I admit it, as a general theme, life can be hard. There’s a lot to #adulting. So much to remember and stay on top of.
So many things that aren’t necessarily fulfilling that we must just do. Grocery shopping, paying bills, choosing the right insurance, etc, etc. All these little things add up over time. We don’t want to be doing them, but we also don’t want the repercussions of not doing them either.
With all the little hassles of daily living following us around everyday, it’s easy to look around and say life is hard. And any marketer that’s worth their salt knows that the thing most people want is ease. They want the easy way.
In fact, the common guidance for writing a headline for a sales page is to write it in this format: “Get the [outcome they want], for [type of person they are], without the [thing they don’t want/struggle].”
Fill in the blanks and boom! Headline complete. Once you know you can’t unsee it. It’s everywhere.
If the baseline is hard and time-consuming, anything we have a choice about needs to feel and to be easy. Complicated gathers dust. Struggle stays on the shelf.
But what does that do to us as people? When everything is sold to us as ‘easy’ and everything must be ‘easy’ in order to sell… what are we actually becoming?
When we, as humans, face obstacles that challenge us and we do the work to overcome the challenge, we get a hit of dopamine. We did it! We figured it out! We solved the puzzle!
We’re wired to overcome obstacles. We’re primed to face hard things and triumph. It’s how we grow. Humans need a little friction.
I believe that it’s possible to build a business in a way that flows and is filled with ease. That is– without struggling. But it will challenge us. It will cause us to face things that scare us and cause us to grow.
It’s a misconception to conflate ease with easy.
To me, ease is flow without overwhelming the system in such a way that progress stops. The expectation that everything is easy is that there is no challenge or obstruction along the way.
To move forward with ease may mean that you may run into a challenge or stumbling block and progress might slow but it doesn’t stop. You’ve carefully considered your plans and have built margin within your business. You have the space and energy to devote the resources necessary to the challenge at hand. Sure, you may slow down, but at no point are you overwhelmed to the point of stopping, crying, and spinning in a loop of doubt or despair.
To expect things to be easy is to stop the moment things get hard. It’s a short circuit to the system. All flow comes to a halt. Momentum stops. There’s overwhelm that derails the project all together.
I believe it all comes down to momentum.
Ease is riding the wave of momentum and applying a little more effort up the hills as you pedal forward in pursuit of your goal. Expecting easy is not peddling at all and then having to get off and push it up the hill… which you probably weren’t expecting or prepared to do.
I don’t believe that easy is helpful to us in the long run. And expecting things to be easy… to move forward without any effort on our part is unrealistic and primes us for failure. But ease? Yeah, that’s my jam. That’s where we build muscles that help us to climb ever higher hills… not without effort but without the struggle that comes from trying to peddle up a hill without the wind at our back.
