Easy seems like an obvious "good thing", but over the years it's become a pause for me. Truly great things rarely (if ever) come easily, so when something feels easy, I've trained myself to start looking for unintended consequences.
Pain, difficulty, perseverance, friction, failure– these are words associated with long term success and improvement, and they all represent various forms of "hard". It's all just hard.
Alex Hormozi has one of my favorite quotes on the topic:
"Life is hard. Believing it should be easy makes it harder. The idea that something should come easily is a misconception that often leads to disappointment. When things seem simple, it's often a sign that you are missing crucial information or that you have not yet encountered the real challenges."
- Alex Hormozi
I think he captures it perfectly that our expectation has such a heavy anchor to our outcome. When we continuously imagine that just around the corner things get easier, we're met with endless disappointment. At some point, disappointment leads to discouragement, depression, self-doubt, and the kind of failure you use as a weight not a step.
Perspective
A long time ago I started saying to myself "I do difficult shit, and I'm not a baby". It's stupid. It's corny, not even my best work but it's stuck with me. What it does for me internally is it sets perspective: everything is hard, and I signed up for that. I don't get to complain, be annoyed, be frustrated– I could choose to stop at any time. So either I can decide that I enjoy difficult things and I can't wait to solve this impossible problem to hit the next impossible problem, or I can quit.
I'm not quitting, so I can choose to enjoy difficulty and even look forward to it, or I can be miserable, constantly disappointed, discouraged... you get it.
I choose to embrace difficulty, and it's made doing difficult things much more enjoyable. I love it.
To be clear I'm fairly trash in plenty of ways too so this isn't a noble post about my iron will. I'm stronger than a bull in the gym but still have love handles because I eat/drink like an asshole too often... still mastering the will over my diet. I'll get there.
Why is easy a warning sign?
I always think of get rich quick schemes and work out programs promising abs and a different you in some unreasonable amount of time with minimal sacrifice and maximum gain. All the warning signs of "something is off". I think we all know internally that something is off, but there's a glimmer of hope that maybe this time... it's real. The truth is that it may be real this time, but I've never encountered an example that doesn't have hidden forfeit. There is forfeit somewhere, maybe you haven't found it yet, but it's there.
It's the fundamental structure of all reality. Cause and effect. Sewing and reaping. Equal and opposite reaction. There's fundamentally something tied to the amount of effort that is put forth and the value that it returns. It's not always as obvious as a pill once a day vs the gym 5 days a week, but it is hidden somewhere.
What does this have to do with my business?
Most of what I write refers back to tech in some way, and this is no exception. I see this in the form of cheap and easy to implement software or general technology that will change [this thing] and solve [these problems] and it only takes 20 minutes to turn it all on!
Maybe some of that is true, but what did not happen in 20 minutes is adoption of that thing into your team, customers, and general business. What did not happen in that 20 minutes was SOP creation, training, communication, real adoption, dealing with customer support, customer fall out.. there's a lot, you get the point.
The promise of quick implementation / quick wins almost guarantees failure. The promise of "not having to do anything!" actually guarantees that the team will... not do anything... which is literally the opposite of what we want. It turns out there's an amount of difficulty, hard work, focus, inconvenience, friction, and general TIME required to make anything truly successful.
On that note, it's definitely not just technology in your business, it's everything.
It's unintentional, but our expectation of "easy" predetermines our failure
What's easy to do is easy to not do
- Jim Rohn
I love this quote and I think it summarizes all of the above perfectly.
AI is easy...
For the same reasons I raise an eyebrow at get rich quick schemes and abs in 2 weeks, I raise an eyebrow at AI. I'm not claiming to fully understand the hidden forfeits for every nuance of AI usage, but I've found some (check out my blog on AI usage here), and I believe we're going to keep finding more.
An easily identifiable forfeit is the general failure of AI adoption and ROI studies, with MIT findings being concerning, at best:
- 95% of enterprise AI initiatives deliver zero measurable return.
- 5% of custom/embedded tools reach production with impact.
- 80%+ of organizations have explored or piloted general LLMs; ~40% report deployment.
The study cites things like cultural change being completely avoided, basic non-invasive integrations to "sit on top of" the things they already do instead of being deeply integrated, individual contributors being responsible for the majority of implementation and decision making vs a real strategy.
There's a lot more but it all screams the same thing to me– it looked easy so they said yes to easy, had easy expectations, did the easy work, none of that was good enough because it's not easy at all to truly change a business, and it failed.
This isn't surprising, or even new
I have a half written blog on the topic of "human first technology" (coming soon!) which is essentially all about the problems we're seeing here.
Technology adoption is a cultural change– it's people focused. Technology's purpose is to improve the human experience.
As soon as the technology (or any initiative) is selected and implemented because it's easy, because everyone else is doing it, because it's "cool" instead of solving a real problem and having an actual implementation plan/strategy that HURTS because it genuinely takes EFFORT and WORK, it's wrong. It will fail. We already knew that, we're just seeing it again in a new flavor– AI.
A culture that loves the challenge
My biggest take away is building a culture that enjoys the challenge. A culture that expects it, rather than builds itself hoping and praying they will never see it. A culture that solves difficult, impossible problems, just so they can get to the next difficult and impossible problem. It will happen, so why do we set weird expectations that it will stop being difficult? What if we decided that what success and happiness looks like for us and our teams is never running out of problems because we love solving them?
Happiness is the gap between expectation and reality
- Shawn Achor
If happiness is the gap between expectation and reality, and we continuously promise our team that "things will get better/easier after xx thing", are we really surprised when we have unhappy and stressed employees? At what point have you seen your business or anything you've done that was worth while be "easy"? We have literally stacked the deck against ourselves.
What if we decide easy is a warning sign, and we know that to be truly successful in anything we do in our business it will take some level of pain, and we plan for that pain instead of avoiding it?
Maybe today we decide we don't want easy, and we enjoy the difficult.
Is it you?
If I've described you and/or your business in any way, reach out. Getting ahead of easy is what I do every day, and I'm an expert at it. What kind of "easy" things are you doing?
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