Not everyone loves to solve puzzles; I do.

When I used to get the newspaper, I would do the Sudoku number puzzle each weekday. The publishers started you off with an easy one on Monday and the difficulty increased each day with Friday’s puzzle being hard.

At first, the Friday puzzles were marathons. I would wrack my brain attempting to solve them but the answers wouldn’t come. I would have to set it down and come back to it later with fresh eyes to make more progress. It would sometimes take me into Sunday to solve it.

Eventually, Friday’s puzzles weren’t as hard. At first I thought the puzzle makers had taken mercy on me and made the hard ones less hard, but the truth is hard got much easier.

Here’s my observation: Anything you do that’s easy for you is a result of conditioned behavior; anything that’s hard, isn’t.

If it’s easy for you to speak in front of a group, you’ve developed a pattern that makes it easy. If it’s hard for you to lose weight, you’ve developed a pattern that makes gaining weight easy.

The American “Quick Fix” Philosophy that we’ve spread around the whole world gets in the way of us seeing this plain truth: Hard becomes easier with practice.

It seems no one wants to practice anymore. I see this at my seminars on a regular basis. People want you to wave a magic wand and make their problems disappear. They don’t want to hear that they must practice to be successful.

We’ve been conditioned to what I call the “Fairy Dust Model.” It’s as though all we have to do is take some magic potion and we needn’t expend any effort to get what we want. You can’t live on a diet of hook, line and sinker.

The real success of the book “The Secret” is that it tapped into the part of people who are looking for easy. There is lots of valuable information in there but the bottom line is that at some point you have to stop dreaming and take action to get results.

We’ve become addicted to shortcuts that short circuit our success.

The failure of most exercise programs is due to lack of proper practice. The difficulty is we want it all and we want it right now. We buy the expensive gym membership or the exercise gizmo on the infomercial and we go at it with guns-a- blazzin’. Your easy pattern will rebel and make it too hard for you to continue.

You cannot eat a whole cow at once.

Practice what is hard in small steps until it becomes easier. Hard never becomes easy overnight. The ancient wisdom of Lao Tzu comes to mind:

Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.

If you have a hard road ahead of you, take it easy on yourself or you’ll never get there. You’ll start a thousand journeys and not make any real progress until you recognize that hard only becomes easy in steps.

All the best,

John

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