The Imperfectionist: What if this were easy?
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Highlights
- If you can’t cope with at least a little difficulty, you risk living life on too small a scale, shirking challenges you could have handled, or throwing in the towel as soon as some new endeavour starts to feel slightly uncomfortable.
- Because the truth is that meaningful work often just does feel difficult (and "writer’s block", specifically, is just another label for the normal experience of writing). Being a finite human just does require making tough, unpleasant choices about time. Stepping off the busyness treadmill just does tend to make people feel anxious and antsy at first, rather than happy and relaxed. And so on.
- The irony of what’s going on here is that this prospect β that something meaningful might prove easier than you imagined β can itself be a source of discomfort. Many of us were apparently raised to believe not just that important things can feel difficult (they can!) but that they must feel difficult; that the measure of an accomplishment is how much effort it took. And, moreover, that effort is a measure of self-worth β that if an achievement comes easily to you, you must somehow be cheating, or that you just got lucky.