Difficult on purpose

When you don’t have to, sometimes it makes you want to. (Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20)

As a culture, we seek to create gentle environments for young children.

We give them thoughtfully designed toys and games and plenty of encouragement. We let them play with paints and make a mess. We tolerate it while they bang around on the piano. We offer them opportunities to help us with tiny tasks around the house, the garden, and in the kitchen.

It’s okay if it takes years for them to learn — we have years.

At some point, however, a child may seek more. She realizes that her artwork doesn’t look the way she had in mind. Her attempts at playing the piano aren’t music. She has goals she wants to reach, on her own terms.

This person is now ready for a challenge. Grounded in a sense of safety and well-being, she can handle a bit of discomfort. She can handle frustration. She can thus accelerate her progress by pushing into the hard parts.

She may still have years, but she’s got a new sense of urgency. Exploration has now been replaced by efficiency. Instead of taking years to hopefully someday bump into insights and best practices, the learner travels a path, perhaps designed by an experienced guide, that is designed to yield powerful results. She is choosing to participate in an endeavor that’s difficult on purpose in order to achieve what she would not have been able to otherwise.

The more confident and bold the learner is, the more she will lean away from the checklists, the multiple-choice questions and the fill-in-the-blanks. These are useful to give less confident learners that predictable sense of forward progress, but they do not always require depth of thought.

Instead, our learner faces the equivalent of the dreaded essay questions — the open-ended prompts that force her to examine her thinking and construct her own responses from the ground up. It’s uncomfortable, intense work that does not offer a feeling of safety and certainty.

However, by letting go of those superficial checkmarks and engaging in deep thinking, she’s making a leap forward.

She’s not just mindlessly tapping icons on Duolingo — she’s having a conversation with a native speaker in the target language using the handful of words she knows.

She’s not in the classroom dutifully learning the traffic rules — she’s behind the wheel out in the high school parking lot, demonstrating her understanding.

Enough about her. What about you? You’re here. Self-development is important enough to you that you’re more than halfway through my dumb article about it. That’s a pattern that has echoed through your life. You’ve stayed in, shown up, challenged yourself. And that is how your skills — and you — will transform. That’s how you’ll move past the familiar places you’ve been in the unknown.

You’re not waiting for the teacher to call on you. You’re picking yourself.

You’re not seeking the right answer — you’re exploring a range of possibilities without being attached to that one ideal, special solution.

You’re uncomfortable, which means you’re growing and learning. You may not see all of the ways yet because you’re still in it. You don’t have to understand it for it to be happening.

It’s normal to want to take a break. It’s normal to feel like it’s too hard and you can’t. But the easy way is the slow way. Haven’t you already tried that? I know I have. What happens when you see the discomfort not as a pain to avoid, but signal that you’re learning?

Go ahead and take a break — but come back and get back into the game when you’re ready. It’s not easy, but you wouldn’t want it to be.