Doing Hard Things - Passion for Aviation and Travel

One of the core tenets in my life is “Do hard things without being hard on yourself.” That’s what I hope to explain throughout this article (and, to a certain extent, all my articles).
- First, there are two categories of things you can do that I want to postulate: possible and impossible things. While the sentiment behind the aphorism, “Nothing is impossible,” is good, the actual meaning is wrong. There are definitely many things, perhaps MOST things, that are impossible, and it’s good to recognize what those are.
  - If you recognize something as generally impossible, then you never have to worry about it again! It’s sort of freeing in a way.
- The good thing is that there are still plenty of things worth doing that are indeed possible. I guess you could say that these things exist on a spectrum of easy to hard, but since I don’t really care about easy, possible things (anyone can do those things), I’m only going to talk about hard, possible things moving forward.
  - Note that I am purposely keeping the meaning of a “hard thing” very vague, as it is extremely dependent on who you are. Feel free to substitute “hard thing” for whatever you feel is hard for yourself.
- If something is hard and possible, that means it is attainable. Not only is it attainable, but frankly, attaining it is probably quite simple (note that I didn’t say EASY, I said SIMPLE). Why is it simple? Because 95-99% of achieving hard things takes just one thing: hard work!
  - I bet that’s not what you wanted to hear. I bet you wanted me to give you advice on how to shortcut the hard work, or at least circumvent the pain of doing hard work. Well, you’re S.O.L., because I’m going to spend the rest of the article talking about how not only accept hard work as the only viable way to do any hard thing, but how to do it in such a way as not to be hard on yourself.
  - Also, make sure you reread what I said: 95-99% of doing hard things comes through hard work. Indeed, 1-5% comes through other things (which we might broadly call “the process of doing the hard work”), and unfortunately, due to the proliferation of “self-help” books, seminars, life coaches, etc., that sliver of importance is exacerbated far beyond what it’s actually worth. IT REALLY DOESN’T MATTER WHAT PROCESS YOU TAKE AS LONG AS YOU DO THE WORK!!! Even what I’m about to write about could be considered in that 1-5%, so if you stop reading now, I won’t blame you. Go and just do the work, and you’ll figure it all out anyway.
Now, here’s my mindset and process for how I’m able to do many hard things (running a company, training for high altitude mountaineering, completing an MS in aerospace, etc.) all at once while still having a great time and being uber-healthy. AGAIN, this mindset and process have only led to 1-5% of my success; the rest has been SOLELY due to hard work, and that’s the most important thing you should take away from this.
- First, I like to take this mindset on doing hard things: “Once you figure out that you really want to achieve a goal, especially if it will take a very long time to attain, make a rudimentary plan to reach that from where you are now. Then, COMPLETELY FORGET ABOUT EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN THE FIRST STEP AND THE GOAL ITSELF” (note that this wording of this thought is paraphrased from a chapter in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, where the author expresses a similar mindset).
  - Another quote that expresses my point (this time paraphrased from Dwight D. Eisenhower): “Planning is priceless, but plans are worthless.”
  - I hope you get the point that thinking about doing hard things is an oxymoron, but that’s how we often go about it. Who the hell knows what tomorrow might bring, much less next year! We make these well-drawn-out plans, we get the advice of dozens of our friends, we run the numbers…when we could’ve spent 1/10th of the time by just doing something and learned even more, since we actually have an outcome of the task.
  - This thought (the idea of “analysis paralysis”) has been discussed to death, so I won’t discuss it any further in depth. But just note that out of the 1-5% I mentioned earlier that a good process will help with, 90% of that is a mindset that the best way to learn is to do. Thinking is really only good for quickly deciding between sets of actions (but even then, if you have an infinite mindset, as expressed by Simon Sinek, making decisions should be almost instantaneous, as there really is only ever one “best” decision for a person who believes that time is not a factor, or at least not a major factor, in the utility of a decision).
- Now, since I just alluded to several different unoriginal topics from others, let me talk about something that may or may not be as unoriginal, but from my own experiences: There is no value in any plans/action items/etc that exist on a timeline beyond today or tomorrow. Or even more extreme, there is no value in anything that isn’t presently occurring.
