Doing Hard Things

Doing Hard Things

Hello.

Every now and then someone will ask “How’s the business going?” And I want to say “Great! I’m loving it!” And in some respects it is great. I feel like I’m in the right place, doing the right thing. I get ideas for new products daily. The reviews are coming in and people are enjoying the stuff I’ve designed. 

But, between you and me, this is hard.

A lot of it comes easily to me, which is why I started this business specifically and not a bakery or financial consulting firm. I design stuff. Easy. I design ads to let people know about the stuff. Easy. I make choices about how the website should look and function. Easy. That is, the deciding is easy.

Deciding what the website buttons should look like is easy. But getting the app I’m using to do it, well, there’s a learning curve. There are so many buttons to click. And some of those buttons are not where I think they should be. And the little AI assistants don’t always get it right. 

“I’ve changed the button to red for you!” Look again, robot. That’s not red.

I just spent an hour and a half adding social links and changing two button colors.* That’s an hour and half I thought I was going to spend writing up a business grant application, which is also hard. Persuasively explaining why I need the grant in under 1,000 words while competing for it with hundreds of other small businesses is daunting.

But when I started this endeavor a few months ago I made myself a sticker. The one pictured above. I CAN DO HARD THINGS. I know what I’ve set for myself is hard. If it was easy… well, you know.

I made that sticker for myself because in that moment I remembered that at my full-time jobs I was the person who did the hard things. We have a creative review with a difficult client who’s mad at us because we totally got it wrong last time — give it to Emily. We need a whole new package design system created and ready to print in 1 day — give it to Emily. The client is asking for impossible things but also needs to feel heard, understood, valued and ultimately happy with another design — Emily.

Emily can do hard things.

I wasn’t going to include this sticker on the site but as I’ve thought about it whenever I see it on my mirror, journal, laptop (I made several) I realized that the practices I’ve designed for in this shop are all hard.

Design is hard. It takes years to get really good at it. That’s why the best firms have design teams — it takes several people looking at stuff over time from several vantage points to make something really great. And everyone learns from each other and we all get better over time. And the robots aren’t very good at it without a brilliant human fixing all the slop that comes out.

Writing is hard. Everyone can write something. But writing something that inspires people in some way is hard. Inspiring them to think differently. Inspiring them to feel something. Inspiring them to act. It’s not easy to do that really well.

And improv is hard by its nature. Most people would rather die than get up on stage. And then you have to be entertaining without knowing what is going to happen next. It sounds absolutely impossible to the uninitiated.

If you’re reading this, you probably do hard things too. So, I’m offering this sticker to you.

YOU CAN DO HARD THINGS.

Remember that when you feel like your life is full of impossible quests. You can figure out a way. You have before and you will again. Enjoy!

Check out the sticker here

*I want to note that this is not the hardest thing I've had to do since launching, just the most recent. Have you tried to place a Google ad lately? It left me near tears. And this blog — the layout is wonky and I can't figure out why yet. But I have ten other hard things to get to today. I'll fix it later.