When Are Hard Things Worth Doing?
Slamming Your Head Against The Wall, Or Enlightenment?
A big theme over the past few years for me has been doing hard things. Getting in shape, eating better, spending less time on my phone, and just generally looking at things I’d failed to do in the past, and tackling them head on.
At some point, perhaps after I’d taken the stairs avoiding the elevator the fiftieth time, I figured it sort of seemed like every worthwhile thing was the hard thing. Being brutally honest with people you wanted to impress? Hard.
Saying no to the cookie? Hard. Committing the time to do something every day? Hard. Taking the stairs when theres an escalator right there — every single time? Hard.
I think at some point you kind of end up flipping things on themselves and you go from everything worth doing being hard to thinking “well, basically anything hard is worth doing …” and I think it’s worth asking whether this is the case. Here are some things which I try to do, and why I think they are hard.
I think there are many reasons so many worthwhile things are hard to do. When it comes to health, our bodies don’t necessarily love straining, but they need to be pushed so that they stay in shape. Somewhat similarly, our bodies love salty, sweet, and fatty foods, but they actually don’t need much of this stuff; we are built to load up on what historically might have been rare foods, but the world has changed. I guess you could say the body really optimizes for short-termism, which does make sense.
When it comes to things like learning a skill — for example piano or touch typing — to some extent, the difficulty is down to your brain literally reshaping itself. Efficiency doesn’t come for free though, and to be able to reshape those circuits, effort is required. On a less micro level with these things, we really do need to get a feel for the right way to do things, but also the failure modes.
Setting aside time, which is often just the first step in doing some hard but worthwhile thing is hard, because it gives us less slack — something which we always want. Especially in 2025, most of us have no shortage of things we can use to fill our time, so having spare bits of time feels like a nice thing — more than it might have 20 years ago. Setting aside time often does eventually also just mean making tradeoffs, and this is hard because it often means compromising something else, and having to evaluate things against each other. Discipline is related to this I think, but some of the difficulty there is just in the grind, it’s working out on a schedule, enduring discomfort, waking up early, again often fighting against what our body wants to do in the short term to leave us better off in the long-term.
There’s also awkwardness, social interaction, and putting yourself out there. I think for everyone we identify certain things we struggle with, but what we don’t necessarily appreciate is that the inverse is probably more helpful. I used to be afraid of public speaking; I made a big YouTube channel, and did lots of speaking gigs, and I am no longer afraid, but that doesn’t mean I can go to a dance class or any random social engagement and feel totally at home. There are a small number of things I am quite comfortable with, and I’m probably not comfortable with the rest. These things are hard for the sort of usual reasons: pride, ego, nervousness. Humans are social animals, we don’t want to risk being on the outs with our tribe.
There’s also just learning things for the fun of it. Doing this is obviously valuable as I discussed in a recent post, but it’s also hard!
I think the hardness of this one is basically down to a lot of the usual things: rewiring the brain, setting aside time, sometimes some awkwardness, but there is also a big psychological factor where it’s easy to say “You know what, nope!” to something you don’t explicitly need to do.
Obviously this wasn’t an exhaustive list, but my point is that there are a lot of reasons things are hard, and often it does come down to our physiological short-termism, our risk aversion, our desire to not commit ourselves to things, and just generally not wanting to be overstretched. All of this stuff makes sense.
But, I hope it’s obvious that anything hard is not worth doing; it would be hard to break your own finger, or put your hand in boiling water knowingly, but these are not good things. I think that there are a lot of reasons something good might be hard makes this obvious; it’s not really the hardness that makes it good, but that some energy has to be exerted to get you to a better place. There are destructive or non-productive uses on one’s energy!
But because I am a contrarian, I do think there are some cases where it is worthwhile to do a nonproductive hard thing, thought likely only for a while.
Walking everywhere for a while instead of taking the car or bus can help you appreciate the places you spend time more, as well as just how powerful and powerfully-shaping our transport technologies have been. Doing something by hand where there is a specialized tool is another case of this: you learn to appreciate the tool, and how it might have rendered worthless a lot of specialized knowledge people developed to work in the old system (tools aren’t all good for everyone). Another example that really gets at this is doing calculations by hand, or in your head. You don’t need to — technology to solve this problem for us is omnipresent these days, but something is so clearly lost when people can’t do math themselves. I think this will probably be instructive on how people using “AI” to write might change their writing abilities, but also their ability to reason with language — which is a lot of thinking.
The point here isn’t that you can get tougher by burning your hand sticking it in boiling water (though someone probably does think this), but that you can really learn to appreciate the world, and sometimes even become more capable by removing some of the aids that we’ve filled our world with.
So, to answer the question at the top, I think hard things are worth doing when they lead you to a better place, even if they might seem strange, or countercultural. Sometimes even microdosing the hard stuff might be enough to give you a greater appreciation for the world.
Another example of a hard thing that may not be actually be worth doing: my first programming class, which was in C++. (Programming and C++ are overall every bit worth the struggle, but my first C++ class was horribly taught). The first red flag was the hyperfocus on syntax. We first had an entire quiz dedicated to setpoint and other iomanip methods, before we even learned how to write conditionals or loops. Grading was draconian, arbitrary, slow, and subject to change, and the professor mocked people in front of the entire class and refused to answer their questions.
I've had plenty of other rigorous engineering professors but I respected them because their standards, though harsh, were consistent, and they were courteous. I had no respect for this C++ professor, though, so I dropped her class and later learned C++ and Java with other professors and on my own. Never looked back!