Mark Becker

Two summers ago, Kara Lawson was speaking to her Duke basketball team. She wanted them to shift their mindset. What followed was 2+ minutes of gold on how to be successful. Here’s Lawson on embracing hard things: “We all wait in life for things to get easier. Think in your own life. I just gotta get through this, and then it'll be easy … It's what we do. We wait for stuff to get easier. “It will never get easier. What happens is you handle hard better. “Most people think life is gonna get easier. Basketball is gonna get easier. School is gonna get easier. It never gets easier. What happens is you become someone that handles hard stuff better. “That's a mental shift that has to occur and each of your brains. If you go around waiting for stuff to get easier in life, it's never going to happen. And then what happens? Oh, it's so hard. Oh, I can't do it. When is it going to be easy for me? Oh, it's easy for other people. “It's not. It's hard. And the second we see you handling hard better, what are we gonna do? We're gonna make it harder. Because we're preparing you for when you leave here. Not just basketball – in life. “And if you think life when you leave college is going to all of a sudden get easy because you graduated and you got a degree, it's not going to get easier. It's going to get harder. “Make yourself a person that handles hard well, not someone that's waiting for the easy. Because if you have a meaningful pursuit in life, it will never be easy. If you're trying to win a championship, if you're trying to have a family … Ask your parents. Do you think it was ever easy for them? “If you want to be successful, it goes to the people that handle hard well. Those are the people that get the stuff they want … If it's hard, don't get discouraged. It's supposed to be. Don't wait for it to be [easy]. It won't. "Make yourself someone that handles hard well, and then whatever comes, you're going to be great.” – My takeaways: 1. This isn’t about sports. It’s about building a business, building a family, building a community, being a valuable citizen and every other meaningful thing in life. 2. “Hard” doesn’t mean “bad.” There can be joy in hard things. 3. There’s a Haitian proverb: “Behind mountains are more mountains.” There’s always another one to climb. 4. What you see on social media is a facade. People make their lives look glamorous online. Behind the screen is a human being struggling through their journey. 5. None of us are immune to difficulty (even if some try to appear that way). 6. “Easy” is convenient, “hard” is fulfilling. What satisfies you in the short-term robs you in the long run. 7. Have you ever heard someone tell a story about how easy a great achievement was? 8. “Easy choices hard life, hard choices easy life” misses the point. We shouldn’t seek an easy life to begin with. 9. Instead, build your capacity for difficult things. Then find joy in the process of handling those things. 10. No meaningful life travels an easy road. ||| Hope this is helpful. Follow me @TMitrosilis for more writing. I also write a weekly newsletter on the process of improvement → theprocess.news/subscribe