Easier Doesn’t Make Things Easy | The Probabilist . com

Easier Doesn’t Make Things Easy February 11, 2007

Posted by The Probabilist in : [Articles], Consciousness, Goals, Personal Growth, Productivity, Beliefs, Abilities , trackback

It’s time for a reality check. Or more of a perspective check. One of the biggest reasons people fail to push their personal growth up a notch is because they don’t seem to grasp what making their lives easier really means that they have to do - or how to relate to it.

All personal development is geared towards being at greater ease, doing things more easily or having things come to you more easily. But that basically never means that the path to get those things to happen to you is an easy one. And that’s why you need to have a more accurate perspective of what an easier solution to your problem or challenge is actually about. Many people fail to lose weight, make more money or improve their relationships because they seek easy fixes to their issues, when there truly aren’t any.

It makes me think of people competing in a race. Even the person that is at second place is doing worse than one of the competitors. And the person racing at next to last place is doing better than another one. This is the power of perspective that many fail to understand when trying to make improvements to their everyday life. They hear about a method that is supposed to be easier than what they’ve tried before, yet it still doesn’t seem easy for them to apply it.

Granted, the confusion often stems from poor advertising that states that a company’s or person’s solution is easy, not easier. Or quick when in fact it’s quicker. Or cheap when they mean it’s cheaper than their competitors’ products. It all also depends on what kind of a product, service or solution is provided. People don’t get very disappointed over small issues, but when it gets to emotionally and substantially more important issues like health, wealth, appearance, career and happiness, they get disappointed over self-improvement programs that promise easy routes when they never are. Sometimes the program and how it is presented is to blame. But when it comes to the consumers that fail to reach their goals (if they even have any), it’s because their mind-set and perspective is faulty to begin with.

Going back to the race analogy, in the first case, the person that is almost the best one of everyone competing will push himself even harder if and only if he thinks of himself as doing worse than the others, even though that he’s doing tremendously well in most of the other competitors’ eyes. He also understands that the leap he has to make in his own performance to improve his placement is incredibly much greater than for the person at next to last place to improve his.

On the other hand, the person sitting at next to last place needs to do much less in order to improve his placement. But the reason he isn’t is because he’s either complacent about his performance or doesn’t have faith in himself. He might also have the perspective that he’s doing better than the worst one competing, so it’s all good because of that. The biggest error is that he compares himself with people doing worse than him instead of those doing better than him - and this keeps him trapped. He may be constantly looking and buying into what he thinks are easy solutions that require little effort on his own part.

The bottom line is still that you have to think about your perspective. If you’re already performing say in the top 20 % of people in an area of your life, the going gets tougher and tougher to make even greater improvements and achievements. You’re bound to stagnate if you don’t remember that easier solutions don’t make them easy.