nothing is straightforward. everything isn’t struggling.

I have a choice with the marketing gurus. Which, let's face it, we all are at this point in history. All of us who have a platform to express our opinion are trying to sell something. We were taught that this is the thing to do with an audience. Sell ​​them things, be it an idea, an image, or an image of ourselves that benefits our pockets or our egos.

In selling, it is essential to limit how difficult what you are trying to sell seems to the person you are trying to sell it to. This is why EASY is becoming as important a term in selling things to people as FREE. We need the potential buyer of our ideas, expertise and secret plans to wealth to believe that it will be easy and effortless, so they will effortlessly put their money, likes, shares or whatever currency you exchange where our mouth is.

Hell happens

This whole story has one catch. Nothing worth having comes easy. Absolutely nothing.

Any sense of ease disappears the moment something is made easy. The old easy becomes the new basic expectation, and now we want easier, more idiot-proof, less effort. So EASY does not exist. It is a mirage on the horizon that we chase in circles around the barren dessert of sloth and delusion.

There are those who tout the idea that if you focus and cut everything else out of your life and just follow your dreams and passions, it will be easy. I say bullshit.

It's never easy. While focusing and minimizing the noise of your life is essential to doing great things, professionals who dismiss the very existence of all the bad things that happen in people's lives in order to contain them are often empty achievers. They have great Facebook photos, great stats about their achievements, and are mostly lonely jerks with no human love and even less self-love when you dig deeper. We try to learn to be better in the human world from those who tell you to be less human. Let me know how it works for you over the years.

The human reality is that life is complicated and things go wrong. Even when things go right, they are not comfortable and nothing, I repeat, nothing works the way you wished and as quickly as you hoped it would. If things work even better or faster than you hoped, enjoy it first. Then realize that you were extremely lucky and part of what happened is a coincidence. Now study how much of what just happened was a coincidence and support those areas to make it last once standard probability, life and human factors catch up with your luck.

My belated adventures in paperwork

About three years ago I started an offshoot of my online persona so I could focus on paperwork. It was an idea that I had been considering for over five years before I did it, testing with great effort for a year before I bought and started the site. That's how Papernautic was born, after two name changes, long planning and a year of testing on Instagram to see if there was underlying interest. I had and still have great plans. Some of them have happened, many haven't happened yet, and some I've changed my mind about as I've tested things now that I'm working on it.

As an example, I didn't want to make a video in the beginning. I wasn't sure about putting them together and I didn't like what I saw others doing. I also didn't watch too many videos at the time so it was irrelevant to me. Now, three years later, video is much more ubiquitous in my life, so now it made sense for me to consider video to scratch my own itch. In January I decided to create my origami instructional videos.

It took several weeks of planning and testing before I made ten videos. They were muted because I wanted to record it separately and cleanly rather than bothering to talk and compose at the same time. More weeks passed during which I took beauty shots of the origami models, came up with the visual style and branding for the videos, made the title cards, wrote the instructions, recorded the audio and finally put together 3 videos out of ten. on a 7 year old netbook with a small screen and less computing power than your smartphone. Each video was less than 2 minutes long and took weeks to prepare.

Online gurus will tell you to "just do it". Putting it out there and not worrying about getting it right. This is good advice if you're doing something so new that its very existence grabs your attention. That doesn't exist in the video. If you can imagine it, someone on YouTube has already done it. There are millions of origami instructional videos. how do you differentiate yourself? You'll do better.

Better is not easy. Fast is not better. It's better for a two-minute video to look colorful, smooth, and professional, even if it's shot on your balcony and takes a month to shoot, at least the first time.

Then life got in the way. I haven't given up on videos, but with major practical upheavals going on in my life, that's okay. There were times when I literally didn't sleep for days or when I didn't have any computer to work on. No made-up excuses, real stuff that can't simply be placed under the "When the going gets tough..." motivational poster.

When the going gets tough

You know what, it's true when the going gets tough, the tough get going. But often, instead of their passion projects, they need to tackle much more important things like survival and logistics. That's the reality, and that's where persistence comes in, the fact that even if you're not afraid to drop the ball on some dream thing you're working on, you'll never stop working on it. If it's possible, you go for it. That's persistence, but more on that later.

It is now six months since I first made my ten videos. The tenth one just came out a few weeks ago. The gurus would say they should have been out in a day. After all, two-minute videos take two minutes to make, right? Really? How about good sound, editing, transcription, narration writing, recording. Fixing errors, creating captions, editing 5 pages of YouTube settings, creating images from videos, creating blog posts, editing, publishing, constantly sharing on social networks. All done in two minutes, right? Poorly.

Nothing is easy. Everything takes time, and unless you're some stupid idiot with delusions of grandeur and a digital nomad life who delegates everything to new age slave labor for 5 bucks apiece, things take time, especially in the beginning because you set the bar with your efforts. You have to know how to do everything before you teach others how to do it.

My advice to you regarding advice is to not take seriously any expert who says things are easy and fast but also tells you that success will require a lot of persistence. They will usually use the much dumber term "inappropriateness" instead of the perfectly good word. If things were really quick and easy, persistence would be pointless. 

My suffering is greater than yours

We have gotten into a state of mind where we like to celebrate our suffering. The problem with celebrating things is that you desire them, consciously or otherwise. To varying degrees, we all crave suffering and take damn good care to get it. How? It's really simple for us now, anything that even slightly disturbs our idea of ​​a perfect existence is marked as suffering in our book of life.

Did anything cost real effort? Suffering. Did someone force you to think and not use ready-made solutions? Suffering. Did something turn up, despite a million realistic variables, that didn't look a bit like what the outcome should be? Suffering. Did someone make you wait an extra minute for your morning coffee while you live-tweeted the experience of waiting at your desk and wasting your precious, unique time that could have been used to cure cancer and build your personal brand as a thought leader? Suffering.

We suffer a lot with the choice because it is now a badge of honor. Like 19th century European nobles who deliberately acquired cosmetic sword scars to appear more, well, noble, we invent suffering to add to our expected story of hardship before our great arrival at the great success we imagined get free. The fact is, we want things easy, but we don't want it to look like it was easy until we try to sell someone a course like we did. Suffering becomes a stumbling state that we claim and ignore at our convenience and whoever is watching.

what is suffering

Let's stop this nonsense. You can look up the meaning of suffering in the dictionary yourself, but what is suffering? Suffering is hardship. Difficulty doesn't just mean that something is hard, it means a level of pain, deprivation, illness, threat that is far beyond what is normal and expected.

This is where we get into trouble. What we "expect" is based on the logic of fantasy, not the reality of the real world. Effort is not hardship beyond what is expected. Effort is actually the expected method and process of getting where you want to be. The more extraordinary your expectations of where you want to go, the higher your expectations of effort should be. Doing what you should be expected to do to get what you want isn't suffering, it's a journey.