I’ve long wanted to start a blog, but never prioritized it until now. I don’t have a succinct reason for wanting to blog. I’ve enjoyed writing for as long as I can remember, and I always thought that a blog would be a good creative outlet for me. In my academic and professional lives, I’ve found that my perspective can be helpful for others, and I’ve consistently received positive feedback on the writing I’ve done over the years. While there are more reasons I’m getting into this thing, I think those are perfectly adequate for now.
One of the reasons I never really got a blog off the ground was that I haven’t always known what I would blog about. I don’t really care to get publicity or notoriety for my thoughts and perspective on things. And while I’m passionate about many things, it’s not always easy to find a central theme that aligns with my diverse passions.
The hard-easy phenomenon, as I have been referring to it, is an idea that I first learned about when I was being taught how to mentor youth at the first program I worked at after getting my undergraduate degree. The idea is relatively simple: people are faced with choices all of the time. The options they have can be put into two buckets: hard and easy. If people choose to do the more difficult things (hard) first, then things get easier later on. If they choose to do the easy things first, then things get more difficult.
The example that was taught to me when I was introduced to this idea revolved around basketball. If the players hustle after the opposing team scores, get downcourt quickly, and get the ball into play quickly, the defenders don’t have as much time to set up, and the players have more options as a result. If the players take their time and let the defenders get into position, the options they have are more limited.
To take it step further, a player that struggles with an aspect of their game (let’s choose ball handling as an example), he or she has few options. The player can do nothing to improve their ball handling skills (easy), which will not improve their ball handling in play. This could open them up to being replaced, or at the very least, will limit their utility on the court. The player could also spend time training and developing their handles (hard), which will lead to more opportunities and abilities when playing in the future (easy).
Once I learned about this concept, I started seeing it everywhere. Someone that wants to have money to go on vacation can choose to spend time budgeting, and cut expenses in unnecessary areas so they can save for vacation (hard-easy), or they can get a credit card and charge everything on their vacation, forcing them to make payments and pay interest down the road (easy-hard). Someone that wants to make a career change can choose to develop new skills, reformulate their resume, spend time ironing out what they want in a new career, and apply to jobs and companies and match their career goals and values to help set them up for success on the job hunt (hard-easy), or they can avoid doing any of those things and hope to get promoted or noticed by someone without putting in any additional effort (easy-hard).
Obviously, I’m biased towards doing the hard things first, and that’s what I’ll be blogging about.
This blog is dedicated to the hard-easy phenomenon. I’m planning to tell anecdotal stories about how it has shown up in my life, do deep dives into places I see it showing up for others, and tell stories about others’ experiences with it.
I’m planning to do a weekly blog for now. I hope you enjoy it! Who knows where this thing could go?
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