because even if you’re incredibly smart and interested in the subject matter, if you’re applying yourself in the wrong arena or the wrong market, then you’re still likely to fail.
Perhaps the hardest part, especially for more senior people that are used to being in charge of something, is figuring out how to take what looks like a nice plan and make it something real. Something real typically means finding someone willing to pay for something and presenting whatever it is that you do in such a way that they exchange money for it. That’s actually really really hard. Even for smart people.
And the question that I wonder aloud sometimes is whether that process should feel harder or easier as you go along. If you’re growing and doing better, how should your day-to-day feel? Because there are always challenges and always new things to do.
I suppose that, if you’re successful, replicating the same thing, making that same sale over time, should feel easier. Hopefully, you’re getting better at it and you’re understanding what people want and are willing to pay for and how what you’re selling is different from what other people are selling. And as you learn and adjust that core process becomes easier.
But then other people see that it’s easy and they start crowding into your market and then you have to stay on your toes and continue to innovate and continue to tinker with whatever it is that you’re selling so that it evolves and becomes different. And that makes it hard or challenging again.
So, as I think about it or write about it, it seems maybe it’s the wrong question. Since anything that works is bound to get harder as you’re forced to innovate. And maybe the question is whether the work is interesting and challenging and whether it feels hard or easy depending on how engaged you are in the process and how good the team is with whom you’re working on the problem.
Still, in the back of my mind, I guess my intuition is that things should feel easier as you get better at them. And that if they’re feeling harder. If the core stuff that you’re doing feels like more of a drag, feels more taxing, spiritually or intellectually, that should be something to think about and to consider and upon which you perhaps should give some pause.
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