Tuesday's Rule #16
Lemon squeezy
Welcome to this week’s edition of Tuesday’s Rule! A weekly breakdown of a “life rule” question I’ve found interesting or useful.
Number two of the three-part question mini-series.
True greats make their work look easy.
In sports, think of Roger Federer. His smooth playing style made it look like he won his 20 grand slams at a leisurely stroll.
Barack Obama is one of the great public speakers and can effortlessly hold court. Even when talking in front of millions of people on topics which carry great weight, he does so without a shred of nerves.
But my favourite example is Usain Bolt at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
This 4 minute video is well worth watching to remind yourself of his supremacy and charisma at his peak. It’s fun and rare to witness such dominance carried out with such nonchalance.
Three golds, three world records. And while he went even quicker a year later, the ease at which Bolt won the 100m - celebrating 20m before the end - is a spectacle in making insane things look ridiculously easy.
Even in the real world among us mortals, some people make things look easy even when we know they're not.
Carrying a sense of calmness and composure when performing tasks shows someone truly in control of what they’re doing.
I've found that holding on to this concept - true mastery is when hard things look easy - helps me improve at what’s important to me.
This brings us to today’s question:
What Would This Look Like If It Were Easy?
My take on the question is that it isn’t about cutting corners and obviously the answer won't help you run like Bolt, speak like Obama, or serve like Federer.
It doesn’t even necessarily seek to actually make things easy.
It seeks to unlock what would go into making the thing look easy.
The obvious point is the amount of hard work that enabled these individuals to perform with ease when it gets to game time.
Such intense effort went into Usain Bolt’s workouts that his father once said he didn’t like watching him train. It was too gruelling.
Barack Obama's speeches were always smooth and confident. However, his aides have discussed the brutally extensive preparation involved in ensuring each speech was delivered as perfectly as possible.
Preparation and hard work behind the scenes are pre-requisites for making something look easy.
But beyond that, if struggling with something, feeling stuck or stressed, this can be a helpful question to ask yourself to trigger a new thought pattern.
The power of this question is that it tells you where you need to look.
I asked myself the question when sitting down to write today.
Several things immediately came to mind (no, the answer wasn’t to use chatGPT).
If it were easy, I would be in a flow state, with no distractions. I would be writing about something that I found genuinely interesting. I would have prepared the main ideas and the structure of the post so that when I start typing, I’d know where I’m headed once I’ve finished each section.
These answers, which came almost immediately, tell me that I need to plan ahead and remove any distractions from my surroundings.
We humans tend to overcomplicate things.
It is often the most straightforward answers that are the most powerful, but through various biases, we trust more complex ones.
Often we overlook simple explanations because they seem too obvious and too easy.
This is true of general decision making as well as specific topics such as exercise and investing.
That over-complication can lead to paralysis by analysis.
Sometimes we need to devise and act on the simple solutions, avoiding the “mid-wit” trap popularised by the above meme format.
When stuck or overthinking, asking the question - what would this look like if it was easy can do two things.
It will make you question whether you are prepared enough or whether you’ve done the necessary level of work
It will show you where to look for solutions
Try it for yourself next time you’re struggling with something.
Sometimes, the answer is right in front of you.
You’ve just got to be willing to take the easy way out.