If It Were Easy, Everyone Would Do It
Adebayo Adebisi24 June 202614 min read“It is supposed to be hard. If it was not hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.”
There is a line from the old film A League of Their Own that I think about a lot. A coach is talking to his best player as she walks away from the team, because the game has got too hard for her. He stops her and tells her it is supposed to be hard, and that if it were not hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.
For most of us, when the work gets hard, we read it as a sign that we are on the wrong path, or not good enough, or that there must be an easier route somewhere. My goal in this post is to redefine what hard means to you. It should no longer be the thing standing between you and the life and business you want, but the very thing that protects that life and business once you have it, and the thing that makes you good enough to keep it.
You probably know the moment I mean. You start something, a business or a new skill you need, and at first the energy carries you. Then you hit the part where the work is hard and slow and the results have not shown up yet. You start to wonder whether you picked the wrong thing, whether you are cut out for this, whether everyone else has found an easier way. The feeling is real, and the work really is hard. But you are reading the difficulty as bad news, a signal to turn back, when it is closer to the opposite. By the end of this post I want you to see that same difficulty as some of the best news you can get.
So pick the thing in your own work or life that is genuinely hard right now and has you thinking about walking away. Keep it in mind as you read.
Why your brain reaches for easy
Your brain is wired to save effort. It treats hard work as a cost, something to avoid if there is any way around it. That is why a hard task can feel so bad before you have even started, and it is not a flaw in your character. The same pull shows up in the most driven people you know, because every brain works this way.
Some years ago a team of researchers at Princeton, led by a psychologist named Wouter Kool, set out to answer one question. We already knew people avoid physical effort where they can. They wanted to know whether we avoid mental effort in the same way. They gave people a free choice between two tasks. One made them switch back and forth and concentrate hard. The other asked for far less. There was no extra reward for picking the harder one. Across six separate experiments, people kept choosing the easier task. Scientists have a name for this pull, the law of less work. Later experiments went further: when people were offered more money to do the harder task, plenty still picked the easy one and walked away from the cash.
So the urge to grab your phone or do some small easy job the moment the real work gets hard is the default setting almost every human being runs on. That matters because of what it tells you about everyone else. If avoiding hard things is the default, then most of the people around you are avoiding the same hard things you are, for the same reason. We are all wired for it.
Easy has no moat
If almost everyone avoids hard things, then the easy ones are already packed with people doing the same level of work. Take a simple service in business, the kind someone can start offering after a weekend course. With so many people offering it, the price drops, because a customer can get the same thing from a hundred other people. That is why easy work pays so little. There is always someone willing to do it cheaper than you.
The investor Warren Buffett built his career on the opposite of easy, and he has a word for what he looks for: a moat. He pictures a good business as a castle, and the moat is whatever stops a rival from crossing over and taking your customers. The wider that moat, the safer the business and the longer it lasts.
So what is a moat made of? Things that are hard to copy. It is the same thing business people mean by barriers to entry: whatever makes it hard for a new competitor to step in and do what you do. A lot of money to get started, or years of skill nobody can shortcut. Both are just another way of saying hard. The difficulty itself is the moat. Take the difficulty away, and there is nothing left to keep anyone out.
So when the work is hard and you are tempted to quit over it, look again at what is in front of you. That hard part is the wall around the thing you are building. It is the reason you will still be standing in five years, paid well for something a competitor cannot easily reproduce. Think about any skill in your business that took you real time and pain to build. That difficulty is exactly why nobody can copy it in one afternoon. If it had been easy, everyone would already have it, and it would be worth nothing to you.
If you want to be paid well, and stay paid well, you have to do something the next person cannot easily copy. That means doing something hard. There is no version of this where you get the moat without the difficulty.
The hard is where you get good
The hard part does not only protect you. It is also the only thing that makes you better at the work, and there is solid science on why.
A cognitive scientist at UCLA named Robert Bjork spent decades studying how people actually learn. He found that the study methods that feel slow, hard and frustrating, where you struggle and get things wrong, are the ones that build knowledge that stays with you. The methods that feel smooth and quick, where it all seems to be going in, fade within a week. Bjork called that productive struggle a desirable difficulty: desirable because the struggle is the thing doing the actual work of learning. He also showed that how good you feel while practising and how much you are really learning are not the same, and can even work against each other. The version that feels like you are failing is usually the version that is making you better.
Take learning to sell. You can reread your notes and watch other people's calls all day, and it will feel like progress. Or you can get on a real call, fumble it, feel how uncomfortable that was, learn what did not work, and fix it for the next call. The second way feels far worse, and it teaches you far more.
Another researcher, Anders Ericsson, spent his career studying how the best musicians and athletes in the world got that good. They all relied on a kind of training he called deliberate practice. It is hard, focused work that demands full concentration, and in his words it is not inherently enjoyable. They keep doing it because it is the only thing that moves them forward. The part of the work that makes you better is the part nobody enjoys, so most people drop it and do the fun, easy version instead, which is why so few people ever get significantly better at anything.
Most people quit right where it starts to pay
So the difficulty protects you, and it makes you good. But there is a catch, and it comes down to timing. Both the skill and the reward sit on the far side of the hard part.
The marketer Seth Godin wrote a short book about this called The Dip. Almost anything worth doing follows the same shape. It starts off exciting, then it sinks into a long, hard, boring middle where the rewards have not arrived yet and you are putting in work with little to show for it. Godin calls that middle the dip, and the dip is where nearly everyone quits. They come for the exciting start, they hit the grind, and they leave to find a fresh start somewhere else, which comes with its own exciting beginning and its own dip waiting a little further in. It is a vicious cycle a lot of people are stuck in.
