First of all, this may seem like a very chicken soup quote, but the point is that it’s not a quote to look at, it’s a quote to do, you know, chicken soup is always telling you to shift the way you look at things, such as seeing brilliance in suffering and victory in frustration …… In short, chicken soup texts aren’t responsible for solving problems, whereas this quote does.
Secondly, a premise should be added to this sentence, and the full version should read something like this: if you have two choices, and both can achieve the same result, you should choose the harder one.
Of course, I’m not saying that if you have two girlfriends, you should choose the uglier one, in normal people’s eyes, it’s obvious that the happiness of getting a beautiful wife is higher, but if you think you’re like Zhuge Liang, that can’t be helped, but Huang Yueying’s father is a famous scholar, and this famous scholar is the son-in-law of a gentry, oops, so complicated, anyway, we’re all smart people, so I won’t go into detail.
Finally, this is not me saying that my life experience is not rich enough for me to give such old-fashioned life advice, it’s a quote from Pual Graham, the godfather of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, inside Hackers and Painters.
In his book, Pual Graham gives three examples.
One is the matter of his startup viaweb, where he says, “The difficulty of the problem should be used as a guide in choosing what problem a company is going to solve, and it should be used as a principle for all decisions thereafter. “This simply translates to: if you have a problem, you should face it head on.
A rule of thumb from viaweb: Let’s say you’re a quick-footed little boy with a big, strong dog chasing you behind you. You run to the stairs, should you go up or down at this point? I think we should go upstairs. If you go downstairs, the big dog might run as fast as you. If you go upstairs, the big dog’s huge body will be a disadvantage. Yes, you will have a hard time running up the stairs, but the big dog will have a harder time.
At this point you think about the scenes in movies or novels: if the main character is being chased, he faces two roads, one is a flat road, the other is a thorn bush where there are few people, the characters in the movie always choose the more complicated, riskier path, not because the movie or novel is set in this way, but to take the more dangerous path has a greater chance of survival, do not you see the main character fall into a mountain stream to get martial arts secrets, after rushing into the waterfall to get the guidance of a superior person, as the saying goes, if you do not die, you will be blessed.
The above example is a consideration from a survival strategy, while the next example is a consideration from a competitor’s perspective.
Assuming there are two candidates for a new feature in the software that create exactly the same business value, we always choose the more difficult feature. Not because the feature will generate more revenue, but because it is harder. We’re happy to force our big, slow competitors to follow us into the swamp.
Startups, like guerrillas, like to choose deep forests that aren’t easy to live in as a base, the kind of place that the regular government army can’t chase after. I still remember how exhausted we were in the early days of the startup, racking our brains all day long over some horrible technical problem. Still, I was quite happy because those problems were so difficult even for us, then the competition would think it was even more impossible to solve.
Big companies are extremely risk averse and most of them don’t want to go into riskier areas, if you want to, that’s your chance.
The last, and most important, example is about tangentially related personalities that are highly operational.
If you have to choose whether to sit at home and watch TV, or go out for a run, go out for a run. The reason this works is probably because when presented with two difficult and one easy choices, often out of laziness, you will choose the easier option. Deep down in your consciousness, you actually know that not being lazy will lead to better results, and this method simply forces you to accept that.
If you have always been a loser, then you should always choose to do the easy thing, because the easy option is too easy to do.
Choosing the easy one doesn’t mean you’re making the right decision, it only means you’re smart, and smart is used to cover up laziness, to avoid problems, and you have to take the hard step to move forward.
It’s so easy to live a normal, boring life, you can stop reading, taking risks, not exercising, not writing, not going out, not tossing …… but the most regrettable thing in life is: I could have. Choose the hard things and you can know how far you can go in life.
But, it’s your choice how easy it is to be boring and how difficult it is to be interesting.
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