DO HARD THINGS
I lead a small group of college age Sophomores. Many have already changed their majors more than once. The reason is always the same: whatever they were doing before proved too difficult. “It was just too hard,” they tell me.
Let’s take a trip back in time to the summer of 1984. Mary Lou Retton had just won gold. Every little girl I knew wanted to be a gymnast.
Including me.
I could do a cartwheel and a head stand and a back walkover.
But the splits eluded me.
And to me—that was the definitive skill—the thing that divided true gymnasts from mere wanna be’s.
Doing a split was hard.
And so I employed the same technique I still use today when I don’t know how to do something: I ask someone who does.
In this case, I called on my friend Claire Wellborn. We were at a birthday party, and we were jumping on the trampoline, playing games like popcorn and piggy in the middle. Claire must have done a split at some point, and I, incredulous, said, “Teach me how to do that.”
“It’s easy,” she said. “Stretch a little bit everyday, and eventually you’ll get there.”
Stretch a little bit everyday.
That advice has followed me my whole life.
Stretch your mind.
Stretch your relationships.
Stretch your money.
It’s funny how easy it is to forget such a silly little thing. Adult goals are big, impossible. We want to start businesses. Influence millions. Change the world. The method—stretch yourself a little bit everyday—seems so obvious as I sit here now typing these words.
Like my college Sophomores, when something feels hard I want to change activities or quit altogether. Keep going? That’s absurd!
Because it hurts. Starting something new is hard. Staying with something that feels tedious and boring is hard. Finishing well is hard.
Not many people know that a year before the 1984 Olympics, Mary Lou Retton broke her wrist and missed the world championships, and then a mere six weeks before the official start of ‘84 games, Retton suffered a debilitating knee injury that required surgery.
It’s all hard.
Stretching is more about discipline than anything else. Difficult choices require us to access our values. I once heard someone say things feel hard when you’re learning something new. Doing something over and over again doesn’t just make it easier; it actually rewires the brain. As you focus, different areas of your brain “light up” as blood flow increases and new connections form. What feels hard is actually just your brain making those new connections. As we learn something new, cells that send and receive information about the task become more and more efficient. It takes less effort for them to signal the next cell about what’s going on. In Biology, we say, “neurons that fire together wire together.”
And that’s how Mary Lou Retton revolutionized American women’s gymnastics for years to come.
Your Core Values
When I was nine, I didn’t know what values were, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t creating them.
And the same is true for you.
Consider the first goal you remember achieving. How did you do it? What value did you access that made it possible?
Incremental gains are important.
“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”
Besides making the task at hand feel easier, Incremental gains have the ability to motivate us. Every time we try something new, we remember that we already did something hard—and we didn’t die. Because we did it once, we can do it again.
I stretched everyday, and then I practiced going down into a split. Just like Claire promised, I achieved a pretty rad split in about a month’s time.
Whenever I do a split now—and I still do one everyday—I’m reminded that it all started with that first tiny stretch on a trampoline in 1984.
That hurt.
A lot.
Until one day, it didn’t.
The cool thing about learning how to do a split was that by employing one value—discipline—I gained another—flexibility.
For additional resources, read James Cleer’s book, Atomic Habits. His website also includes a comprehensive list of personal values. You can access it here.
What are the values that have helped you achieve your goals?
What keeps you from quitting when things feel hard?
What have you always wanted to do that you’ve been too afraid to start?