Train Your Mind to Do Hard Things
Hard work means two quite different things. If you don’t understand the difference, they can feel like they are the same thing, when they are not.
The first can be described as the difficulty to begin the work. There can be many reasons for this. I can recall for example how this very article began as a single paragraph idea that went on to sit in my “Idea Incubator” folder in Obsidian for weeks. I knew what I wanted to do with it but not exactly where I should begin. It had become a problem of procrastination.
Being stuck produces nothing, and this has a significant cost to you. Often you do understand what is preventing you from beginning the work, but you are frozen and unable to move beyond the starting point.
The second is the difficulty of the work itself. I’m sure that we’ve all had to deal with this at some time, like holding a complicated argument in mind for long enough to find its essence, recalling something instead of looking it up on your phone, or taking the easiest way out and simply asking AI for its help with the hard work.
Unlike the difficulty you may have when trying to start the work, dealing with difficult work yourself is not a cost. It is what you want because it will build your capability. If you take the difficulty out of your daily workflow and by doing that end up not challenging yourself, this eventually harms your personal development.
What you lose when the second kind goes
We understand simply that the effort put into something is what it costs you for achieving the outcome. It is the other way round. Effort is the process that produces a capability, and the resultant outcome becomes a by-product of the development of that capability. Harvard Health’s summary of the research puts it directly: “It’s the constant repetition of working to improve, and not the quest for mastery, that can have the greatest impact.”
The same summary explains why the brain can go on learning and growing with age, but only if it is continually trained. Mental reserves that you will draw on later in your life have to be built before you need them. Harvard’s guidance is direct, once something has become comfortable for you to perform, raise the bar within it rather than just carry on.
Brian Millar tells a story in WIRED that shows what this looks like from the inside of business. Before the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, he explains that he had worked on software that gave banks a real-time view of their risk profile. This innovative software was an automation that intended to replace a long-used manual process with another process that was simpler to use.
The manual process involved various heads of risk processing spreadsheets emailed to them from different parts of the business. They then stitched together these spreadsheets to form a consolidated view of the business’s risk. By using this reconfigured information, they applied their insight and determined the organisation’s risk profile. Being presented with an alternative automated system, they were not willing to trade their skill for a dashboard that simply anyone could read.
What was going on here was that the heads of risk were wrong about the value of the new software and its automated outcome, and very right about themselves. By removing the difficulty embedded in the manual process, the numbers that were generated automatically still arrive. However, the critical difference now is that the person reading these numbers can no longer tell when they are wrong.
The outcome of this automation is the loss of expertise. Without expertise, an automated process often seems to be fine and nothing obvious appears to be wrong. The report gets written. The analysis gets done. The answer arrives, and the output may appear to be better than what you would have produced yourself by manually stitching together spreadsheets.
What is not initially noticeable is that your business is slowly becoming a place where nobody is able to produce that output unaided by the automated process. Someone who used to do the hard work themselves enough times that they were able to understand it has now moved on because their skill and knowledge were replaced by an automation. All that is left is the automated process.
There is often no concern by businesses about automating processes until one day the automation tool is unavailable, or what you need today falls outside what the automation is designed to produce. What is left once the manual process is completely gone is the impossible challenge to ever bring it back again.
All the older advice about addressing these two types of hard was that you just needed to pick up the pen, head down at your desk, and start. The truth is anyone can do that, but how is it helping you? The practical problem you face is no longer how to make yourself work but rather it’s the skill to tell whether doing the work yourself is something that will make you better at something you want to be good at.
What follows is one question, two answers, one list, and one check.
The question
Ask yourself this question whenever a task is in front of you.
If I did this myself, ten times, would I be better at something I want to be good at?
This question does not ask whether the task is hard, urgent, if anyone is waiting or if you enjoy it. These questions are irrelevant when considering whether doing it will improve your performance.
When the answer is ‘No’
This is the cost that you will pay in time and energy when performing the task or doing the work. It is understood that the work must be done, but what if doing the work does not invest anything in yourself?
If this is the case, you need to decide whether you remove it entirely, automate it, or delegate it to somebody else where doing so will add to their own growth.
What you get back from doing this review and planning before taking on a task is more capacity that will allow you to focus on harder work that benefits your growth and learning. So, if it has often seemed that you never have the capacity for harder work, it may be because you were spending too much time on work that never benefited you.
Would you be more capable at the end of it than you were at breakfast?
When the answer is ‘Yes’
This is your investment, and two rules must be made to apply to it.
The first is that you do the task yourself, including the parts you could easily have had done through delegation or automation.
The second is that you challenge yourself enough that you move just outside your comfort zone and hold it there. It should feel like the burn in your muscles at the gym.
If the work ran smoothly throughout the task, you should not be happy because it was in hindsight too easy, you were not challenged, and it changed nothing in you. There is no evidence of a benefit.
If you finished feeling totally defeated, the failure teaches you nothing more than why you missed the mark. It also achieved nothing even if you put great effort into it.
If you can find the balance between the two (often at the outset by trial and error), you will invest in yourself and improve over time.
You should not be misled by the comfort that effort brings. It is easily mistaken for competence. The level you are operating at must be raised continuously and deliberately. Harvard’s example is the casual golfer who doesn’t need a new game to play as they improve, only a lower handicap.
The list
Write down your own interests, once, and they must be what you will not hand over through delegation or automation. The list should be short and specific. On my list for example it’s most important to me that I’m able to decide what to write about, and I will not hand this decision to anyone else.
Write it in advance so that it becomes a rule rather than a negotiation you have every time you need to decide.
It is a list that is personal and private, so it’s easy to keep it honest with yourself. The list will contain only the capabilities that you believe would diminish yourself if you were to lose them.
The check
Once a month, you should do your own personal self-review and write down the one thing you can now do that you could not do before.
What you are building
The question you ask yourself and the decision you make will not show up at all in the output that you produce. The choice you make will eventually show up in you, and in your own performance.
