You should enjoy doing very hard things

3 ideas, because you know you are meant for more

Watch the video version of this essay:

If you prefer Spotify:

---

I can’t help but think that most people are miserable because of one word.

Expectations.

I used to sit in my first class of the day back in school, at 8:52am with my eyes all crusted, listening to a teacher I didn’t like, talk about ideas that weren’t fucking profound to me.

Repeat that five more times and that’s a hard school day for anyone to sit through.

I didn’t like school. What I was learning wasn’t interesting to me. I didn’t want to feel forced into learning (obsolete) subjects that were quote-unquote important.

Just so I could pass an exam, that would tell the system everything it needed to know about what I was capable of progressing onto...

Ambition can look like laziness to other people when it isn’t being aimed in the right direction, I think.

Doing hard things can actually be pretty easy.

But there are 3 profound ideas you need to understand, for this to make any sort of positive impact on your life, starting from today.

The reason you don’t think that now is because the expectations you have of yourself are fucking you up.

And in this essay, we are going to think about this together.

Idea I - You’re not aiming low enough

Modern man can’t see God because he doesn’t look low enough. - Jung

I’m not religious, but that’s a profound fucking idea.

People don’t set the expectations they have for themselves low enough.

What do I mean by this?

You see, an expectation is a standard for success. Happiness is when your expectations are exceeded. And where this applies to doing hard things, is as such:

Find your limit, then back off by 20-30% so you can sustain that limit across time.

There is nothing stopping you from working at 100%.

Perhaps 120% or more, for every second of every day.

Then again...

Burnout happens when you exceed your mental ability to recover from doing hard things.

Mental muscles fatigue like physical ones do. Try training every body part in the gym for 10 sets to failure every day and get back to me (if your nervous system doesn’t give out before then). The mind works the same way.

There is a point of diminishing returns with everything good in life.

After 2500 words of writing each morning, my focus drops, my brain feels cloudy, and my decision-making becomes half-assed and my idea quality worsens.

It’s only surface-level ideas at that point. No profound ones :/

Which isn’t great considering I quite literally earn my income with my mind. I digress.

• Your energy is finite.

• Your attention (quite literally, what you attend to) is finite.

• Which means your time is also finite.

If we use training your physical muscles as an example, what we can take from that, is the idea that sub-maximal stress applied with the correct form, targeting the right muscle, across time... is optimal for long-term adaptation.

What do I mean by this?

You need to do extremely hard things, but in extremely small amounts, extremely often.

500 words of writing per day is next to nothing. It takes what, like 15-30 minutes?

But 500 words that consist of profound ideas that have been thought about for days, and not 3 hours, stress tested, and written in a way that is impactful and persuasive and engaging to read... a 2000 word newsletter like what you are reading is done in 4 days of “hard” work.

And I’m still doing the same amount of work each morning as when I had one just subscriber. I believe it was my girlfriend :)

My Dad always used to tell me this.

Anytime you do an exam, just aim for 1% more than last time.

He never asked for more of me than that. And now, I think, it’s fully clear to me as to why this is such an important idea that you need to wrap your head around.

1% improvements and little wins add up in a way you could not possibly imagine.

Let me give you a profound idea that will floor a lot of people.

Idea II - This is your fault

Every man is not only responsible for what he does but what everyone else does. - Dostoevsky

Working on one small project for 30-60 minutes per day will create more positive outcomes than you could possibly think of, that bleed out across your entire life.

Here’s a profound idea I’ve always loved thinking about:

Everything you do affects what everybody else does.

I want you to really think about this.

Imagine if you lifted weights twice per week.

There will be exceptions I know I know. But again, really think about this.

You build some muscle, which is a beneficial thing. A large muscle is a stronger muscle, which makes basic physical exertion feel like a breeze. Walking up a flight of stairs feeling unscathed is no joke.

Your joints feel stronger too. Your heart pumps blood more efficiently. Let’s not forget the improvements in insulin sensitivity, and deeper sleep, and that new baseline level of energy you bring to everything you do in your life.

Everything.

If you’re a writer or a creative person, you’ll know how important the idea quality of your work is.

Think of how much sharper your thinking would be thanks to all those benefits?

How much clearer and better articulated your sentences would be. Because you’re not sitting crusty-eyed at a desk, wishing you could lie in bed for a few more hours, to make up for the late night you had staying up till 3am, because you were too tired from the day before. You can see how that toxic loop is self-perpetuating.

You get perceived differently with a more muscular frame.

Sorry, but status and how we are perceived by others is still an important factor for feeling a deep sense of meaning in your life. It’s ok to want to look muscular, and therefore more attractive, and to be perceived as such.

I was the world’s skinniest, insecure 16 year old... and I am definitely no model, with my ugly mug and receding hairline, nor will I be the next Mr. Olympia.

But I do what I can do, with my own standard and my own limit I MYSELF can sustain, and have sustained, because I’ve been lifting for 7 years now. Which is what matters.

To wrap up these benefits, you can do more of everything across a longer time period, thanks to the increased longevity these benefits bring about. You model a standard for everyone else who sees you with those benefits. Friends, girlfriend, your Dad who has tennis and golfers elbow (he’s feeling better now).

The harsh truth:

How many hospital beds would be freed if you did this?

For people who need it for involuntary reasons?

Reasons outside of their direct influence or control, all because you decided to pull your act together?

I say that harshly because I like speaking harsh truths to myself sometimes.

You will know 1000 people in your lifetime.

This means two things:

1. You are one person away from a million people

2. You are two persons away from a billion people

Everything you do has a ripple effect. Like throwing a mossy stone in a silent lake.

Doing nothing and staying inside playing Fortnite all day, alone, persuades people who do (and don’t) know you to keep giving their attention to other people.