  - I worded that very specifically: Note that I didn’t say “no point,” but “no value.” For many things, you sometimes have to plan them out in advance to get what you want (e.g., trips). But the key is that until something is presently occurring, there is no value in it. Whether past or future, it is literally nothing; it is just a concept. And like thoughts, concepts “weigh” nothing and yet we attach so much “weight” to them (see my Clear Mind article for a further explanation of what I mean).
    - Maybe this doesn’t make sense, so I’ll contrast it to a common situation. Let’s say you’ve always wanted to start a company. And now, the time has finally come to put your dreams into action. So you do what most people would do when trying to navigate the path to reach a goal: You attempt to make a comprehensive roadmap for your new company. You have a clear end goal in mind, so you write a super detailed plan that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. You believed what I said in an earlier section of this article, and after writing the plan, now you focus solely on the first step. After encouragement from friends and family, you take the first step…and you succeed! You feel great that you finally got into it and you’re eager to take the next step in your journey. However…the first step has already shown you that your plan is completely off! Maybe it’s the timeline, maybe it’s the progression of tasks, whatever; it’s just not right and continuing the plan (as it’s written) would be a fool’s errand.
    - So what do most people do? Do you break from your plan (since it was just a concept anyway)? Of course not! You have spent a lot of time and effort making it, it has “weight” behind it, you’re not going to admit to yourself that you wasted your time making this super detailed plan. Instead, you are going to follow the plan despite what you had already learned (making yourself believe that the results of your first step follow your plan, even though they don’t) and soon enough, you’re led astray and you fail. And what do you blame it on? That you hadn’t planned enough! So next time you try, you spend even MORE time making a valueless plan instead of just trying to learn from the consequences of your action.
  - Instead, what’s the best way of going through this situation?
    - I think the first progression (setting an end goal, figuring out a rudimentary plan, taking the first step) is good. Like I alluded to earlier in the article, there are only two things you need to succeed in anything in life: A clear guiding end goal (“a North Star”) and the knowledge of what the next most logical step is that will take you toward that goal.
    - You don’t have to know about ANYTHING in the middle! Because, also like I said earlier, anything that is not currently happening has no value. So, only focus on what you can do now and not what you need to do in the future, because you will likely be very wrong in your prediction anyway. And that’s okay! No one is a soothsayer, and you don’t need to be one to succeed.
    - Ultimately, this won’t work if you don’t have the confidence in yourself that you will grow to meet every challenge and that no failure will break you. YOU DON’T HAVE TO KNOW EVERYTHING AT THE START! You just have to believe that you can learn everything as needed to progress to the next step.
- “Ok, great,” you say. “Now how can I actually put this into practice?”
  - If you’ve gotten this far, I know you’re an ambitious and energetic person and want the best way to actually “do it” (instead of just believing what I said earlier about hard work being 95%+ of all success). Fine, I’ll give you a method that works for me to help optimize my time.
  - First, go read my Routine article and set a sustainable routine. There’s no way to be consistent toward any goal if you’re constantly having to decide what to do with yourself at any given moment in every aspect of your life.
  - Next, the best way I’ve found to only think about the next logical step is to carry around a small notebook (about 5.5” x 3.5”) with slightly more than 31 pages that will serve as both your daily to-do list and your sole source of truth with how to spend the time on a given day.
    - Why slightly more than 31 pages?
      - Because each notebook will be used for one month. It also should be small enough that you can keep it in a pocket. I like these ones from Amazon.
    - How will I actually use the notebook?
      - That’s up to you, but generally I like using two sides for every day (so for an open book format, this would be with the backside of one page on the left and the frontside of one page on the right).
      - On the left, at the top, write the date. Then for each major component of work that you plan to do that day, write an underlined header.
        
