How to Make Difficult Things Easy

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How to Make Difficult Things Easy
We can make difficult things easy by breaking it down into small pieces, and practice these small pieces separately before putting them all together. It’s normal for most of us to prefer easy over hard. Even we make the hard things harder when we let ourselves fall into a habit of avoiding them. However, hard becomes easy, if we do it willingly while it’s still hard. We all know quickly that everything can become easy once we bring willingness to the hard parts. Certainly, we drag our feet all the way to the easy-point, so it stays hard as long as possible. In fact, our society that values convenience and technological solutions teaches us to overvalue the easy and to undervalue the hard. We try to escape the hard parts as often as possible, limiting our exposure and justifying our psychological resistance to it. Therefore, we seldom come to something hard with the intention to get to the point where it’s easy. We’ve all been watching hard things become easy our entire lives, but we still trust and even celebrate our resistance to them. We like to complain about the hard stuff we have to deal with, and often people validate us, and take the chance to share their own.
To put it another way, actually, we need hard problems. Hard problems elevate our capabilities. They force us to dig deeper and focus more. They make us better. Unsolvable problems might provide even more value than we might initially believe. A 2016 article in the Wall Street Journal profiled how Northwestern University uses problems without clear solutions to prepare freshman engineering students. The designers of the university program believe that solving near-impossible problems is an essential life and career skill. For example, imagine attempting to solve these challenges:
Equip a stroke survivor to crochet (用鉤針編織) with one hand.
Equip a partially paralyzed shooting victim to put on tight support stockings (為部分癱瘓的槍擊受害者穿上緊身支撐襪)
Make workout gear (鍛鍊裝備) for someone with only one arm.
Make a bottle opener (開瓶器) for someone with only one arm.
Imagine that the students only have $100 to spend. How can they solve the problems? The university believes that learning to confront difficult problems teaches resilience, humility, and creativity. Students have to learn how to fail, and how to handle the various emotions associated with failure, like anxiety and even depression in some cases. These new challenges are open ended, with no clear path to success. The students learn to accept failure and to learn from it. There is a certain power in confronting a problem without a clear solution. Truly, facing the near-impossible task forces us to change in ways that we would never otherwise consider. But most people do not just look for hard tasks, and then try to do them. We only need someone to push us to attempt the impossible. For example, watching a movie is easy. We just sit in front of a screen and pay attention. But making a movie is hard. Very hard. Infinitely harder than watching one. How to solve big problems, as a matter of fact, asks us to use our creativity. We have to break down the problems until we reach the point where the problem is small enough, so that it can be solved by us. Something is not impossible just because there is no clear solution. We should prove that hard things are not impossible. Hard things need to be accomplished. Life is hard, too, sometimes. At some point, we all have to face circumstances we really don’t like, but we have to take action.
Rather than waiting until the last minute, with the pressure mounting on us all day, the best thing we can do is to just do it. Often, we get struggle when something seems so large, so huge, and so scary in front of us. Again, everything is less hard when we break it down into small, manageable pieces. We have to wake up in the morning and do hard things first, so that they’re out of the way. The smaller the steps, the less overwhelmed we’ll feel and the more likely it is that we’ll get through the hard part quicker than we would, rather than trying to do hard things all at once.
Furthermore, with a support system, we can have people around us to support us physically, emotionally, and/or spiritually. Very often, our support system can also help us do hard things. Our family members, our relatives, our friends are the people that they really support us. We ask them for advice, for help, for listening to our difficulties, and even for spiritually encouraging us in every respect.
By the way, hard things are hard for a reason. It’s like dieting. If we love pizza and chocolate, we won’t eat a salad. It sometimes seems nearly impossible to do for us. This is where discipline is needed. In other words, we have to develop some disciplines in order to achieve hard things. If we really want to be healthy, we should eat healthy food as often as possible. Eating all the pizza and chocolate we want isn’t a healthy choice. But if we incorporate discipline into our habits, we can actually still enjoy pizza and chocolate just in small amounts, and keep our shape. The discipline comes when we choose to eat 80-90 percent healthy food, and 10-20 percent pizza and chocolate. Then, we’ll overcome the difficulties. Discipline ensures us to reach our goal and do hard things.
Last but not least, nothing in life is ever perfect. Even though we are really doing our best and striving for the best effort, still, we might make mistakes. Let them go anyway. Mistakes are how we learn and grow. We are not perfectionists. We just can do it as much as possible. We need to make sure that we, nevertheless, have energetic power to challenge the struggles. We practice notwithstanding. We practice, practice, and practice. Practice makes perfect. We really give ourselves some time to go through the process, and overcome the most difficult parts as possible as we can.

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