Scrolling seems harmless, till you learn it keeps you on social media platforms long enough until you get shown advertisements (yes, corporations monetize your scrolling).

Posting a single piece of content online can influence hundreds of thousands of people. Even a single profound idea is enough to shatter a disease-like perspective, a cancer in the mind for somebody who is suffering.

And, content stays online forever.

Anyone can view it, and attracting attention to your work and persuading people of its value is quite literally a skill. Every morning you practice at it, having reflected on feedback, and iterated with trial and error until you find success, guess what?

You increase the impact of your ripple.

I have your attention now, do I not? That’s 14 months of trial and error learning to write with impact.

“But Craig!”

Yes my fellow legend.

How on earth has this anything to do with having a project to work on?

I’ll show you (we’ll get to the action steps soon, I promise)

Idea III - If you can’t do it for a year, don’t do it

I am going to use writing as an example.

Firstly, since it’s relevant to Substack. Also because I am a writer (now full-time, I quit my job last week) and it’s where my authority and expertise lies.

200 words of writing per day for 365 days straight will always beat 1000 words every 2 weeks. The arithmetic always wins here.

500 words is about one section of one of my newsletters.

I call them my Profound Essays. The word newsletter sounds salesy, but yeah, I send these out weekly to my email list - newsletter.

3-4 days and it’s donezo, like we thought about.

(It’s funny, I am thinking as I am writing this, and you are thinking to yourself by reading what I have written? How profound!)

But it took me a lot of trial and error over 14 months to fully realize this principle. When I started wrapping my head around the whole “writing under a personal brand” thing... as cringy as I find the word personal brand... I never had a word count limit per day.

So my routine was all over the place.

1500 words here. 483 word there. 3 days off... what was I writing about again?

So what I realized was, after tons of stupid mistakes, was to give myself an expectation so low that achieving it would almost be certain.

500 words.

As much as I hate seeing the phrase, “it compounds,” because it’s a phrase AI-writing always uses, here goes: the benefits do compound.

It’s the Matthew principle. An economic principle that basically says those who have everything, more shall be given, and those who have nothing, all shall be taken.

Why care about this profound idea?

It is easier to keep improving toward a goal once you have started.

There will never be a greater jump in progress than moving from zero to one.

If you can bench 100kg how easy do you think it would be benching the empty bar? You’d be repping 20kg like it’s a feather. Not going to jiu-jitsu one week, and doing just one session the next, that’s a 100% improvement in comparison. And yet we annihilate ourselves when we don’t perfectly follow a 16 hour routine planned down to the second.

Aim lower.

Here’s the action steps.

How to do hard things, but properly

I want to give you broad principles here.

Which, you can apply to any context to suit your needs.

Also because I’m trying to condense my writing into a lower word count. My 5.6k word mini-course on escaping beginner hell in 3-6 months was a lot of work, and fun.

(thank you for your DMs, I’m grateful you guys got tons of value from it).

• Start with a time block - 30-60 minutes needs to get carved out of your schedule. Preferably each morning. If you don’t know what project to be working on yet, good. You have this block for figuring it out. Attention precedes time, and time is what lets you direct your energy and focus toward one meaningful goal.

• Choose a goal to achieve - In 90 days. One deadline with a clear outcome. Something tangible, measurable, and concrete. Ask AI to help you brainstorm a goal. I’ve been experimenting with this myself currently, I like to choose one quarterly goal from one domain of my life at a time. By that, I mean having your life organized into categories (mind, body, soul, vocation is the simplest one). Choose one category, and one goal for it. I’m working on my mental health at the minute with journaling. Before that it was launching The Profound Writer.

• Find your limit - My limit for writing content or building products each morning is about 2 hours. Any more than that and my brain feels too fatigued, which starts disrupting other areas of my life, which is not good (obviously). In this case, writing content (my newsletter) for 45 minutes, going on a walk, then working on a project I can monetize for 45 minutes (ebook, template, lead magnet/paid-tier Substack post, course)… that is my limit.

• Then back off from it- By 20-30% so you can sustain it. Writing is very hard. As is physical training, or doing chores, or having no goals and doing nothing all day. All you need is high quality work that moves a needle done daily. What is one thing you could do, that would pull a lever or move a needle one step closer toward your ideal life in 3 months time - NO MATTER HOW SMALL - that you could do for 30-60 minutes a day, one day at a time?

• Negotiate with yourself - Seriously. You need to cut a deal. There are more unconscious forces within you than you think, like desire, interest, curiosity, motivation, things you have little control over. This is why we aim low in terms of our goal, and also why we aim low regarding the standards we have for ourselves. If you hate waking up earlier than 9am, if you’re like me, you might need to compromise with yourself and agree on starting with 8:50am. Even if the philosopher inside you thinks that 6am starts are noble and more serious for creating your life’s work.

• Keep iterating - Sprint, then recover. I keep using the gym as an analogy, but really. You don’t train biceps to failure and go back 6 hours later to do it again? You train hard, you recover, you consume nutrient dense food, you sleep, you reflect on your workout, what worked, what didn’t, you keep your feedback inside your brain, you manipulate and stretch and warp it with your own brain, so it encodes into your memory (this feedback), and you definitely try your best not to ask AI to organize everything for you, and to tell you what the answer is (right away, at least).

I’m currently messing around with a writing workflow. I got this written in 2 days. I am loving it, and I’ve been meaning to say this.

I look forward to being a vessel for the writers and creators I’ve been speaking to. Or those starting out looking to write online or build a personal brand talking about profound, deep ideas you have. I’m doing this full-time now. So I’ll keep letting you guys know about what is working for me (and not). I have some big things in the works.

I appreciate your time and attention a lot more than you might think.

You’re an absolute legend.

- Craig :)

---

Keep reading onward for some more profound ideas: