Do the hard thing

When you are facing multiple choices regarding what to get done next, always choose the hardest thing first. Our brains are wired to look for the easiest thing and to avoid obstacles. By deliberatly choosing the hard thing, you are exercising your brain. It's the equivalent of lifting weights, but for your brain.

Paradoxically, by deliberately doing hard things, you will live more comfortable life than if you tried to live a comfortable life.

People worry that AI will take their jobs (and I do too), but what they don't realize is they are actually just scared of being forced to do the hard work. In fact, those people are probably not very good at what they are doing.

They are somewhat comfortable at their current position, and are probably living and doing things on autopilot. AI is comming, and it will disrupt that. The fact that they will not have their comfortable job anymore, but instead will have to go through some hard times is making them desperate.

If you want to be a good engineer, or a good human in general, the best skill you can acquire is the ability to accept challenges and adapt to changes quickly.

When you look at the most successful people, they all have one thing in common, they are exceptional at solving problems and adapting to changes. They are often one of the fastest to successfuly navigate new obstacles, and they welcome them.

You cannot acquire this mindset by listening to what your monkey brain wants and doing easy things. You have to constantly challenge yourself, and the simplest way to challenge yourself if to choose to work on hardest tasks first.

For example, I am bad at writing. This post will probably be very poorly written, and there are two reasons for this, besides, of course, me being a bad writer.

One, I won't use LLMs to help me. Even though LLMs are not very good at writing, they do produce average content, and I curently deem myself below average writer. I could easily improve this post by using an LLM to rephrase, or even write this for me. That would be easy and "efficient" way to do it. However, if I did that, I would learn absolutely nothing.

The second reason is, I won't spend too much time writing and refining this. I am not a 100% comfortable with putting this out in the world like this. I want to overthink and bring this as close to perfection as I can before publishing it. However, if I force myself to write and publish this as quickly as possible, I am challenging myself the most. That, in turn, is when I grow the most, because I choose the hard way.

Life is, and always will be, full of challenges. Current big challenge that many people are facing is, as I already mentioned, being "replaced" by AI. If you are doing just enough, picking easy tasks, and are not used to challenges, this indeed is a scary thought. Much scarier than it would be if you were at peace with constant challenges in life.

The thing is, by doing hard things and improving yourself, you probably won't change the fact that AI will replace or automate at least a part of your current job. What will happen instead is, you won't be scared of that because you are used to challenges and you know that you will overcome this, just like you did with everything else.

Now, go and do something hard.