Hey, how’s it going?

It’s already March and time isn’t slowing down.

I’m visiting Miami next Friday 15th March to meet with some cool entrepreneurs and creator friends. If you’re in the area I’d love to hang out!

Let’s talk about facing new challenges and a common misconception around how hard something is to achieve.

I call this The Difficulty Illusion.

Let’s get into it.
‍

💭 Thought of the week

Comparison is the thief of joy.

It’s a daily occurrence with social media to compare ourselves to others.

But hardly anybody shares transparently the challenges they face, the mistakes they’ve made, or the decisions they’ve got wrong.

This leads to our newsfeeds, which on average we consume 4 hours per day, becoming an endless scroll of everybody else seemingly doing better.

I noticed this week another factor that makes this even worse.

See, I overheard two people talking in a lift…

Person A was giving Person B advice on scaling their business.

It all sounded very, very simple.

Person A was listening intently to Person B - to be polite - but I could tell inside they were feeling frustrated and probably thinking:

“You make it all sound so easy.”

And this is a problem.

Derek Sivers famously said: “If more information was the answer we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs.”

So clearly with any endeavour, we can all intellectualize how something could be done. We can break most things down into a series of logical steps.

But this is a trap.

• Eat in a calorific deficit for long enough and you’ll see an ab (maybe two!)
• Communicate more in your relationship and you’ll avoid problems.
• Floss every day and you’ll avoid cavities.

All so simple to say and recommend, but hard to do regularly in practice.

So why does this matter?
‍

It’s well known that our internal narrative is usually negative. Even in the best of times, we’re not exactly our own best friends.

Yet, we’ll show up for others and share amazing advice that we struggle to follow ourselves.

We’re all playing in the game of simple (vs. complex) without acknowledging the true extent of difficulty (easy vs. hard).

Online everybody else looks “ahead”.

And because we can intellectualize the steps they’ve taken towards success, this can lead to us feeling negative about ourselves in comparison because we haven’t done it ourselves.

On the flip side, we can also discredit other people’s hard work just because we can list exactly what they did. Action is all that matters and it's action that bridges the gap between where we are, and where we want to go.

So the next time you’re evaluating a challenge you face, it might be helpful to first differentiate simple from easy and to be aware of The Difficulty Illusion.

Things can of course be simple yet very hard to achieve.
‍

💡 A perspective to consider

The only thing that is doing the thing is doing the thing.” — Strangest Loop

• “Preparing to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
• Scheduling time to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
• Making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing.
• Telling people you're going to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
• Messaging friends who may or may not be doing the thing isn't doing the thing.

I needed this reminder. Enjoy the full tweet by Chris Williamson.
‍

❤️ Content I LOVED

🛠️ Tool - Loom

- I really hope you use Loom already, but if you don’t, download it now. Last week we stopped 50% of internal meetings in my business and replace them with Looms. Status updates in particular are more efficient async.

📹️ Instagram - Anyone Can Push Hard Caffeinated by Simran Kaur

- I’m going to write more about the topic of “caffeinated productivity” as it’s such a great term for unsustainable work methods.

📸 Instagram - Your March Energy by Yung Pueblo

✍️ Quote of the week

❝

It's easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time.

Clayton Christensen

‍