Quality of difficulty

Is it the kind of hard that gets easier over time or the kind of hard that burns you out over time?

Hard work, easy life.

Easy work, hard life

Establish a habit of making it hard for yourself and life will gradually become easier. Establish a habit of making things easy on yourself and life would more gradually get hard.

At 1st glance this makes sense and sounds nice. As you break it down there are a few holes that are worth patching.

Not all efforts that are perceived to be hard are created equally. The reason why something is difficult is at the heart of whether or not investing that effort will increase the quality of your life.

If something is challenging because it is broken, the hard choice that will later increase the quality of life would be to take a deep dive into the machine, diagnose the problem, and fix it at its root . Plenty of people have cars that are hard to start because you have to know the trick. Practicing the trick until it’s no longer hard is not the hard work that later pays off. That example is the easy work disguised as hard work that will later lead to hard times when the car doesn’t start.

The labor that would give back in dividends is taking an afternoon to learn what could be causing the issue, attempting to address it with the resources and knowledge you currently have, and either fixing it yourself or reaching a point where you must seek the expertise of a professional.

This takes patience and discipline and, if you’re learning, the time spent is an investment rather than a loss.