Category: Style

There is a major difference between difficult and hard for me.  I have noticed that professionals love to say they work hard. Over time it has become a badge of honor. I work harder then you and my parents told me hard work = success and therefore I will be/am more successful. That logic seems so screwy and I followed it for way too long.

I propose that if you work hard you are bad at something. There are always difficult things in the world. It is difficult to create an atomic bottom, or be nice to your mom sometimes, it is difficult to start a company. But when something is hard, you are doing it wrong. Life is easier than I think we realize sometimes and with the mentality that working harder is better than not we fall into this brute force, power through mentality. For instance lifting a tree IS hard and people did it for years, building a pulley system was difficult and made lifting a tree less hard.

There are so many red flags that pop up when this is happening. Talking in circles at meetings, staying up late every night, rearranging your pitch to others everytime you give it. Stop and think, am I proud of how hard I am working more than I am tackling the right difficult problem?

It’s weird, is it actually lazier to work hard than find the right difficult problem? For instance, if I had an eating problem and I found myself rummaging through my fridge alot the lazy/hard way to solve it could be to put a lock around my fridge and the lock only opens if I ride my back for more then 3 hours. That’s alot of work and you “solved” the problem, but we know that that is a shit load of work and you didn’t really put any effort toward the actual problem. You simply solved all the points around it, but you worked so hard for it, right? Congrats you’re a hard working idiot. That is a red flag. The difficult thing here is you have an eating problem, go to a gym, go to a psychologist and find out why you find comfort in food, buy healthier foods, etc.

Another example is in politics and law. The ROI for “catching someone in a crime” is low. Someone has to wait around and catch you. The question is why are they breaking the law, why are they angry, is the law right, are the roads safe, etc? Way more difficult but when figured out MUCH easier to maintain and way less hard. Try building a fence on the border of Mexico and the U.S. That’s alot of dumb level hard work. I mean the most similar things are the ancient Great Wall of China, and the BerlinWall…..really? Why don’t you want immigrants here, why do they want to be here and find a mutually beneficial result? If they are coming to the U.S. for healthcare, in order to get healthcare you must be a citizen, in order to be a citizen, you must do x. If it’s cash then offer cash to register, as it may be cheaper then manning and building a non interest aligning wall. Aligning interest and solving difficult problems allows you to not need to over manage tasks and decreases hard work. The best system is one that manages itself to be accommodating to everyone’s passions, interest and goals as closely as possible so that the management of themselves is the most efficient way to work. Regulating pirating music is way harder then making it cheaper and easier for users to download individual songs almost instantly instead of having to break the law, code, search, and wait for songs that are stolen.