The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur

March 14What's Difficult

He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher … he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

Mark Twain—The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)

What if your work felt like play? That would be great, right? You could wake up excited and ready to go to the playground every day.

Or, you could change how you face difficulty. We've become so conditioned to go out of our way to have things be easy, convenient, comfortable, that we've forgotten what dealing with obstacles is supposed to teach us. We've somehow become weak and fragile.

It's not that you need to be slapped in the face or dunked in an ice pool each day—or maybe it is—but things worth doing, like inventing something that saves lives, should be difficult. What makes them hard, though, is when we lose the meaning in what we are doing.

Meaning is what makes us covet a thing not just when it's hard, but because it's hard.

It comes down to this: our real joy is ultimately defined by what we willingly struggle for.

Challenge Question

1. What is hard about what you do? What are you willing to do anyway?