Why the Hard Things are Usually the Best Things

Some days, writing is easy. My fingers glide over the keyboard, the words flowing from my heart onto the page and I can just keep going for hours without taking a break.

Today is not one of those days.

Yesterday wasn’t either.

So, what gives? Did I suddenly lose my word-flowing power? Am I destined to be a literary failure? Am I really a writer, or is that a term that I use simply because I don’t know how else to label myself?

All of these thoughts were racing through my head when I saw this quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and I realized that this is exactly what needs to be happening right now. Sometimes, even your dream job has to be hard, or else, is it really worth it?

Most things that are truly rewarding are difficult to achieve. For example:

• Relationships: usually, the best relationships are the ones that had the most work put into them. It’s easy to look at a healthy marriage from a distance and think that they have it all together and it’s just-so-beautiful, but usually those people with the healthiest marriages have battled through their fair share of ugliness to get to the beauty that we’re admiring now. 

• Working out: There are rare days when it’s fun to work out. But for the most part, it’s painful. Being healthy, exercising, eating right, etc. can be mentally, emotionally and physically draining. But the results are ALWAYS worth it. And usually, it becomes easier the longer you're committed to the training.

• School: One of the hardest classes in my entire academic career was Russian. I had to study every single day, sometimes for hours a day, for it to be meaningful at all. But, I LOVED it. The most challenging subjects are usually the ones that are the most gratifying in the end.

I think these same principles apply to most aspects of life, and hopefully they will apply to my book. I’m going to be honest with you guys: I’m tired. I want this book to be done. Yet here I am, doing a total re-write of the book I JUST FINISHED because this is important to me and I want it to be the very best that it can possibly be.

So, right now it’s really hard. But I’m hoping that at some point, it will get easy. And, even if it doesn’t, something tells me that the end result will be satisfying.

Are you going through anything right now that is proving to be more difficult than you thought? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

I'll leave you guys with one last quote from Goethe: