“If it’s easy, it’s probably not worth pursuing.”
Discuss.
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23 thoughts on “Easy < Deep Thought Thursday”
If you subscribe to this theory, then you may overlook things too easily. If its easy, just do it anyway! whats to lose? a few minutes? and it may turn out to be worthwhile… you just never know but if its an opportunity, take it!
Always consider the easy ones, if it looks good, try it. Then move on to the harder ideas. Consider those. As long as you’re moving forward, it can’t be wrong. There are no mistakes, just lessons.
“Change happenes not in grand gestures, but in immeasurable units.” -Author Uknown. Even the most difficult roads are walked one step at a time. I agree whole heartedley with Chris and PJ.
Nothing is really easy, except procrastination.
Everything else is hard.
Even the easiest thing eventually runs up against something hard.
The finish, the failure, the flop, the financing, the getting started, the stopping and shipping, the letting go, the price, your self-worth and self-confidence… you name it.
Your edge is where things get hard.
Practice makes easier, and then you find the new level, new devil, with any luck.
The thing that’s easiest for you is what you charge the most for. That’s hard!
My philosophy is the polar opposite of this one. I believe if something is that difficult, it most likely isn’t meant for you. When things flow easily, you are following the path you are meant to walk on.
I disagree. I believe that if it’s easy, it’s your gift or talent. We fight so hard to make things difficult. If we encourage the ease at which we do things, our artistic styles would shine for all the world to see. 🙂
Funny, I was just discussing this very topic this morning, because allowing myself to do, enjoy, and appreciate the “easy” things, is an important life lesson for me. I’m learning that it’s not necessary to justify my existence through “hard work” or equate success with struggle, wearing that struggle like a badge of honor. Success is achieving the things I want to achieve. I spend my fair share of time in that uncomfortable space we equate with learning and challenging ourselves – so much so that it has become easier and normal operating mode for me to do that. I’m learning to appreciate the “easy”, lightening up, laughing more, having more fun – all with a recognition that I can’t do it wrong and I’ll never be done.
I’m on board with all the disagree-ers
We can choose for life to be hard or for life to be easy. I prefer easy.
Effortless is the latest theme over on Zen Habits also. http://zenhabits.net/glide/
Everything is hard before you master it; learning to walk, learning a new language, learning how to drive a car. Often, necessity dictates that we keep climbing the ladder of mastery, otherwise we stagnate.
OTOH, “If it don’t come easy, you’re doing it wrong.”
Love it. nuff said.
Astaire made dancing look easy. It isn’t.
Ease = mastery to the point where you can get out of your own way and see what wants to reveal itself.
Things come easy after long hard work.
As I used to say when I was ballroom dancing, “I can teach you to waltz in ten minutes. It will take you a lifetime to perfect it.”
I have to agree with JJ, Heather and Walter. The notion that things are difficult seems to be driven by humans need to complicate in order to maintain an illusion they’ve created. The truth is that if you are in your natural rhythm and flow then things should be easy. The difficult only arises when we allow our emotions and excessive mental energy to drive it, rather than coming from our free flowing heart-center.
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
-Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 2, Scene 2
After decades of paintings my observation:
First it’s hard. Then it get’s easy. They it’s hard again. Then suddenly it becomes easy again. Then once again it’s hard (I think you see the pattern here…).
Insights seem to well up within us at unexpected times. When they do the long-suffering difficult painting suddenly can be resolved.
I suspect the slow and steady grinding away in the studio is the dues we must pay the muse for those times when she lets us have a breakthrough.
It’s that way learning a foreign language. You progress, then you reach a plateau where you think that you are not progressing…then all of a sudden, when you have let go of obsessing about the plateau, you progress again. And so it goes until you become fluent with new words and phrases popping up now and then.
Now this is something which depends on the circumstances. Clearly it’s a generalization which would be better phrased as “Sometimes the reward is inversely proportional to the difficulty. Sometimes it’s easier than you thought – and the reward is still fantastic!”
Examples abound and I know we can all think of them.
I think that the quote wasn’t talking about making things difficult unnecessarily, but rather that always taking the easy path won’t reap the best rewards. It’s easy to sit back and do nothing, to let others make tough decisions, but is it always right? I don’t think that people should take the difficult path just because it is difficult, but to not challenge yourself will stagnate your growth. What if Gandhi took the easy path? What if Steve Jobs took the easy path (to be topical)? When society decides to just take it easy it doesn’t progress. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t ever relax or do the easy projects too. But I feel that we all have to challenge ourselves sometimes. Are you most proud of the easy projects you’ve tackled or that you were able to finish a masterpiece that pushed you to your limits?
Wendy, a masterpiece is a masterpiece whether or not it was difficult (however one defines that) to accomplish. If we stop and think about it, we should probably define “difficult” and “easy” for particular meanings. For example, if something is time-consuming is it difficult? If something requires stretch of the imagination is it difficult? If a task requires setting aside one’s ambivalence for that task is it difficult?
You get the idea. Semantics does play a role in this discussion, in my opinion.
To go a bit further; when I tackle a job that I am perhaps somewhat phobic about (bookkeeping, say) I find it’s not difficult in that it isn’t complex, but my ambivalence makes it difficult for me to sit down and keep it up – until I train myself to assimilate that bookkeeping isn’t a monster. If you want to stick to artistic creation, then I would say that difficulties seem to disappear in my memory once the work is finished. Clearly, psychology has its role as well!
Interesting that you use the word “tackle” to describe the job. 😉
Professionals make things look easy to observers…. Need I say more?
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