It's extremely hard, but easier than you think
Obvious plans are underrated
Life hides its biggest rewards behind difficulty. A big payoff, probably means enduring hardship. Almost nobody wins the lottery. Few actors get discovered by walking down the street. Writers don’t get book deals from their first blog post.
In my mind, I self-exclude from outcomes because they’re far away from my current reality. As an example, I’ve never written a line of code. Working as a software engineer feels like something that might happen in a parallel life, but not this one.
But I also know how often I’ve thought of things this way that became reality 6-12 months later. I went from being picked last in gym class to being on a sport’s club’s most competitive team where the head coach was an Olympian. I went from dropping out of university to working at a Y Combinator (an exclusive startup accelerator) startup.
Internally, I’ve also experienced emotional growth, have better relationships and am able to deal with thoughts and feelings I previously did everything to avoid.
Those things used to feel as far away as being a software engineer does today. I’ve seen my life transformed too often to trust that feeling of “that’s not for me”.
This quote encapsulates it:
"The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think."
-Marc Andreessen
My simplified version: It’s extremely hard, but easier than you think.
One part of this quote is easy to overlook: If you know what you want. Knowing your objective is a prerequisite for getting it. I like to entertain becoming a software engineer, but it’s no burning desire. I won’t go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion. And that’s okay. That desire may develop (or another one will). But most people don’t get what they want because their wants compete and they never choose one over the others, which ensures they’ll get neither.
Now let’s analyze both parts of the motto above.
It’s extremely hard
At standup comedy open mics, there are always the unprepared comedians. They’re the funny person in the friend group and believe this will translate to the rest of the world. This never works. Sure, Dave Chapelle can do it, but amateurs can’t. These people don’t want to accept that standup comedy is hard. It should be easy for me, they believe.
Many people pursue things this way. They think “I want to be a writer, but that would mean doing X, so I won’t do it.”
But accomplishing most dreams is hard. That’s why they’re still dreams.
Whether you want to be a professional painter/writer/potter/singer, become a doctor, start a successful business, have a perfect little family — those things are hard, which is why most people don’t have them.
Whenever I’ve accomplished something I didn’t think I could, it was because I deployed energy in that direction — and usually nothing too innovative.
Following obvious plans is underrated. How many people you know have an aspiration, but aren’t doing the most obvious thing to get there?
They want to change jobs, but they’re not applying. They want a relationship, but they’re not dating. They want to get fit, but don’t work out. They want to be professional actors, but they don’t audition.
We love to believe rules shouldn’t apply to us. That we’ll get discovered one day or that the right partner will stumble into our lives. These things do happen, but usually not to people sitting on their couch.
But when you start taking action, you get to the second part.
But easier than you think
There are obvious plans for most things you want to accomplish. If I wanted to become a professional Substack writer, the pattern would look something like this:
Publish high-quality writing weekly (or more often)
Grow my subscribers by promoting my writing on social media and collaborating
Get picked up by the Substack algorithm and get further promotion
Turn on paid subscriptions
Wait until I make enough money to go full-time
It’s how most professional writers here make it. It’s an obvious, simple plan (though each step is hard!). But the percentage of writers following these is tiny. It’s the highest chance of succeeding, yet nobody’s doing it!
In most ambitions, there are obvious things you’re not doing. Maybe it’s because you don’t like them, because they’re hard or because of what someone from high school would think.
But taking these usually leads to results. As Andreessen put it: “the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think."
Dploy energy in a direction and things start to happen. They’re rarely the exact things you envisioned. You’ve probably experienced this: You joined a gym, discovered you hate lifting weights, but loved the pilates classes and now you go to a pilates place every day. Or you applied to a job, weren’t chosen, but the hiring manager referred you to your dream job at another company.
These random things happen whenever I deploy energy into a direction. I’ve actually rarely gotten the exact result I wanted when I embarked on a journey.
And that’s a good thing.
Why you probably won’t get what you want
A friend of a former colleague hated her job and dreamed of working at Nike instead. Every quarter, she would apply to every position at Nike she could remotely be considered for. Every quarter she’d get rejected. Every quarter she’d be devastated.
That example is silly, but this happens when your criteria of success are too narrow. It’s like desiring a healthy relationship, but it can only be with one specific person. I remedy this by wanting categories, not specific things (i.e. “I want a remote job at a software company” not “I want to be the marketing lead at Netflix”). This lets life do its work. It tends to surface things you couldn’t even predict.
Desire is a contract with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
-Naval Ravikant
Looking back, things are always obvious: Vyond was an unprofitable VR headset company hurtling towards bankruptcy. Once they admitted failure, they became Brex, a fintech startup that issues credit cards to startups and is now worth $12 billion.
Should they have done the credit card thing right away? Maybe. But they probably wouldn’t have found it had they not already been deploying all their energy into building a company. In Andreessen’s words, they were building a company, so the world reconfigured itself to present them the opportunity.
It’s unlikely this would’ve happened had they not been heads down building a company. This has happened with most major things that impacted my life.
I made a plan to achieve something, sprinted in that direction and discovered something I could never have thought of when I started the journey, which gave me what I wanted (and often more). And when I look back, the only thing they all have in common was that I was taking action into a direction. It was extremely difficult, but easier than I thought.