Which is easier? Doing what is hard or doing what is difficult?

From Seth Godin Book “Free Prize Inside” page 54 & 55

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Nobody Said It Was Easy

The thing about soft innovation and the creation of Purple Cow is that the very skills you are used to using to succeed aren’t much help. Putting in a lot of hours, using up a lot of energy, staying away from home at all hours---that’s painful and hard, but it’s not what you need to do to be an innovator.

Creating and championing free-prize isn’t hard, but it is difficult.

          

               Harry Truman made some difficult decisions. The most difficult, of course, was dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. The act itself wasn’t hard for Truman----he signed a memo and it was done. Making the decision, taking the responsibility, living with the outcome---that was difficult.

                Douglas MacArthur, on the other hand, managed a team that did hard work. He commanded hundreds of thousands of men and women, deployed millions of dollars in resources and performed an awesome task that was incredibly expensive.

                I define difficult work as the stuff that takes guts or insight. It’s not particularly dependent on how big your budget is or where you got a degree. Designing the profile for the Chrysler Building was difficult. Building it was hard.

                Companies are pretty good at work. Hard work involves the management of projects and the deployment of assets. The people working on a project don’t spend a lot of time worrying about whether it’s ultimately going to be a success in the marketplace---instead, they worry about their role in the process.

                Flying thousands of planes across the country every day is hard work. Publishing fifty thousand new books every year is hard work. Building millions of passenger cars every year is hard work.

                Having the guts to change the timetable so that your planes aren’t late, on the other hand, is difficult. So is publishing a book in a cereal box. And so is voluntarily launching an ultra-low emissions automobile.

Difficult work is easy to avoid. Difficult work is exactly what will get you promoted.

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