You Can Do Hard Things

DO HARD THINGS

I lead a small group of college age Sophomores. Many have already changed their majors more than once. The reason is always the same: whatever they were doing before proved too difficult. “It was just too hard,” they tell me.

Let’s take a trip back in time to the summer of 1984. Mary Lou Retton had just won gold. Every little girl I knew wanted to be a gymnast.

Including me.

I could do a cartwheel and a head stand and a back walkover.

But the splits eluded me.

And to me—that was the definitive skill—the thing that divided true gymnasts from mere wanna be’s.

Doing a split was hard.

And so I employed the same technique I still use today when I don’t know how to do something: I ask someone who does.

In this case, I called on my friend Claire Wellborn. We were at a birthday party, and we were jumping on the trampoline, playing games like popcorn and piggy in the middle. Claire must have done a split at some point, and I, incredulous, said, “Teach me how to do that.”

“It’s easy,” she said. “Stretch a little bit everyday, and eventually you’ll get there.”

Stretch a little bit everyday.

That advice has followed me my whole life.

Stretch your mind.
Stretch your relationships.
Stretch your money.

It’s funny how easy it is to forget such a silly little thing. Adult goals are big, impossible. We want to start businesses. Influence millions. Change the world. The method—stretch yourself a little bit everyday—seems so obvious as I sit here now typing these words.

Like my college Sophomores, when something feels hard I want to change activities or quit altogether. Keep going? That’s absurd!

Because it hurts. Starting something new is hard. Staying with something that feels tedious and boring is hard. Finishing well is hard.

Not many people know that a year before the 1984 Olympics, Mary Lou Retton broke her wrist and missed the world championships, and then a mere six weeks before the official start of ‘84 games, Retton suffered a debilitating knee injury that required surgery.

It’s all hard.

Stretching is more about discipline than anything else. Difficult choices require us to access our values. I once heard someone say things feel hard when you’re learning something new. Doing something over and over again doesn’t just make it easier; it actually rewires the brain. As you focus, different areas of your brain “light up” as blood flow increases and new connections form. What feels hard is actually just your brain making those new connections. As we learn something new, cells that send and receive information about the task become more and more efficient. It takes less effort for them to signal the next cell about what’s going on. In Biology, we say, “neurons that fire together wire together.”

And that’s how Mary Lou Retton revolutionized American women’s gymnastics for years to come.

Your Core Values

When I was nine, I didn’t know what values were, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t creating them.

And the same is true for you.

Consider the first goal you remember achieving. How did you do it? What value did you access that made it possible?

Incremental gains are important.

“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Besides making the task at hand feel easier, Incremental gains have the ability to motivate us. Every time we try something new, we remember that we already did something hard—and we didn’t die. Because we did it once, we can do it again.

I stretched everyday, and then I practiced going down into a split. Just like Claire promised, I achieved a pretty rad split in about a month’s time.

Whenever I do a split now—and I still do one everyday—I’m reminded that it all started with that first tiny stretch on a trampoline in 1984.

That hurt.
A lot.
Until one day, it didn’t.

The cool thing about learning how to do a split was that by employing one value—discipline—I gained another—flexibility.

For additional resources, read James Cleer’s book, Atomic Habits. His website also includes a comprehensive list of personal values. You can access it here.

What are the values that have helped you achieve your goals?
What keeps you from quitting when things feel hard?
What have you always wanted to do that you’ve been too afraid to start?

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The Good Life: It's a Question of WHO, not WHAT

FINDING YOUR “WHY”

In 1999, our family made our first-ever Amazon purchase. It was a book called Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping. I’m not sure you could have convinced 1999 Chantel that one day she'd not only be buying all her books on Amazon, but everything from batteries to cleaning supplies and even socks!

Paco Underhill, the book’s author, predicted that “online shopping would never overtake retail.” Boy, did he get it wrong! On Amazon, in addition to books, you can now purchase more than twelve million products.

There’s so many things we’re sure of when we’re young—we play games like M.A.S.H. that predict who we’ll marry and how many kids we’ll have and what kind of car we’ll drive. We go to college and think we’re prepared for work when we graduate. When you’re 22, you’ve got the whole world figured out.

In 1999, Gavin worked as a consultant for a large technology-based consulting firm, and I had just applied to medical school, not knowing that nine months after that I’d be giving birth to our first-born daughter.

Sometimes I think about the life we might have had—if Gavin had continued on the “partner” track at his big company and I had gone to medical school and become a big-shot doctor.

Thank goodness those predictions didn’t come true!

I used to think the “good life” was predicated on these “What do I want to be when I grow up” decisions, but the reality is the exact opposite:

A good life is born from a question of “who,” not “what.”

And what I mean by that is this:

Whether or not I went to medical school was irrelevant.
And whether or not Gavin stayed on the partner track was irrelevant.

We decided that who we were going to be together would always trump what we did with our lives. And our lives would never be the same.

By 2001, with another kid on the way, I knew for sure I’d never do the medical school thing.

And in September of that same year, when Gavin quit the consulting firm, a lot of people thought he was crazy, too. He had gotten a glimpse of his future—at men twice his age who spent the majority of their lives on the road, who’d been married two or even three times, and who barely knew their kids—and he finally said, “This isn’t for me.”

We never looked back.

Even though we didn’t know that one day we’d add two more kids to the mix.
Or that we’d fall in love with ministry.
Or that I’d start a nonprofit.
Or that we’d move to a place called Canton.

When we got married in 1996 we never could have guessed that the life we have now would be so beautiful and rich and full. And in 1999, when Gavin ordered Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, not only did he have no idea that that first purchase would be the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship with Amazon, but he had no idea that this book would inspire a whole host of questions.

Because why do we do any of the things we do?

For love?
Or for ambition?
Or because we don’t feel like we have any other choice?

What We Really Want

If we’re intentional about our lives, there is always a choice. We could have kept going, “kept our eyes on the prize,” so to speak, but for us, the prize was never the big house or the fancy car; it was always a purposeful, meaningful life together. We wanted margin to be creative, and we wanted to do work that felt meaningful. We wanted to be able to serve, but more importantly, we wanted to be able to love people well.

In 1999, we were buying a version of parenthood that we thought would serve us well. I’d be a stay at home mom for a year, then start medical school, and Gavin would continue consulting at his high end technology firm. We could figure out the logistics later.

But remember: in 1999, Paco Underhill didn’t think internet purchases would ever outpace brick-and-mortar retail, either.

He didn’t know what he didn’t know.

And neither did we.

I’m not sure you could have convinced 1999 Chantel that this life would be a better life.

But it is.

We did the best we could with the information we had at the time.

That’s all we can ever do.

Don’t beat yourself up for not being able to see into the future, but wherever you are, with the information you have, make the best decisions you can.

Sometimes I get annoyed when people ask me if I’m just a mom, and I think Gavin chuckles a little when people assume that as a pastor he only works one day a week. If we cared what people thought, we wouldn’t have been brave enough to do the work we’re doing now.

I think it all worked out okay.

“Open yourself up to the opportunities that are right in front of you, and the next step will reveal itself.”

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