Yesterday night, I was talking with a friend and I said something along the lines of cycling is the easiest hard thing I do. When I was riding my bike home, I realised a lot of life's' responsibilities and tasks can be put into a table, a matrix of sorts. There are tasks that are clear to us, but are hard to execute. And then there are tasks that are rather hard to figure out how, but trivial to execute. And there are tasks that easy or hard both ways.
Let's take a few bad examples. Laundry. For me, who has their washing machine inside their apartment, it is an easy - hard problem. It is very clear what I need to do with the laundry, but it is somewhat hard to execute, putting the laundry in the machine is not the only thing I need to do, I also need to make sure my wet clothes are put up on a drying rack for drying afterwards. It is rather menial work, arguably requiring one to wait until the washing machine is done with its' program. On the other end, there are things that are hard to know about but easy to execute. For example, buying a coffee grinder. Anyone who is interested in making decent coffee at home would agree, the grinder is a very important part of the coffee brewing process. Choosing a grinder is a relatively complicated sudoku puzzle. One has to consider the shape of the cutting blades that are inside the grinders, maintenance of the machine, how easy it is to get the ground coffee out from the grinder. All of these play a part in choosing a coffee grinder. But buying it, is rather trivial in today's world. Only thing one needs is a credit card.
And then there are things that are easy plan and easy to execute. Doing the dishes, as someone who has a dishwasher, is one of those tasks. It does not require planning or hard execution to do the dishes when using a dishwasher. And then there are hard - hard problems. Writing a novel is one of them. Not only one has to figure out a story, they also have to write the story down, edit it, rewrite part, over and over. It is one of those backbreaking procceses; like Studio Ghibli's Hayao Miyazaki said in an interview; and I rephrase, making an animated film is like working at a construction site, laying it out brick by brick. I think if one can plot out their lives' responsibilities on this matrix of planning & execution, one thing becomes quite clear. One gravitates towards the easy - easy things, but it is quite likely, most of the important things they might want to do, are hard - hard things. Looking for a job, moving to a different city, going through a divorce; all of these are, in my imagination, for most people are hard - hard problems. As the author of Cult of Done, Bre Pettis wrote, there are two (three) states of being. Not knowing, action and completion. Where one has to really deliberate are around not-knowing and action part. I argue, it becomes clearer when they lay it out on a matrix.