The easy wins
Do you go for the sure shot — or not? (Image by JUNO KWON)
As much as I love to advocate for finding ease and eliminating the layers of difficulty and obligation that creep up on us, I am very good at making things harder for myself.
Maybe that’s why I’m so committed to this work. I know all too well what it’s like to believe that certain habits are necessary when that is not necessarily true — and I know the magic of shedding those habits when it is revealed that they are optional.
One thing I could let go of is my constant quest for variety when it comes to what I create. I don’t have to keep seeking clever angles and new formats. Instead, I can find a formula and repeat it, over and over.
And I don’t need to come up with new topics, either. And neither do you. We can just go with the easy wins: The things we’re already good at talking about, that we enjoy talking about, that we could talk about forever.
Is this boring? Potentially. But for whom? If it’s boring for you as a writer or or artist, that’s one thing. But if you’re worried that it is boring for your audience (or potential audience), I just wonder: Would you rather have an audience who is interested in what is easy for you to talk about or one who is interested in stuff you have to put effort into talking about?
I know which one I’d choose. Putting effort into everything is the equivalent of feigning interest in whatever your date is into. Go ahead and do it — if you want to accidentally be successful and face a lifetime of doing that. No thank you. I’d rather be myself — the best version of myself, hopefully, but a version of myself that I don’t have to work hard to sustain.
Nobody needs to write a blog post every day — only a fool would do that. But if you would like to share your ideas more often than you are currently doing, the bar does not need to be high. If you do it in the way that suits you, it will be a lot easier than you think.
Last fall, I was at a crossroads with my business. I had a couple of different ideas that I wanted to pursue. I settled on one and spent a few hours building out a website only to realize that, since this was an area in which I had relatively little track record, I was going to have to write a bunch of articles for the website in order to demonstrate authority and expertise in the space.
After a couple of months went by and I did not do this, I decided to focus elsewhere. Why not build on what was already working: the areas in which I was already demonstrating authority and expertise? I pivoted, and now I don’t have to write all of those articles. That was easy!
I used to think that being well-rounded was the way to go. Now, I’d rather be spiky. There’s so much more to gain from the easy wins that come from leveraging skills I’m already good at than in dutifully shoring up weaker or less familiar areas that I don’t enjoy exploring anyway.
True, we grow from experiencing discomfort and difficulty. But there’s plenty of that still to be found in the areas we’re good at. And playing on the leading edge of our ability doesn’t have to be the front-facing work that we share with the world today. It can be something we do for our own growth, behind the scenes. Training, not performance.
So I invite you to focus on sharing what’s easy for you to do, create, or talk about. It still might not be easy to share it, and that’s the whole point. If the sharing is the only hard part, you’re on the right track.