But look at what the dip is doing. It is thinning out almost everyone else who started when you did. The reward on the far side is big precisely because so few people get through to claim it. If the dip were easy, the far side would be packed, and there would be nothing much waiting there. The difficulty of the middle is the only thing that makes the far side worth reaching.
You can see it in the numbers. In the US, where business survival is tracked closely, the Bureau of Labor Statistics follows every new business that opens. More than a fifth are gone inside the first year. By year five, about half have closed. By year ten, roughly two thirds are no longer trading. The obvious reading is that two thirds were never going to make it. But that is not what the data shows. It shows that most people just stopped. The businesses still trading at year ten simply kept going after most of the others had stopped.
As Alex Hormozi puts it:
That sounds like a motivational line until you hold it next to the survival numbers, and then you realise he is just describing how the math works in business. Every person who quits because the work is hard is one less person standing between you and the reward.
Choose hard on purpose
If the hard things are what protect you, what make you good, and what clear out your competition, then the smart move is to go looking for them on purpose.
We already know where the easy road leads. It is the crowded one, because everyone else is making the same choice and arriving at the same destination. Sort your options by what is easiest, and you walk straight into the middle of the crowd, competing with everyone, with nothing to set you apart.
So flip the question. When you are choosing between two ways to spend your effort and one of them is harder, let the hardness count in its favour, as long as that hard thing is also valuable and you can see that most people avoid it. The cold call everyone dreads making, the skill that takes a year to get good at, the consistency required to create compounding results. Those are the places almost no one else is willing to go.
A writer named Steven Pressfield has a name for the feeling that pulls you off that kind of work. He calls it Resistance, and his observation is worth holding onto:
The more important a piece of work is to you, the more Resistance you feel toward doing it.
So the pull away from something hard is not always a reason to avoid it. Often it is a sign you have found the exact thing worth doing.
When something is hard and valuable, and you can see that most people give up on it, you have found the best opportunity you are going to get.
Build a system for doing hard things
Deciding to do the hard thing and actually doing it, day after day, are two different problems. Choosing the hard thing is the easy part.
The pull toward easy never switches off. It is wired in, there every single day no matter how motivated you felt yesterday. So if your plan is to wake up each day and win a fight against your own brain on willpower alone, you will lose most of those fights. Motivation turns up on some days and goes missing on the days you need it most.
What you can count on is a system: the plain, boring machinery that makes the hard thing happen whether you feel like it or not. There is a well-known line from James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits: you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. Everyone has the goal. The goal is the easy part. What separates the people who actually do the hard thing is the system underneath it. Here is how you build one.
Start by shrinking the hard thing down to one specific action you can repeat. Make it small enough to tick off in a sentence: thirty minutes on the bike, or one post written. Keep it vague or enormous, like "get fit" or "do more marketing," and your brain treats it as a threat and steers you toward the easy path, which is usually procrastination or finding excuses. A system can only be built around a small, repeatable action.
Once you have that, decide in advance exactly when and where it happens. A psychologist named Peter Gollwitzer spent years testing this. He had people make plans in a set shape: if it is this time, and I am in this place, then I do this one thing. Across more than ninety studies and over eight thousand people, the ones who planned that way followed through far more often than the ones who only intended to. So you do not leave it to "sometime today." You say: at six in the morning, at my desk, I write one post. The decision is made before the day starts, so you are never deciding in the moment.
Then make that slot easy to start, and guard it. A researcher at the University of Southern California named Wendy Wood found that close to half of what we do on a given day, about 43%, is not really a decision at all. It is habit, running on its own while our mind is elsewhere. That is where you want the hard thing to end up. So clear the obstacles out of its way ahead of time, and treat the slot as non-negotiable, until the day comes when you do it without negotiating with yourself at all. That is when willpower stops being involved and the system is doing the work.
This is the real reason I wake up at 3:50 in the morning. It is not that I am unusually disciplined; I get distracted as easily as anyone. By the time the world wakes up and the easy distractions start, I have already done the hard work my business needs, on a schedule that never depends on my mood. I remove the obstacles ahead of time by sleeping early, getting my clothes ready, and planning my morning. The system runs, and I just show up to it. My most productive work happens between 4am and 10am, but the time itself is not the point. The point is that I keep it as a non-negotiable.
So do not leave your hard things to motivation, because it will fail you on the exact days that matter most. Build the system instead. Shrink the hard thing down, give it a fixed time and place, and guard that slot until doing it stops being a fight and becomes just what you do.
What to do this week
Knowing all of this changes nothing until you act on it. So here are five things you can do this week to start.
- 01Catch yourself reaching for easy. For the next seven days, just observe yourself. Every time you pick the lighter task over the harder one that would actually move you forward, make a note of it. You cannot change a pattern you have never seen or acknowledged.
- 02Pick your one hard thing. Find the single most valuable thing in your work that is hard, that you have been avoiding, and that you know other people avoid too. That is your moat. Choose it on purpose, and commit before you talk yourself out of it.
- 03Lock it into your week. Give that hard thing a fixed time and place, decided in advance, so doing it no longer depends on how you feel that day. Make it small enough to repeat, and protect the slot. That is your system.
- 04Name your dip before you are in it. Accept now that a long, boring middle is coming, where the rewards have not arrived yet. Decide today how long you will give it, in months, so that when the hard middle hits you keep going instead of quitting.
- 05Use the drag as a compass. When you feel the strongest pull to avoid something, flag it. More often than not, that is the most important work you have.
So the next time the work gets hard and you feel the urge to find an easier path, remember what the difficulty actually is. It is the wall that keeps your competition out. It is the thing building the skill that makes you good. It is the reason most of the people who started when you did will not be there at the end. You do not need it to be easy. If it were easy, everyone would do it. So go and do the hard thing that is stopping you from achieving your dreams.