It's not supposed to be hard

Why you're struggling to progress

I’m the type of person who makes things unnecessarily difficult. I overthink, I over-analyze, I over-anticipate. If the solution sits right there before me in plain sight, simple as could be, I’ll think to myself, “Surely, that’s too easy. Surely, I’m missing something. Surely, I ought to throw a wrench in this.”

It’s not that I’m not a hard worker. I think I work very hard, actually. Perhaps not the hardest, but hard enough to be called a hard worker. And it’s not that I’m a procrastinator, either. I’ve gotten myself into a habit of ripping the band-aid off, so to speak.

It’s that I have an ego. It’s that I think, for some reason, I’d be better off—or that it’d be more honorable—if I took the long way . . . if I held my head high before what’s given, and instead grinded my way through the back-country so I could say I earned it.

I might even say that my desire to work hard has forged this sort of expectation that things ought to be hard, and that if they’re not, then I’m doing something wrong.

But I’m starting to realize that I’m holding myself back. Because, while there are certainly supposed to be obstacles, periods in which it is indeed very difficult, the path forward isn’t always supposed to be hard. In fact, it’s supposed to be easy. It’s supposed to be like slicing through warm butter.

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For the longest time now, I’ve grinded and hustled and grinded, and if I’m being honest, I’ve made very little quantifiable progress. Yes, I’ve become a much better writer than I was many moons ago—and there is undoubtedly something to say about how much a person may grow by forcing themselves at the beginning of whatever journey they’re on to take the long way. But at the end of the day, I’ve not got much to show for it, other than hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of words typed.

Not that that’s nothing—and not that I should expect to be famous or anything by now—but that a lot of other people, those less compelled than myself to take the long road, would probably have built a fairly large audience by now if they were in my shoes.

Many times, I’ve wondered why. Why have I struggled to progress? And why haven’t certain others?