There is No Greater Impediment to Progress than Ease
Denzel Washington shared this sentiment a while back, it's high time we listened
A few years ago, I was honored with the opportunity to give the Last Lecture for USD’s Mortar Board chapter. In case you are interested, you can watch or listen the video on YouTube. In preparation for the talk, my sister shared the title quote with me from a speech by Denzel Washington. It is a powerful sentiment. We can all benefit from adjusting our perspective to value challenge as a means to fuel self-growth. Unlike the benefits of ease, which are only immediate and temporary, a mindset honed to value discomfort fosters meaning in the immediate and meaningful growth over time.
The title of my talk was Exercise, Education and Experience with Failure: My Path Toward Resilience. I chose those three things because they are difficult and they will not always make you feel good in the present moment, but they are experiences that promote self-growth precisely because of this. In particular, I consider exercise to be an incredibly useful a metaphor for life because fitness, like most meaningful endeavors, is an arena where the outcomes of value take hard work. The same ideas apply to education as well, but we’ll stick with exercise for now.
To benefit from exercise, first and foremost, you must engage in the activity. If you want to improve your fitness, you can’t take the easy way out. You can’t improve by simply observing others working out, by reading books about exercise or watching videos, or by simply listening to trainers. Instead, you have to do the work; you have to put in the effort yourself.
And, importantly, you don’t get stronger, faster or increase your stamina without challenging yourself. Ease is a serious impediment to progress. Only doing what comes easy leaves you right where you started. Any good exercise program is structured on incremental growth. A plan that gradually increases in difficulty, continuing to push you further by offering greater and greater challenge as your skills improve. If your goal is growth, it should not be easy. An easy program is a waste of your time.
Progress only comes from working in the learning zone. Set the level of difficulty not so far out of your range of ability that your failure is guaranteed, but at the boundaries of your ability. In doing so, you ensure a mix of success and failure while keeping yourself oriented toward an attainable outcome that pushes you to keep improving. When adopting this strategy, you will not always feel good. Your muscles might hurt and you might experience a pang of self-doubt or be confronted with the reality of your current limitations. This should be exactly what you desire, however.
Adjusting your mindset to value the experience of being challenged and facing difficulty is important. Appreciating the opportunity, not just the obstacle, orients you to seek out more of such experiences because you recognize their value. Getting frustrated is part of the drill, but that frustration can be interpreted as either a sign to give up or a sign that you are where you should be. Work to view it as the latter. Taking pleasure in the discomfort will motivate your continued efforts in promoting growth.
Taking the easy way out by seeking immediate comfort undermines self-improvement. This is not to argue that one should never rest. Just as structured exercise programs include time for recovery, we must make space for time off in other arenas as well. However, the current and endless focus on self-care promotes ease at the expense of well-being. Don’t get caught in this trap of immediate self-gratification. It can cause you to get stuck in an unhelpful focus on the present, providing only a temporary, fleeting and unsatisfying gain.
Finally, it is useful to consider the last important aspect of both exercise and education - that change doesn’t happen overnight. The results, the benefits, the noticeable improvements accrue over time. An orientation toward immediate pleasure undermines one’s ability to stick with a challenging program long enough to develop these benefits. Try appreciating the discomfort of the struggle toward improvement instead. Such a mindset creates a mechanism of reinforcement in the present that supports progress toward more meaningful, long-term growth.
In the throes of exertion and strain, remind yourself that there is no impediment to progress like ease. Work to see every obstacle as an opportunity to learn, to develop, to grow. In doing so, you will cultivate a mindset to help you thrive.