A system for hard things

The easiest way to do hard things is to learn to love doing them

There’s this voice in my head that yearns to be done with hard things. I want to go to the gym a hundred times and never go again. I want to study hard for a few years so I can stop studying forever. I want to reach a permanent state of irrevocable zen, then stop meditating entirely. I trick myself into believing that my habits are temporary means to permanent ends — to be fit, to be well-read, to be more aware.

But of course that’s not quite true, is it? I can’t lose 10 pounds once, then only eat donuts for the rest of my life.¹ I can’t study for a few years, then never again — knowledge is steadily winnowed by time. And I can’t achieve mindful enlightenment, allow my brain revert to its old muttering patterns², and expect my enlightened state to persist. Yet I’ve somehow convinced myself that I'm working through a finite checklist of goals, when, in reality, I'm cultivating habits that must either continue until death or be consigned to inevitable decay. It’s quite Sisyphean, from that vantage.

I suppose my mistake is that I still implicitly subscribe to a skill tree view of life — that progression is permanent, that time and mind are infinite, that my career as a professional musician can resume once I’ve reached everlasting checkpoints on my other skills. But of course, internal equity decays, and for the things you love and want to sustain, you can't stop. But I think that’s the idea — you can only sustain effort forever if you love the act itself, anyway. The goals need to vanish behind the joy of the process itself, or over-focus on goals will make it harder to continue after each milestone (or even harder: after setbacks).

A [somewhat atypical] skill tree. Points if you know what this is from.

I was recently talking with a pro golf instructor about how golf has this process-not-goals philosophy baked in³. There certainly are natural goals to pursue: hitting a certain distance, achieving a certain score. But golf is a sport where mess-ups are both so inevitable and obvious (it’s you against you), that it often matters more that you establish a strong love of the iteration process when you mess up than to just keep swinging. “Golf is a game of seeking perfection but never achieving it,” my friend explained. And so one must love the pursuit of perfection — not the signals of perfection — to succeed.

But this is how we tend to approach the things we love anyway, isn’t it? You don’t do things you love doing to hit arbitrary milestones, but because the act itself brings you delight. We don’t watch TV to simply watch all the TV⁴. Of course, this isn’t to say that we can’t enjoy rewards that come with effort. But love of the act itself can be a much more powerful sustaining force, particularly when your goals have been reached (or, more importantly, when you fail at reaching them).

I need to remind myself of this regularly, but luckily, for the things I do regularly, some love is usually there anyway, underneath the goals. I weightlift because I love the purity of the mental effort required when pushing myself to failure. I love to study, not simply as a means of attaining expertise on a subject matter, but because I love the way ideas turn over in my head, spawning new ideas, evolving my beliefs. I love meditating because the awareness that I am able to cultivate makes every present moment more alive.

And while those “hard things” perhaps aren’t so canonically hard, I give them as examples because they are predictably recurring, and so I’ve found them to be be strong instruments for practicing this mindset shift. But I’ve found that the benefits in making this shift can extend to truly hard things — playing games you can’t win, choosing a least bad outcome from a set of truly terrible options. The desire to engage just has to run deeper.

joseph moon

and I have been repeating this Nietzsche quote to each other as of late, which neatly captures the nature of such depth:

"The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others."

- Nietzsche

In short, this is all a rehash of the old “journey, not destination” bit, but I hope this has given you a different dimension for internalization. I, for one, often take “journey not destination” as a mantra to repeat as I white knuckle through process, but I hope you can see the wisdom beyond the utilitarian. It offers a different system for life — one where life is loved, not merely tolerated.

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Other comments

This is quite a different perspective than one of my last posts, where I advocate doing absolutely nothing. But I think the more general theme is that there is value in understanding where your biological compulsions are trying to bring you — whether that means chasing achievements or chasing productivity.

1. Or at least, not for long.

2. I think one can reach a point in practice where the mind is both so conditioned to be mindful and you’ve sufficiently dissociated with your thoughts that it seems to stay like that (I think this is what counts as “enlightenment”), but I’d say this is a very specific example where you’ve surpassed a tipping point where you are just practicing all the time, so I’d consider this still “practicing”.

^ On that point, this is the goal — getting to a point where the practice lives rent-free in your brain and in your life.

3. As do many sports, of course, but I think golf tends to capture this with quite an unparalleled level of precision.

4. At least, I hope this is true for most of you