Baltasar Gracian, in his book ‘The Art of Worldly Wisdom’ said, “Attempt easy tasks as if they were difficult, and difficult as if they were easy; in the one case that confidence may not fall asleep, in the other that it may not be dismayed.”
Over the course our lives we’ve figured out a few easy ways to make the difficult easy. The first, most important method is to work past where you’re at. We’ve found that by simply defining the step after the one you’re working on, the current becomes measurably easier. By defining the next step, by working past where you’re at, you give yourself and the task at hand purpose. That purpose is what drives us to accomplish things. It gives us the feeling of working towards something important. Another simple way to make the difficult seem as if it were easy is to break up all of your big tasks into smaller, bite sized tasks. We work in intervals of 20 minutes. Every time we sit down to make content, or edit podcasts, or work on setting up speaking engagements for the future; we work in a multiple of 20 minutes. This makes everything seem incredibly do-able. It changes the mindset from “Man, I’ve got to write this entire blog right now” to something like “Ok, I want to work on my blog post for 20 minutes, then I think I’ll edit a bit, and then I’ll take a twenty minute break to go walk for a bit.” These small methods of changing the way you work go even further as to change the way you think about work. If you want to learn to become a bit more efficient and enjoy your work more, try these two methods to make the difficult easy out and tell us how it helps!