Some Things Are Meant To Be Hard

After a long hiatus, I finally went back to rock climbing (just indoors for now), and there, I was trying my hand at a route at the limit of my abilities. I kept falling off at a particular place, and I assumed I just hadn't figured out the right move, sequence, body positioning.

Because in rock climbing, strength certainly doesn't hurt, but it's technique that really enables you to climb well: Put your feet, hips, and shoulders to work, and your arms have barely anything to do. And so I assumed that I hadn't found the right trick yet: The moves felt hard, and if I'd use the right technique, they'd feel easy.

Not on this route, though. No amount of trying to be cute with technique allowed me to finish the route. In the end, it was a matter of gritting my teeth and pulling really hard.

And of course that's how it feels when you're working on anything that comes with cognitive strain, too. It's good and natural to wonder if you can find a way to work smarter instead of harder, but for the real challenges, you have to work both smart and hard. If you shy away from anything that feels hard, you might end up wasting endless time looking for a way that's smart and easy where no such way exists.

We see that with people who endlessly tinker with their productivity system under the mistaken assumption that the right folder system, tags, or AI-generated schedules will make the work a breeze.

And we'll see a lot of it when people endlessly tinker with the prompts and routines in their AI agents under the mistaken assumption that, if you just say the magic words just right, the AI agent will fly through that hard task.

Sometimes, you really got to grit your teeth and crank hard.