Our doubts can hold us back just as easily as they can goad us to achieve.
Lady Macbeth urges her husband to “screw your courage to the sticking place” as a means of encouraging him to murder Duncan and seize the throne of Scotland.
For any sane mortal, committing murder qualifies as a hard task, so it makes sense that Shakespeare’s power-hungry villainess would do whatever she could to put her husband in the proper frame of mind to commit this dastardly deed.
Which leads me to a thrillingly trite observation: Doing hard things is hard.
Not just murder, of course, but other things, like, say, swimming from Cuba to Florida (thank you, Diana Nyad).
Take the doubt survey! It’s fast, fun, and revealing!
I’ve been doing a hard thing, recently, and the experience makes me wonder why I put myself through it. Doing hard stuff is a sure-fire recipe for doubting your competence, if not your sanity. Along with doubting how you choose to spend your time. And doubting your judgment: Why did you agree to this in the first place? What did you expect to get out of it?
It’s not as if there’s any shortage of easy stuff to do. You know, the stuff we’re already good at, like making scrambled eggs or changing a diaper. (Don’t confuse easy with fun.)
My most recent hard thing involved creating from scratch a two-week course for writers on an amorphous topic that doesn’t readily lend itself to an instructional framework.
Specifically, I designed a course around defining the concept of your novel.
How does one teach “concept”? Good question. I don’t know why I pitched this idea in the first place.
As I sat down to invent the course, mild panic ensued. The blank screen interrogated me:
Why did you think you have a handle on this topic?
How are you going to pull this off?
What expertise do you bring to the table?
What if others have already taught this far better than you’ll ever manage?
As you can see, my doubts about this obligation (which I’d tried and failed to get out of, by the way, indicating my level of dubiousness) escalated and kept escalating. Imposter syndrome had me in its grip.
I had no choice but to forge ahead, so I proceeded to make something out of nothing—to conjure substance where I feared there was only a void. I did my best to turn an obligation into a creative opportunity.
I did the hard thing and felt that familiar stretch, or growth—an additive force. I became more than I had been. I learned things—brought forth new ideas—that I hadn’t known before, or didn’t know that I knew.
I filled that void—which wasn’t a void, after all, but a hole eagerly waiting to be filled.
This task took hours and hours, thus confirming the truth in the old adage, “no pain, no gain.”
The experience reminded me yet again that our doubts (self-doubts, in particular) can hold us back just as easily as they can goad us to achieve. The pendulum’s swing depends entirely on the choice we make—whether to exceed our known boundaries or remain safely on the sidelines.
I can’t say that I’m looking forward to the next really hard thing, but once confronted by it, I’ll try to remember that discomfort, terror, and doubt are not necessarily too high a price to pay for accomplishing something we assumed to be just out of reach.
This is so well-thought-out and so brilliantly written, Amy. Loved it!