Why getting better at the thing we love is so painful

There are so many times where there are these skills that we want to obtain. Something we want to get better at. It could be coding, a sport like soccer, writing, any skill that we typically enjoy.

So, we set goals. Deadlines. We take courses. We work on projects. In the beginning, everything is flowing smoothly. We’re getting better and we’re enjoying it. But that doesn’t last long.

Soon into the process, we start getting bored. We don’t enjoy the courses or the projects anymore. It’s getting painful. We start dreading it. Meanwhile, because of this emotional battle, our growth decreases. We’re not learning as much as we used to. Learning has become tiring.

I recently found myself face this exact dilemma. I had grown fond of marketing and so I set a goal for myself to get better at website design, an aspect of marketing. The first few days went well. I was building a website for my Church as it needed a new look, and everything was flowing well. I was also learning HTML and JavaScript on the side.

But as things progressed, I slowly got tired of working on the website. I didn’t want to take the courses anymore. I started dreading it. And I wasn’t getting better either. I was forgetting most of what I had learned and whatever I did remember, I couldn’t figure out how to apply it. I was learning at slower speeds.

Now before I offer my reasons as to why this happened, I’ll share an interesting thought. You could call it an unprofessional case study.

While I was doing all of this, I was also trying to get better at telling jokes. I had found stand-up comedy intriguing and figured it’d be nice to be a decent jokester. As this was a hobby of mine, whenever I found free time I’d watch interviews of comedians, video essays, and stand-up routines trying to understand the science of a joke. I’d start writing jokes myself. I’d think about how I could make something funnier before I said it to my friends.

I never dreaded any of this. I enjoyed it. Further, I was getting better, at least according to my friends. I was consistently getting better. It had never become dreadful or painful, yet I was still growing at a consistent rate, arguably higher than the rate I had grown in website design.

Why?

You could say that stand-up comedy is inherently funny and thus enjoyable. Or that maybe website design was just a hobby and not meant to become something taken seriously. But I believe there’s more to it than that.

I believe it’s because I didn’t view getting better as a task. It wasn’t something that I had to do, but instead something I could do whenever I wanted to. There wasn’t a strict schedule, strict deadlines, or anything that tightly constrained what I could and couldn’t do.

To be clear, I’m not saying you should remove the order in your life. That’s an extreme and one that hasn’t worked for me.

I am instead proposing that you simply change your perspective. That might come with practical changes, but I am simply proposing that you look at growth in a different way.

That you remove the label of growth as a task or a deadline, but a process. That was the fundamental difference between my growth in website design versus stand-up comedy. It was because I gave myself room to fail, to breathe, and to grow.

Often times, in the pursuit of exponential progress, we forget the fundamental idea of everything being a process. We bombard ourselves with deadlines and tasks that it becomes so painful. I don’t believe you should remove those deadlines but give yourself space. In the end, you’ll approach growth in a much healthier way.

That often means that you’ll have more energy to give. That you might be more enthusiastic, and that can lead to more growth. Said simply, if you give yourself room, you’ll grow more.

Practically, that might look like setting more fun challenges. Small wins. We all have our different approaches, but at the end of the day, I encourage you to change the fundamental way you look at growth. Shift it from a task to a process. And let me know what happens.