If It Was Easy, Everyone Would Do It

“If it was easy, everyone would do it.” It’s one of those phrases we’ve all heard a hundred times, but recently I’ve been thinking about just how true it actually is.

Starting something is often the easy bit. We tend to start when motivation is high, when we’re excited about what could happen and when we have a clear picture in our heads of where we want to get to. We start the new job, launch the business, sign up for the challenge, decide to get fit, make the change or finally set the boundary we’ve been thinking about for months. At the beginning, there is excitement and momentum. We can see the end result and, for a little while at least, getting there feels completely possible.

Then comes the bit that nobody really talks about. It gets hard.

The initial motivation starts to disappear. Progress feels slower than we expected. Someone says no. We have a bad week. Life gets busy. We start comparing ourselves to other people and wondering why they seem to be finding it so much easier. The thing we were once excited about can suddenly feel like another thing we have to carry, and that little voice starts creeping in: Wouldn’t it just be easier to stop?

And yes, sometimes it would. But easier and better aren’t always the same thing.

We talk a lot about beginnings and endings, but not nearly enough about the messy bit in between. We celebrate the person signing up for a marathon and then we celebrate them crossing the finish line, but we don’t see quite as much of the cold, dark training run when they really couldn’t be bothered. We celebrate someone launching a business and then, a few years later, we celebrate their success, but we don’t see all of the days in between when they wondered whether anybody was listening, whether it was going to work or whether they were good enough to pull it off.

The same applies to so many areas of our lives. We see the qualification, the promotion, the transformation, the successful relationship, the confident child or the big achievement, but behind almost every outcome we admire is a middle that was repetitive, uncomfortable and probably far less glamorous than the finished result.

The middle is where the work happens.

I think one of the hardest things to remember when we are in that stage is that something being difficult does not automatically mean that we are doing it wrong. We can become so used to looking for reassurance that we are on the right path that the moment something becomes uncomfortable, we start questioning the whole thing. Maybe I’m not good enough. Maybe this isn’t for me. Maybe I made the wrong decision. Maybe everyone else can do this and I can’t.

But what if it is simply hard because it is hard?

Growth can be uncomfortable. Change can be uncomfortable. Learning something new can be uncomfortable. Doing something differently from the way you have always done it can be incredibly uncomfortable. Sometimes you aren’t failing and you aren’t on the wrong path; you are simply in the part where you have to dig a little deeper.

That doesn’t mean we should glorify pushing ourselves until we break. There is an important difference between perseverance and running yourself into the ground. Keeping going doesn’t mean ignoring your body, sacrificing your wellbeing or remaining in a situation that is hurting you simply because you don’t want to be someone who “gives up”. Sometimes the strongest decision we can make is to stop. Sometimes we need to rest, change direction, ask for help or completely rewrite the original plan.

Digging deep is not about blindly pushing forward regardless of the consequences. It is about being honest enough to stop and ask yourself, Do I still want this? If the answer is genuinely yes, then the next question becomes, What do I need in order to keep going?

Maybe you need to slow down. Maybe you need more support. Maybe the approach you started with no longer works for the life you have now. Maybe you need to stop expecting yourself to do everything perfectly. Or perhaps you simply need somebody to remind you why you started in the first place.

This is also where motivation can become misleading. We often think that successful people must somehow possess more motivation than everybody else, but nobody wakes up every morning desperate to do the difficult thing. There will be days when you feel like you can take on the world and there will be days when you would quite happily ask the world to come back tomorrow. Both versions of you are allowed to exist.

The difference is learning that you don’t always have to feel motivated in order to keep moving forward. Sometimes perseverance is far less dramatic than we imagine. It isn’t a huge breakthrough or an inspirational moment. Sometimes it is simply deciding, Today, I am going to do the next thing. Not everything. Not the whole plan. Just the next thing.

There may be something in your life right now that feels like this. Perhaps you are building something, changing something, working towards something or trying to become a different version of yourself. You might be in that horrible middle stage where the excitement has worn off but the reward hasn’t arrived yet. You’ve put in enough effort for it to feel exhausting, but you haven’t yet got far enough to see whether it was all worth it.

Before you decide that it isn’t working, remember that you haven’t seen the ending yet.

You don’t know what could happen if you give yourself another six months, another conversation, another application, another training session, another attempt or another brave decision. You don’t know what might be waiting on the other side of the period you are currently finding so difficult.

So perhaps when things get hard, instead of immediately asking yourself, Should I give up?, ask a different question: Do I still want where this could take me?

If the answer is no, give yourself permission to change course. But if the answer is still a wholehearted yes, perhaps this isn’t the moment to walk away. Perhaps this is the bit where you remember why you started, accept that it was never supposed to be effortless, get the support you need and take the next step.

We don’t have to have endless energy. We don’t have to be relentlessly positive. We certainly don’t have to do everything alone. Sometimes we simply need enough belief to keep moving when the end result isn’t visible yet.

Because the things that change our lives rarely come from always choosing the easiest option. They come from the moments when things get difficult and we discover that we are capable of more than we thought.

If it was easy, everyone would do it.

It doesn’t have to be easy. It just has to be worth it.