Before I begin this short essay, I must first remind myself that for much of the world life itself is hard. For many, survival offers no option and little choice. Below I speak to those of us who have been fortunate enough to have been given a choice.
There are lots of things that are hard to do. Some are physical things like climbing Everest, competing in a triathlon or hitting a 95 mph fastball. Others are emotionally hard like grieving a lost loved one, correcting a life-long bad habit, or overcoming a deeply-seated bias or fear. The kind I want to talk about here though are those things that we consider mentally hard, like science or mathematics or gaining fluency in a second language.
I remember long ago when I was a struggling physics geek plowing through the concepts of quantum mechanics. My professor said that a deep understanding of quantum mechanics takes many years of study because the underlying concepts require new ways of thinking and a consideration of abstract ideas different from our day-to-day lives. I think significant portions of my brain simply keeled over from the effort, and have not recovered to this day.
There is another other kind of hard work that involves sheer complexity, where the ideas are not necessarily new, but are difficult because they may contain a large number of interrelated processes. Managing a large engineering project or writing part of an operating system is hard because of this complexity.
Assuming we have a choice, why take on the challenge of doing hard things? The mundane, repetitive and easy events have long blurred into a mottled sea of gray; and so I believe that when we glance back at our lives, we will remember vividly the times we took a chance — the effort, the stress, the grind — and the euphoria when we reached the peak, solved the problem or crossed the finish line. And in those moments we are forever changed.
whoisfenton 