The Art Of Doing Hard Things

I have applied this principle in many fields, it works every time

Learning and doing hard things make our life easy.

“Do what is easy and your life will be hard. Do what is hard and your life will become easy.” — Les Brown

But our mind resists doing hard things. Our mind does not want to spend too much energy. That’s why we find it so hard even to start doing hard things let alone completing them. However, we have to do hard things. There is no other way around.

Whenever I want to write a blog, go for a run, or read a book, I face a roadblock. My mind resists doing those things.

Nonetheless, I have figured out a way to do those things every day. I go to the gym 5–6 times a week, I publish 3–5 articles a week, and I read 2 books in a month.

So the question is, “How do I do it?”

The answer is simple,

Break hard things into small things and commit to completing one small thing. Once you complete that one small thing, you start feeling motivated to complete more small things, and before you know you are done with your work.

For example,

1. If I am going for a run, I say to myself, “Just run for 5 minutes.” When I run for 5 minutes, I repeat the same thing — run for another 5 minutes. This way I complete my 20 minutes run.
2. If I am writing a blog, I say to myself, “Just write for 5 minutes.”
3. If I am reading a book, I say to myself, “Just read for 5 minutes.”

If you think, you will give up after 5 minutes, you are wrong.

If you start working on anything, it’s much harder to give up than continuing the work.

The most recent example is when I was updating my LinkedIn profile. I needed to update my projects and qualifications but I was finding it hard to start.

So I broke down the updating task into three small sections — update personal information (the easy part), update qualifications (moderate level difficulty), update project (the hard part).

I started with the easy part and once I was done with updating the personal information, I did not want to stop and I completed the other 2 tasks as well and updated my LinkedIn profile.

Doing hard things is not hard. It’s all about the mindset. If you think it’s hard, it will be hard. If you think it’s easy, you will find it easy.

Thanks for reading.