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What hard thing do you want to do?

Resilience is crazy-stupid hardheadedness.

Susan Brassfield Cogan
4 min readNov 15, 2017
davida3 on Flickr

When you’ve had a hundred doors slammed in your face or heard “no” a thousand times, it’s easy to sit down and say “I tried.”

In fact it’s tempting to say “I’ve tried everything and nothing has worked.”

“Everything” is a very big word. “Everything” is all the galaxies in the Milky Way. “Everything” is all the grains of sand on all the planets going around every sun in every arm of every galaxy.

You haven’t tried everything. Nothing you’ve tried has worked so far. Most likely what you haven’t tried is the very hard thing. And that may not work either.

However

When you try that very hard thing, succeed or fail, you will be a bit stronger and a bit braver and more ready to start the next very hard thing.

When people ask for advice about how to do a hard thing, they can be looking for any number of things, but they sometimes are asking for permission to give up (I’ve tried everything) or they are looking for an easy thing they haven’t thought of (A life hack!).

If your values include something that’s hard to do — getting off drugs, starting a business that thrives, becoming a top writer on Medium — you need to be prepared to do the hard…

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Susan Brassfield Cogan
Susan Brassfield Cogan

Written by Susan Brassfield Cogan

I write self-help, life coaching, and political opinion. I am a creativity and mindfulness coach https://linktr.ee/susanbcogan

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