“Not everything hard is worth doing. Not everything easy is worth avoiding.”
Hey Rollers,
I’ve been thinking about resistance the last few days.
Not resistance in the political sense or the motivational “embrace the grind” sense. Just good old resistance. You know it when you feel it.
The challenge, I realise, is that we’ve been given two very different messages about how to deal with it.
One tells us to be like water and take the path of least resistance. Life’s hard enough already, so why make it harder?
The other tells us the exact opposite. Choose the hardest option. Lean into discomfort, always. If it’s difficult, it must be worth doing.
I’ve found myself caught between those two ideas many times.
Sometimes I’ve avoided things simply because they felt uncomfortable. Difficult conversations are probably the best example. I avoid conflict like the plague.
Other times I’ve deliberately chosen the harder path simply because it was harder. My decision about what to study at university immediately comes to mind. Looking back, I suspect part of the appeal was that it looked difficult and somehow that made it feel more worthwhile.
What I’ve learned is that leaning blindly into either of these extremes all the time is not a recipe for success.
Avoiding resistance has cost me opportunities. Chasing resistance for the sake of it has cost me energy.
Which leaves me with the question that’s been rattling around in my head since last week.
What is the right resistance?
That feels like a far more useful question than asking whether something is simply easy or hard.
The more I coach, the less convinced I become that toughness is measured by how much resistance we can tolerate. I think it’s measured by how wisely we choose it.
The reason I say that is because resistance, by itself, doesn’t tell us very much.
Working until midnight requires resistance. So does shutting your laptop when you know there’s still more work to do.
Running another marathon requires resistance. So does taking the recovery day your body needs, even when your ego wants to keep going.
Neither is automatically right. The context of the moment you’re in changes everything.
As I was thinking about this, I realised this is probably one of the clearest ways I know to describe Smart Toughness.
Not choosing less resistance.
Not choosing more resistance.
Learning to recognise the resistance that’s actually worth your energy.
The resistance that moves you towards the person you’re trying to become, rather than simply proving that you can tolerate discomfort.
The funny thing is, we often resist doing just that. It can be terrifying pursuing the potential you believe you have.
But that’s probably a newsletter for another day.
Until next week.
Keep rolling.
Justin 👊
Take Action in 3 Minutes:
Think about something you’ve been resisting recently.
Now ask yourself a different question.
Instead of asking, “How do I avoid this?”
Or, “How do I push through this?”
Ask:
“What is the right resistance here?”
You might find the answer sits somewhere between the two.