Maria and I purchased raw land a year ago. It’s beautiful, and other than lots of trees, native grass, and cacti there’s nothing there. It’s been more than a year and we’ve barely broke ground. In fact, the only sizable thing we’ve done so far is road work.
Before we can get serious about building a cabin on our land, we first need to be able to get in and out without getting stuck in the mud. And it took us a long time to find someone to do the road work who wouldn’t charge us an arm and a leg.
Fast forward to this past Saturday. After six truckloads of gravel and a fair amount of shaping and scraping to get the right shape, our road guy ran out of gravel 30 feet from the connecting road. We could either order another load of gravel or make do with 30 feet of clay dirt that turns to sticky mud after a heavy rain.
Instead, Maria and I finished the road ourselves — without a tractor. Armed with a wheelbarrow, rakes, and shovels we carefully raked gravel from portions of the road where the dropping of gravel spilled over the sides. We raked, shoveled the excess gravel into a wheelbarrow, rolled it to the uncovered portion, dropped, and spread.
It was a hot, windy, dry afternoon of shoveling gravel. The hard wind kept our skin dry of sweat and masked the extent to which we were dehydrating. After a while we were tired, sore, and done. But we reached the connecting road.
On the surface, this sounds like a rather unpleasant experience, but we actually found ourselves having fun. Why? Well, that’s a bit difficult to explain. But it’s something like doing things that align with our soul’s purpose.
Shoveling gravel? Are you kidding me?
Well, no, I’m completely serious.
We found this piece of land through consistent prayer and effort. We had been searching for years with an intention of homesteading, of living off-grid, living a simple life, building our own domicile, growing food, and raising chickens. When we found this place we knew almost immediately it was the one — that this is where we would finally feel like we found our physical “home.”
Sloth Words
I just learned a new marketing term, “Sloth Words.” No joke. It’s an actual thing. They are words that appeal to psychological desires for slothfulness, and according to this article if you include them in your blog post titles you’ll realize a 57% increase in click through rates.
Imagine that. All you have to do is write titles like,
Three Easy Ways to Boost Your Productivity
Four Fast Strategies for Achieving Financial Independence
Build An Effective Website with This Free Tool
The sloth words being “easy,” “fast,” and “free.”
And few people would likely read articles with titles like,
Eight Difficult Steps to Weight Loss
Seven Slow Ways to Transform Your Life
This Expensive Service Will Transform Your Brand and Drive Sales
But the truth of it is, when we do the work we’re meant to do — the work that is aligned with our soul’s purpose — we will work hard at it simply because it feels enjoyable, satisfying, and even exhilarating at times. It won’t feel like work, even though we’ll be working incredibly hard at it.
The point of this story is not that Maria and I should start a gravel-spreading-by-hand-tool business, because it’s not about that. It’s that working on our land — in whatever fashion — is always highly enjoyable to us because it’s about our dream of homesteading, living simply and close to nature.
The Marketing Machine
The world of marketing has transformed our culture in profound ways — in some ways good, in many ways not so good. That is because the goal of marketing is to build awareness and drive sales. It’s not (by definition) about bringing positive change or helping people align with their purpose.
Thus, the marketing machine seeks to appeal to our base desires and instincts because we will respond more readily to those kinds of messages than what is actually true. Enter “sloth words,” words that gives us the false impression that things can be fast and easy.
But if we truly wish to transform our lives for the better, it means facing into our fears, examining our shortcomings, owning our mistakes, making amends, feeling difficult emotions, and having difficult conversations.
If we want to transform our businesses and make more money, it means diving into the deep end of working on the brand, understanding an audience, refining systems, respecting employees and customers alike, and endless hours of details and refinement. Not to mention financial stress, tax law complexities, and so on.
So, if I tell you I can show you how to be more successful quickly, or transform your relationships in four easy steps, I’m full of hooey. It’s not easy and it’s not quick. It’s hard to do the right thing. It’s hard to throw oneself into the deep end of a challenging situation without any guarantee it will work.
And yet, it’s infinitely easier to do what is hard. Following quick and easy is a sure-fire way of spinning your wheels and potentially making things worse. But doing hard things will transform your life far quicker than seeking the fast method.
Wait, what?
Ever heard the saying, “Buy cheap and buy again?” It means that when we buy on price alone, we may well end up buying something that won’t last and we’ll be heading back to the store to replace it before we can say Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers three times.
Seeking the easy road in relationships will inevitably lead to doom. People write about getting rich quick all the time but fail to mention all the prep work before they pulled the trigger on the one strategy that put them over the top. As in years of prep, of gaining experience, of watching, doing, and learning.
It took me 44 years to become ready for Maria and the kind of spiritually based relationship we have. At age 32 or even 42, I wouldn’t have been ready for her and for this kind of relationship.
I didn’t start writing until I was 47, because it took a lifetime of mistakes and growth and experience before I had a sense of what I wanted to say.
Everything worth doing is hard, but it’s easy because it’s what aligns with our soul’s purpose. It’s easy because it’s hard.
And so, hard is the new easy.