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How Do You Get to Easy Street?
by Kalinda Rose Stevenson
Published on this site: April 20th, 2006 - See
more articles from this month
"Hard work has made it easy. That is my secret. That
is why I win." - Nadia Comaneci
I got an email from a friend this week. She has started work
on a new business venture but has gotten distracted by family
matters. One phrase in her email stood out. "This is
not as easy as I had planned."
Her words got me thinking about the expectation that doing
something new should be "easy."
One of the biggest of the big lies of our times is that success
should be easy. I did a search on Google on the word "easy."
Google brought back 2,490,000,000 websites. Look at that number.
Almost two and a half billion web pages using the word "easy."
The expectation that success should be "easy" has
been drilled into us by too many get rich quick schemes, too
many promises of instant success, and too many sales claims
that some product will make things easy for you. Easy, easy,
easy.
This is especially evident on the internet. We hear too many
stories about 24 hour promotions leading to a million dollars
in sales, without knowing how many years lay behind that instant
success.
Speaking for myself, I'd like to find success on the road
named Easy Street. Unfortunately, taking a stroll down Easy
Street does not usually lead to success. Easy Street is usually
a dead end road, leading nowhere.
If success is so easy, why do so few people succeed? The truth
is that success is rarely easy. Most successful people attribute
their success to hard work. And hard work is not easy.
"If you like things easy, you'll have difficulties; if
you like problems, you'll succeed." - Laotian Proverb
I used to teach Biblical Hebrew to theological students. Hebrew
is not an easy language for English-speaking adults to learn.
The alphabet consists only of consonants. Vowels are noted
with a system of lines and dots. And words are written from
right to left. One of my students approached me one day after
class early in the semester, and with great frustration asked,
"How can I ever learn this stuff?"
I knew that Mike was a professional pianist and singer and
had left a successful career as an opera singer to start theological
seminary. I asked him if he could read music. He seemed a
bit annoyed that I would even ask such a question, and said, "Of course." Then I asked if he knew how to
read music the first time he looked at a sheet of music. He
looked startled and then I saw a flicker of awareness in his
eyes. He got my point. I didn't have to say anything else.
Reading music had become so easy for Mike that he no longer
had to think about it. Learning to read Hebrew is no harder
than learning to read music. It is also not easy. Learning
any new skill involves hard work and it also takes time to
learn. Stephen Covey traces the stages of development from
unconsciously incompetent, to consciously incompetent, to
consciously competent, to unconsciously competent.
Mike had already reached the point of being unconsciously
competent when he read music. This is another way of saying
thathe had reached mastery. In contrast, after two or three
weeks of studying Hebrew, he was consciously incompetent in
Hebrew, and frustrated with himself because he was not already
a master of what he had barely begun to study.
"What is easy is seldom excellent." - Samuel Johnson
The word "ease" is related to the word "easy"
but they are miles apart. What is ease? Ease is what happens
when you have reached mastery of whatever it is that you set
out to do.
The quotation from Nadia Comaneci says it all. Nadia awed
the world with her gymnastics at the 1976 Montreal Olympics.
She made it look easy, as she flung her tiny body around the
parallel bars. But that skill came as the result of years
of grueling work in the gym. That is the real sequence. From
incompetence to mastery by way of hard work. Hard work got
her there, and she made it look so easy because she had reached
a point of ease.
This is the very definition of mastery. When you reach a point
where you make the difficult look easy. The price Nadia paid,
the price any truly successful person pays, is hard work.
"Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with
the things that you'd rather not deal with: fear of failure,
fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about
training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under
that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And, after
you've done that, to do it again the next day." - Seth
Godin
But even hard work is not enough for real success. If one
of the biggest lies of our times is that success can and should
be easy, the idea that hard work leads to success is equally
misleading.
If Easy Street is a dead end, traveling down Hard Work Street
is no guarantee that you will find success at the end of it.
In fact, Hard Work Street can be as much of a dead end as
Easy Street. Hard work by itself is not enough to lead you
to success.
Why? Because sometimes you are on the wrong Hard work Street.
Just working hard is not enough. You need to be working toward
something that is authentic for you. One of the reasons that
so many of us work so hard with so little result is that we
are working at cross purposes with our true selves.
So the real question is, Are you working hard to master a
craft or skill that is the right craft or skill for you. Are
you trying hard to be what you are simply not meant to be?
Hard work would not have been enough for Nadia to succeed
as a gymnast if she didn't have some sort of natural facility
and body type for gymnastics. This is why you don't see female
Olympic-level basketball players who are five feet tall and
gymnasts who are six feet four. No matter how hard she worked,
tiny Nadia would never have stunned the world as a basketball
player.
My student Mike could read music, play the piano, and sing
with an amazing trained tenor voice because he worked hard
to develop his innate talents.
And so, my friend was onto something when she commented, "This
is not as easy as I had planned." Success is not easy.
Success requires hard work. But hard work doesn't have to
feel hard when you are doing something that is authentic for
you. I'm going to give the last words to Alan Alda.
"You can't get there by bus, only by hard work and risk
and by not quite knowing what you're doing. What you'll discover
will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself."
- Alan Alda
Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D. Free Ebook "Do You
Know the Money-Making
Secret in the Monopoly Game?" http://www.nomoneylimits.com
[email protected]
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