Easy Things Get Done

A little while back, I wrote about how fun things get done.

The idea was simple — if you make something fun, you’re way more likely to do it than if it isn’t fun.

If you hate marketing, you’re unlikely to spend a bunch of time on it. But, if you make it fun — maybe by organizing a group of friends who also need to market their startups and by doing it every Sunday morning from a coffee shop, it'll get done.

There are lots of ways to make uncomfortable stuff fun. My favorite is by remixing the uncomfortable thing with one of your best skills. So, marketing is overwhelming, but maybe writing short stories or making PowerPoints or recording short videos or interviewing people isn't.

Change the equation to:

Thing That's Uncomfortable x Thing You're Great At

This makes it the thing both more likely to happen and more likely to be differentiated. And, the less correlated the two seem, the better.

Today's idea is about the second cousin of “make it fun” → “make it easy.” Just like fun things get done, easy things get done.

A good prompt for the task that's currently on your plate and uncomfortable or daunting is:

How could this be as easy as possible?

This works for everything.

If you want to start meditating, how can you make meditation as easy as possible? If you want to get going on customer interviews, how could you make them as easy as possible? If you want to eat more veggies, how could you make that as easy as possible?

Easy stuff gets done, and hard stuff is always just a big stack of easy stuff in disguise.

Break it down, parse it out, and make it easy.