By the Ocean
Breezy 72 Degrees
6:17 a.m.
We all know business is hard. Is that how it’s supposed to be or is that just what we’ve learned to expect?
Is loving someone hard? Is looking at the sunset hard? Is spending a day at the park hard? Is doing something you enjoy hard? Is taking a walk with your child hard?
If so much of our life is not hard, why is business “hard?”
I’ve had a lot of hard years in business. Mainly because I ignored the easy path set before me because I was brainwashed.
That’s a pretty dumb thing to do when the Universe stretches out such a beautiful road before you and you say, “Nah… I think I’ll try this one over here. Did you see what Jack was doing, I think I should do that!”
That’s what I did for a long time. I didn’t want success the easy way, I had to take the long way around. The things that actually made money for me were easy. They are still easy and I actually enjoy them. But I spent years searching for other harder things to try instead of just focusing on the way things came to me effortlessly.
Why would any sane human do this?
You can tell great stories that make you sound like a warrior if you believe business is hard and live out that dream for a while. You can do the same thing with your whole life!
Is a river having a hard time flowing to the ocean? Doesn’t look like it. That doesn’t seem like a high-stress type of position even though that river is “working” 24/7 with no vacation days.
Why are humans so immersed in “hard?” Is hard a set of circumstances? Is it a style of perception? Is it a learned addiction?
Is it because hard is attractive to people who have been trained they aren’t worth much? Do we need to overcome something hard to feel like we are worthy of rewards?
That might be it.
Is it because hard things bring more meaning to life than easy things do? Is that really true or is that just how our perception has been trained so that the value of easy things is completely overlooked?
That could be it too.
Maybe it’s because hard is mainly what we see out there. When we ask our friends how business is and they say, “we’re grinding it out…” or “we are pushing through…” these are all words and ideas that communicate effort, drive, push, force. Hard.
So maybe that’s part of it.
Here’s a question: what if we’re making easy things hard because no one ever taught us to appreciate effortless?
Effortless takes some getting used to. Effortless is the absence of friction and resistance. Effortless is the presence of magic in motion. When you’re not used to that much result from that little input, your body doesn’t really know what to do with all of its unused capacity…all of the extra space where you COULD be doing something but aren’t.
What if we ALL have an effortless path available to us in this game of business? A path that no one else has ever tread, a path we will never read about in a book or hear about in a podcast, a path for which only we were made? What if it is a path that is so obviously perfect for US that we can’t even see it because we’re too busy looking for it.
What if easy vs. hard is mind control? What if we get to choose whether or not we play along?