        For example, it could be: “School”, “Real Estate”, “My Company”, etc.
      - Then this is the most important part: Under each header, you will write yourself tasks to get done that day.
        
        When starting out, be very conservative with what you think you can do that day. We often overestimate what we can get done in a day, leading to psychological anguish when we still see to-do items left.
        
        Also, really try to focus only on the most critical items that you need to do. Even if you think you’ll have enough time to get both the most critical items done with plenty of time left, don’t put more on your to-do list than just the critical items. Why? Because perhaps that critical item actually will take longer than expected, and you’ll rush through it because you feel like you have other stuff that you need to do. Trust yourself that even if you do get all the work done with more time left in the day, you can make a logical task for yourself in the moment.
        
        What is the critical item that you should write down? You could consider this the next logical step, which often is just one thing that needs to get done.
      - I highly suggest writing all the tasks the night before the date you are planning for.
        
        I think it’s more sustainable than trying to do it in the morning on the day you’re writing it for, since you’re already getting ready to do a bunch of other stuff. You have more time to think about what the critical items are, rather than both thinking about them and then immediately going and doing them.
        
        If you believe what I wrote above, it is essentially impossible to know what the next logical step to be done on a given day will be more than about a day before (so essentially, you only know today and tomorrow). And I would rather do it late enough so that the results of the prior day are evident while still early enough that I am objective about the next day. The only time that really makes sense, then, is the night before. I.e., for Sep. 30th, I would write the tasks down on Sep. 29th at 8:30 pm.
      - Then, carry it around with you all day and refer back to it when you need the next task, crossing completed tasks off as you complete them.
        
        For people who need frequent instant gratification (such as is the case for many reading this), the psychological satisfaction of crossing a task off is so sweet. Sometimes, just the thought of being able to cross a task off the list is better than actually getting the task done, or provides the motivation to get a hard task done.
  - How do you pick what tasks need to get done the next day?
    - This is a good question, and perhaps out of the 1-5% that makes up the importance of the process of doing hard things, it comprises 80-90% of that amount. In almost every other way, your process can be unoptimized and still achieve results with hard work, but if you give yourself unimportant or downright useless tasks, that will hinder your growth the most. I still think hard work will push you through, no matter what, but it will take a lot more work and time.
      - Since you are a smart person, probably your problem won’t be choosing a general “category” of tasks to do on a given day (e.g., if you are working on a master’s degree doing research, likely you will pick tasks that have to do with that, rather than, say, picking flowers [unless you’re a botanist]). Hopefully, you will have enough common sense not to do that.
      - Your problem is more likely that you will pick tasks that either shouldn’t get done now, shouldn’t get done ever, or shouldn’t get done by you. I’ll walk through each of these things below.
    - Things you SHOULDN’T DO #1: Tasks that shouldn’t get done now.
      - Probably the most pernicious of the three, this problem arises when your project(s) have a wide range of tasks to complete with varying timelines (which is likely the case for most projects).
        
        For example, if you are completing a capstone project for your college degree, you might have several different things you have to work on, like data collection, a presentation due in 2 weeks, an application for a competition, etc.
        
        Depending on whether you like procrastinating or not, most people’s initial inclination would be either to do all the work right before each deadline or all the work as soon as possible (focusing on what seems like the most important task at the time), respectively.
        
        While most people understand the problem with procrastinating, the problem with doing everything all up front is a bit more subtle. To use the above example, let’s say the presentation requires the data you collect as a major component. Even though arguably the presentation is more important as it determines your final grade, the “meat” of the presentation is fully dependent on the data you collect. Most of the time, people in this situation would try to concurrently make the presentation AND do the data collection. After all, they’re both important, so why not do both at the same time?
        
