The wonderful Malcolm Gladwell, who is revisiting his first hit book The Tipping Point, introduced us many years ago to the concept of desirable difficulty.
All those star athletes and young prodigies found the optimal amount of challenge they were willing to confront to get better and better over time. Rare is the student who improves by simply getting better at what he already does well. It’s in pushing ourselves further; trying, failing, and eventually succeeding in adding new skills that we grow and improve.
The key then is understanding what the difficulty is we’re willing to take on. Where are we willing to push ourselves? Where are the challenges that we don’t mind confronting and don’t find painful to endure, even though they are?
Our world is obsessed with efficiency, reducing friction, and making life easier. The best of the best deliberately seek out ways to make things harder, because in doing so they add to their skills and continue to improve in ways others can’t fathom. But they do that by finding the difficulties that bring them the whimsy, the joy, the pure passion for enduring.
I’ll wrap it up with a funny example. I watched a GQ interview about daily gear with Jerry Seinfeld. He says one of his essential items is the Breitling Navitimer Cosmonaute 24-hour wristwatch. He says he loves that it’s a 24-hour dial because it’s hard. He says it makes him have to work to figure out the time, and that in doing that work he….gets to stare at this beautiful watch face for a little bit longer.
What’s your desirable difficulty to get better?
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