"Hard work has made it easy. That is my secret. That is why I
win." --- Nadia Comaneci
I got an email from a friend this week. She has started
work on a new business venture but has gotten distracted by
family matters. One phrase in her email stood out. "This is not
as easy as I had planned."
Her words got me thinking about the expectation that
doing something new should be "easy."
One of the biggest of the big lies of our times is that
success should be easy. I did a search on Google on the word
"easy." Google brought back 2,490,000,000 websites. Look at that
number. Almost two and a half billion web pages using the word
"easy."
The expectation that success should be "easy" has been
drilled into us by too many get rich quick schemes, too many
promises of instant success, and too many sales claims that
some product will make things easy for you. Easy, easy, easy.
This is especially evident on the internet. We hear
too many stories about 24 hour promotions leading to a million
dollars in sales, without knowing how many years lay behind that
instant success.
Speaking for myself, I'd like to find success on the
road named Easy Street. Unfortunately, taking a stroll down Easy
Street does not usually lead to success. Easy Street is usually
a dead end road, leading nowhere.
If success is so easy, why do so few people succeed? The
truth is that success is rarely easy. Most successful people
attribute their success to hard work. And hard work is not easy.
"If you like things easy, you'll have difficulties; if you like
problems, you'll succeed." --- Laotian Proverb
I used to teach Biblical Hebrew to theological students.
Hebrew is not an easy language for English-speaking adults to
learn. The alphabet consists only of consonants. Vowels are
noted with a system of lines and dots. And words are written
from right to left. One of my students approached me one day
after class early in the semester, and with great frustration
asked, "How can I ever learn this stuff?"
I knew that Mike was a professional pianist and singer
and had left a successful career as an opera singer to start
theological seminary. I asked him if he could read music. He
seemed a bit annoyed that I would even ask such a question, and
said, "Of course." Then I asked if he knew how to read music the
first time he looked at a sheet of music. He looked startled and
then I saw a flicker of awareness in his eyes. He got my point.
I didn't have to say anything else.
Reading music had become so easy for Mike that he no
longer had to think about it. Learning to read Hebrew is no
harder than learning to read music. It is also not easy.
Learning any new skill involves hard work and it also takes
time to learn. Stephen Covey traces the stages of development
from unconsciously incompetent, to consciously incompetent,
to consciously competent, to unconsciously competent.
Mike had already reached the point of being unconsciously
competent when he read music. This is another way of saying that
he had reached mastery. In contrast, after two or three weeks
of studying Hebrew, he was consciously incompetent in Hebrew,
and frustrated with himself because he was not already a master
of what he had barely begun to study.
"What is easy is seldom excellent." --- Samuel Johnson
The word "ease" is related to the word "easy" but they
are miles apart. What is ease? Ease is what happens when you
have reached mastery of whatever it is that you set out to do.
The quotation from Nadia Comaneci says it all. Nadia
awed the world with her gymnastics at the 1976 Montreal Olympics.
She made it look easy, as she flung her tiny body around the
parallel bars. But that skill came as the result of years of
grueling work in the gym. That is the real sequence. From
incompetence to mastery by way of hard work. Hard work got her
there, and she made it look so easy because she had reached a
point of ease.
This is the very definition of mastery. When you reach
a point where you make the difficult look easy. The price Nadia
paid, the price any truly successful person pays, is hard work.
"Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the
things that you'd rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear
of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training
yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier,
drive through the other barrier. And, after you've done that,
to do it again the next day." --- Seth Godin
But even hard work is not enough for real success. If
one of the biggest lies of our times is that success can and
should be easy, the idea that hard work leads to success is
equally misleading.
If Easy Street is a dead end, traveling down Hard Work
Street is no guarantee that you will find success at the end of
it. In fact, Hard Work Street can be as much of a dead end as
Easy Street. Hard work by itself is not enough to lead you to
success.
Why? Because sometimes you are on the wrong Hard work
Street. Just working hard is not enough. You need to be working
toward something that is authentic for you. One of the reasons
that so many of us work so hard with so little result is that
we are working at cross purposes with our true selves.
So the real question is, Are you working hard to master
a craft or skill that is the right craft or skill for you. Are
you trying hard to be what you are simply not meant to be?
Hard work would not have been enough for Nadia to
succeed as a gymnast if she didn't have some sort of natural
facility and body type for gymnastics. This is why you don't
see female Olympic-level basketball players who are five feet
tall and gymnasts who are six feet four. No matter how hard
she worked, tiny Nadia would never have stunned the world as
a basketball player.
My student Mike could read music, play the piano, and
sing with an amazing trained tenor voice because he worked hard
to develop his innate talents.
And so, my friend was onto something when she commented,
"This is not as easy as I had planned." Success is not easy.
Success requires hard work. But hard work doesn't have to feel
hard when you are doing something that is authentic for you.
I'm going to give the last words to Alan Alda.
"You can't get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by
not quite knowing what you're doing. What you'll discover will be
wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself." --- Alan Alda
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