The hardest part of most things isn’t the work. It’s the story I tell myself about the work.
That’s the pattern I keep noticing across work, rest, and everything in between. Most of our dissatisfaction comes from fighting our own limitations instead of working with them. We fight what we have, how much we can do, how hard it feels, and how uncertain it all is. And the fighting is what exhausts us, not the living.
I’ve been circling this theme for a while. Not new ideas, exactly. More like ideas I already believed but hadn’t articulated together. Here are five worth keeping in mind.
Work with what you have, not what you wish you had
Life isn’t an optimization problem. We assume there’s one right path and our job is to find it, when in reality there are dozens of viable paths and the real skill is picking one and moving.
Most people fail to act not because they lack ability, but because they’re focused on the wrong version of their life. The imagined version. The one where they have more time, more clarity, more resources.
This is the trap I fell into for years in my career and life. I kept waiting for the right conditions before making changes. The right financial cushion. The right next step. The right moment of certainty. But certainty comes from movement, not contemplation.
The solution is simple: look at your life as it is. What skills do you have now? What time is available now? What’s within reach now? Then narrow your focus. Drop obligations draining you. Stop consuming information you’ll never use. Pick one or two things and give them your real attention.
This honest assessment is harder than it sounds. Our brains are wired to construct stories instead of examining facts, to overweight what’s loud and underweight what’s true. We overestimate our abilities in areas where we’re weak and inflate the value of what we already have. Seeing your life clearly takes deliberate effort.
This is removal, not addition. Flow comes from setting things down, not picking more up. Your limitations aren’t obstacles. They’re the edges giving your work shape.
Movement beats preparation
There’s a version of productivity that’s all planning and no doing. Designing systems. Organizing tools. Optimizing workflows. It feels like progress because it is effortful. But effort without output is a way of hiding. Most projects die in the comfortable middle of “maybe” because we confuse preparation with progress.
Planning is not action. The person who writes 200 rough words today is further ahead than the person who spent three hours perfecting their writing setup.
This connects to something I’ve noticed since stepping away from structured work. When nothing demands you, you discover how much of your “productivity” was motion without direction. Some days after I left, I’d spend hours preparing to do something and never do it. The preparation was a way of avoiding the vulnerability of producing something imperfect.
The antidote is embarrassingly small. Pick one goal. Break it into a piece boring enough to start without resistance. Do it today. Not after conditions improve. Today.
There are small nagging tasks we all carry around. The bill you haven’t paid, the email you keep dodging. Each one is trivial. Together, they create a low-grade hum of anxiety making everything feel heavier than it is. I started dedicating the first few minutes of my morning to clearing these, and the difference surprised me. Same principle as writing down what’s looping in your head before you start working. Free up the space so attention can go where it matters.
Humans can sustain deep focus for about three to four hours a day. Productivity researcher Anders Ericsson found this ceiling across top performers in various fields, and Cal Newport builds his own workdays around the same constraint. Everything after runs on fumes. I spent years pushing through long days and calling it discipline. It wasn’t discipline. It was a misunderstanding of how the mind works. Build around the constraint instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. Rest is as important as work.
Most difficulty is self-inflicted
The difficulty of a task is rarely what stops us. The second arrow, the story we tell about the task, carries most of the resistance. Our anxiety and desire for perfection make our goals, problems, and barriers seem bigger than they are. The fix: pretend the goal is easy. Not because it is, but because the framing removes the psychological weight keeping you frozen.
This is where thinking harder makes things worse. Your brain craves narrative, so it invents complexity where there isn’t any. It latches onto whatever’s loudest, constructs stories from limited information, and gives your fears more weight than they deserve. You aren’t analyzing the task. You’re building a case for why it’s terrifying.
This is counterintuitive if you grew up associating effort with value, as I did. If something doesn’t feel punishing, it must not matter. But ease often follows understanding. Zone 2 running is easy and builds a strong aerobic base; the trick is to be consistent.
When a problem becomes clear, the path through it narrows. Fewer decisions, fewer things to hold in mind. What remains feels lighter, not because something important was skipped, but because unnecessary resistance fell away.
Perfectionism shows up here too. It’s procrastination in disguise. If you wait for the brilliant insight before starting, you’ll wait a long time. If you produce something flawed and keep going, you’ll produce something good. For software engineering, here’s my heuristic: separate building from polishing into different passes. First you make it work. Then you make it elegant. Trying to do both at once is how projects stall indefinitely. This trick works in many other facets of life.
Let go of control
We also need to let go, and this deserves its own section because it’s where I get stuck the most.
Letting go of the need to control other people’s emotions. I’ve killed ideas and held back honest conversations because I was managing someone else’s potential reaction. But you can’t control how people feel. You never could. Accounting for others matters; organizing your life around their imagined responses doesn’t.
Letting go of what isn’t working. The things draining your energy right now aren’t usually the things you haven’t started. They’re the things you haven’t ended. We avoid quitting because it feels like failure, but staying in the wrong situation isn’t persistence. It’s avoidance. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is stop.
Letting go of the plan. There’s resonance in engaging with life as it comes, including the interruptions. Rolling with what shows up instead of white-knuckling your schedule. Flow isn’t something you force into existence. It’s what remains when you stop blocking it.
Letting go of the story. Your brain wants to narrate everything, assign meaning, predict outcomes. Sometimes the clearest thing you can do is stop the commentary and respond to what’s in front of you. Meditation taught me this: contentment isn’t something you achieve. It’s what’s already there when you stop adding noise.
Be here. This is the life.
I’ve spent large portions of my life treating the present as a rough draft. A rehearsal for the real version starting once conditions were right. Once I had more money. More freedom. More clarity about what I wanted.
I’ve written about this before. How stepping away from work didn’t produce a credits-ending montage. How the growth came not from the freedom itself but from learning how to meet ordinary days without rushing to fill them.
This is it. Right now. There is no future version of your life more real than the one you’re living.
If you want to be a writer, write today. If you want to be more present in your relationships, start tonight. If you want to be generous, act on the impulse when it arises instead of waiting for a grander opportunity. Your future self is built from what your present self does.
Let go of the desire for permanence. Stop trying to photograph every good moment to preserve it. Stop worrying about legacy. In the grand sweep of time, none of it echoes forever. And that’s not depressing. It’s freeing. When the pressure to leave a mark lifts, you’re free to do meaningful work for its own sake.
I’ve found this to be true in my own life since leaving Big Tech. I don’t have more time than before. But I have more attention. When I’m teaching my kid to make sourdough or running a trail in the fog, there’s no laptop open “just in case.” No phone buzzing with escalations. The activity gets my full presence. That’s the dividend of being here.
Happiness, meaning, and purpose aren’t states you achieve and hold. They’re rhythms you build. The person waiting for a breakthrough misses the small openings already in front of them.
The small, quiet differences you make in your immediate world matter. The friend you checked in on. The page you wrote. The morning you met without rushing to fill.
Those count. They’re enough.
So much wisdom here.
Needed this today!