        The problem is that if you make the presentation before you collect the data, you will probably just make “skeleton slides” where you will add in the graphs and charts later. But how do you know how many slides are needed or what they will look like before you collect the data? You might have an idea, but it’s only really clear after you actually do the work. So, you end up having to almost entirely redo the presentation anyway, since you’re skeleton slides were probably way off. You had just wasted your time beforehand making the outline of the presentation when you could’ve spent it getting more data, and then spent the last few days focused solely on the entire presentation when you had everything prepared.
      - Hopefully, you see from the example above that the completion of other tasks plays a major role in the best use of your effort on a given day. Tasks cannot just be thought of as being done in isolation; you can’t just “complete the presentation” and then “collect the data” as two separate things (in most cases). Yet, too often we either consciously or unconsciously think that exact way, doing work that could be better left for another day, when it will be much easier to do.
      - So, when considering what tasks to do, I would highly consider first thinking about whether it will be easier later on when you completed other tasks. You will become 100x more efficient when you put things in their natural order of completion.
    - Things you SHOULDN’T DO #2: Tasks that shouldn’t get done ever.
      - This one is somewhat similar to #1, but with the major difference that, at least with #1, you are still being somewhat productive by working hard on tasks that matter (remember that 95% of all success comes from hard work, even if your process is misguided). However, if you fall into the #2 trap, then you are essentially wasting your time, effort, and productivity without any real benefits.
      - This problem mainly arises when we do things that seem necessary, but really aren’t necessary at all. This might be because we have a lack of information, someone else said that this is the way to do it, or we are willfully ignoring the actual tasks that are necessary. The latter reason can come about because the tasks that are actually necessary are often more difficult, more uncomfortable, and take longer than the tasks that only seem necessary.
        
        I’ll give an example of something I know quite well: Building a technological product from scratch (specifically for a startup).
        
        When running a startup, you have limited time and resources, and you also have to “chart your own path.” In most cases, there is no perfect solution to any problem that arises, and you just have to try your best to keep progressing despite the challenges.
        
        Often, what trips startup founders up is not that they don’t have the energy or passion to do the work; it’s more that they don’t know how to direct that energy into useful tasks that will actually help them progress.
        
        To get to the point, many founders fall into the #2 trap when building their Minimum Viable Product, or MVP (search it up if you haven’t heard of it). They spend weeks or months trying to make everything perfect, building a beautiful website and a professional demo video to showcase their awesome product.
        
        And you know what happens when they showcase it to customers? The customers hate it. They likely don’t hate the founders or the fact that they’re trying to solve the problem, but rather the way that the product was built.
        
        So the founders just spent all that time and effort making a perfect product that they will have to go back and completely change anyway. What happens to that website and video that showcases the product? The website might be able to be changed, but the video is scrapped (after spending 2 weeks worth of effort and $4000 to film it).
        
        They could’ve avoided all of this by just trying to do the only really necessary thing, which was to build a truly MINIMUM viable product, instead of all the extra things that seemed necessary at the time (but look so pointless in hindsight).
      - This is just one example, but I hope it illustrates how much time and effort you can waste by pursuing things that aren’t necessary.
      - And what’s the solution? Consider every task you give yourself and really take a second to think whether it’s truly important or not. If it doesn’t need to get done today or tomorrow, and you have very little information on its importance, then just wait a bit. Perhaps it falls into #1 (things that need to get done later), and you will do it on some other day. But if it indeed falls into #2, you might save yourself hours, days, weeks, or months by taking more time to reflect on it. Either way, it’s not something you need to worry about at the moment.
      - An important caveat: there’s a difference between something that’s not necessary and something you do for fun/just to learn about it. You can make the distinction yourself.
    - Things you SHOULDN’T DO #3: Tasks that shouldn’t get done by you.
      - If you’re reading this article, then you’re probably an ambitious person who likes to do things yourself. You believe that no problem can’t be solved with a little ingenuity and a little bit of effort (by you). And since you have so much of both, then you should take it upon yourself to solve every problem!
      - While this is not a bad thing in and of itself (on the contrary, you really can’t achieve anything unless you have the mindset that any problem can be eventually solved), it becomes an issue when you do something that is better done by someone else.
        
        Since I love examples, here’s a situation where you are working in a team to get a presentation for a project done. You have 2 weeks left to get it finished, and at the end you will present it.
        
        You are the project lead, and you assign the various tasks. Over the next week, almost everyone will get their parts done. However, there is one person who was unexpectedly unavailable that week and can only start working on their part in the final week before the due date.
        
