What If Getting Easier Isn't the Point?
One of the biggest lies we're told about business (and there are many) is that it's hard to get started, but once you start, it will take off and get much easier.
That's why the movie montage of a lady opening a little cupcake shop is all the cleaning, striving, and work that leads up to Opening Day — after which it's all happy customers, buttercream, and counting the money.
We do this in multiple areas of life, actually. We focus on the wedding, not the marriage. We worry about the first few months with a new baby rather than the lifetime of parenting. We think it's hard to start a new sport, but it gets easy after that. We hem and haw about starting our handmade business but don’t think about the challenges we’ll still have two decades into it.
The reality is that many things are hard and continue to get harder, or differently hard, over time. But here's the thing that makes it work out: we get stronger as the thing gets harder. So the problem isn't really that it's still hard, or even harder than it was. The problem is the story we tell ourselves — that it should be easy at some point.
Milo of Croton was an athlete, Olympian, and army commander in Ancient Greece. Because he appears in so many independent sources, historians believe he was a real person. In what would become his most famous feat, Milo trained during the off-years by carrying a newborn calf on his back every single day until the next Olympics. By the time the games arrived, that calf had become a four-year-old cow. He carried it the length of the stadium — and then, in classic ancient Greek fashion, killed it, roasted it, and ate it.
As Milo's load got heavier, Milo got stronger.
Some part of us wishes that things would have a hard part that eventually gets easy when we reach our goal. But if our strength rises to meet the challenge — the way Milo's did — then easier over time would just mean weaker over time. I’ve heard it said that we set goals not because of what we get when we reach them, but because of who we become on the way.
So maybe the question isn't: when does it get easier? It's: am I getting stronger? The load will keep growing. And we can become more of who we want to be as we learn to carry it.
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