TLDR: The interesting part is not what you’re working on, but why you’re working on it, and what your real relationship to the work actually is.
I heard this phrase once:
Everything is as hard as everything else if you care about it enough.
I don’t know where they got it from, but it stuck with me.
Everything is hard.
Building a unicorn is hard, and everyone agrees with that.
Drop-shipping t-shirts, by comparison, is pretty easy.
That is, unless you care about it enough. Then designs need perfecting, suppliers need optimizing, branding needs to resonate, ads need to work, landing pages need to convert, the team needs to be working hard, customer service needs to be good. The list is infinite.
And that’s the interesting part.
The difficulty isn’t always in the thing. It’s in how much you care about the thing.
I see this with founders all the time. Two people can look at the same product and see completely different amounts of work. One sees something that works well enough and ships it. The other sees 100 things wrong with it and stays up until 2am wondering why it isn’t 100x better.
This is obsession.
And obsession has a strange property: it creates work.
The more you care, the more you notice. The more you notice, the more you want to fix. The more you fix, the more you discover. There is no finish line.
This is true whether you’re building a $10 billion company or trying to make the world’s best pair of socks. It’s true of restaurants, cars, writing, investing, relationships. Anything. There are infinite details hiding inside almost everything worth doing well.
This is why I think “choose your hard” is good advice, but incomplete. You should absolutely choose what you’re willing to struggle for. But you should also understand that everything is hard if you care enough to obsess over it and to be the best in the world at it.
Not because the thing is inherently difficult. Because caring changes the resolution at which you see it. Like an itch you need to scratch. A puzzle you need to complete.
Call it the founder’s disease. Most obsessed founders would take that diagnosis over the cure.
I’ve met founders who have spent ten years working on a problem most people wouldn’t choose to work on for ten minutes. From the outside, it looks like suffering. From the inside, it’s the only option.
That’s the part we often miss when we talk about ambition. We look at someone doing something extraordinarily difficult and imagine the outcome if they’re right. But we should also endeavor to understand their level of obsession, and their willingness to endure the tedious pain of making sure every stone in the pyramid is perfect.
The hard is coming either way. There is no version of life without difficult things. You can choose a startup, a job, virtually anything. But no matter what you choose, there will always be another detail, another problem, another thing worth perfecting.
Finding something that isn’t hard shouldn’t be the goal. Finding something worthy of obsession should be.
See you Monday.