        Their part is to make an important diagram depicting the work your team did, and they were assigned it because they have excellent graphic design work, and they usually get their work done on time. You, on the other hand, have very little graphic design experience or expertise, but are an excellent leader and presenter.
        
        Now, almost the entire presentation is finished except for this one pesky little diagram. The presentation is absolutely gorgeous, you want to send it to others for feedback, BUT there is a seemingly huge gap where the diagram is supposed to go. How can you send it to others when it’s unfinished?
        
        So, what do most people do in this situation? Do they just let the diagram go for the moment, play to their strengths, and work on the speaking portion, or even help others improve their parts? No! You spend all weekend making a subpar diagram just so that the presentation looks “done.” Since you have very little graphic design experience, you spend a lot of time just going through the basics to make a passing attempt at the diagram, wasting your entire weekend on this.
        
        And then what ends up happening? Your other teammate comes back on Monday and then makes a 10x better diagram in exactly 2 hours. After all, they have a ton of experience, and you have very little, but you spent 2 days of effort trying to do it because you felt like not having a diagram was an immediate problem that needed to be solved ASAP.
        
        What if you had spent that time actually working on the speaking portion? Or, you know, enjoying your weekend? Both of those would have been vastly preferable to not having the patience to just wait for someone to do it both faster and better than you.
      - Most hard things can’t be done entirely alone. They require multiple people, whether it is in the form of teammates (as in the example above), mentors, coworkers, bosses, employees, or even just support from your family. YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING, and often, you will do a subpar job at everything if you think like this
      - Never set yourself a task that could and should be done by someone else.
  - How do you select what task to do in a given moment?
    - First, recognize that multitasking is almost always a bad idea. Context switching kills productivity, and you often spend twice as long getting each thing done as if you had just done them concurrently. Thus, you should only ever pick one thing to do in a given moment.
    - Then, how do you actually pick what that one task is? Simple! Just whatever your gut is telling you.
      - If you had made the small daily checklist that I recommended above, then you would have already somewhat thought through each task to determine its relative importance (otherwise, how else would you know that it was important enough to go on the list in the first place?).
      - So, I bet you that you probably already intuitively know which task should get done first, second, third, etc., based on relative importance, just by doing a quick scan of your checklist. Yet often, like most people, you try to follow some rule for how to pick each task (like trying to do the “hardest” thing first or the thing that will take the longest first). You waste 10 minutes each time you have to pick your next task because you actually try to estimate the effort and time it takes to do each task and compare it to the other tasks. Which is pointless because you really have no idea how long something is going to take before you actually start doing it.
      - Stop wasting your time. Just trust your gut and pick whatever task you KNOW should be picked at the moment. It may or may not be the hardest, it may or may not be the longest; that stuff is all arbitrary, just pick what needs to get done right now.
    - If in doubt, just pick randomly! If you had made the checklist correctly, then you really only should have written enough tasks that could all get done in a single day anyway. So, whether you do one task before another, or vice versa, doesn’t matter because they should both get done by the end of the day.
      - If you complain, “Yeah, but one of the tasks is dependent on the other, I can’t just pick randomly!” Fine, that’s even easier: Just do the tasks that others depend on first.
- The key to long-term success is to always be easy on yourself, ESPECIALLY when you get started.
  - You’re human, you’re going to get things wrong.
    - Actually, if you aren’t getting things wrong, I would be worried that you weren’t challenging yourself enough!
  - Remember that THE VAST MAJORITY OF YOUR SUCCESS is dependent on hard work, NOT on the process.
    - Even if you did something that was totally opposite of what I suggested—doing everything spontaneously, etc.—then you’ll probably still be successful. It just might take a little longer or might be a little harder. But you’ll still get there with enough time and effort.
- Finally, remember that there is no such thing as a “hard, complicated thing.” There are definitely hard things that seem complicated from beginning to end, but are often quite simple from a day-to-day perspective. Think only about today and tomorrow, trust your gut, and everything will work out in the end!