There’s a dangerous idea that’s been floating around the self-development world for the better part of four decades, which is simply that you should choose the path of least resistance.
The argument is that when you do that you are in a state of flow, you “stick with it” longer, and resistance has been seen as this terrible poison that should be avoided at all costs.
The view that I take is more aligned with the view posited by Jim Rohn, Steven Pressfield, and others in the old-school framework of thinking.
I like to think that choosing the path of least resistance is not the path to flow, but the path to atrophy.
This belief comes from the statement Jim Rohn said all those years ago: “Don’t ask for an easier path, ask for a stronger back.”
Life, in all of her beauty, tends not to get easier, but to get harder.
It gets harder if you level up, new levels, new devils, and all that sort of thing.
It also gets harder if you atrophy, so the question is not “will life get harder?” It’s really: what type of difficulties do you want to deal with?
The Two Root Causes
A lot of resistance comes down to two things.
You know exactly what to do, and simply don’t do it.
OR
You don’t know what to do, therefore you get pulled into the black hole of doom scrolling, procrastination, avoidance, and any and all distracting behaviors.
The good news is that you can answer both of these problems with a single play.
And that play is simple, not easy, and lethally effective.
Getting Control Of Your Prefrontal Cortex, Now
You may have heard of, or even tried before, the countdown method.
That’s where you simply count down from 5-4-3-2-1 and then you do the thing.
That’s good, but it doesn’t get you to the finish line.
I like to pair the 5-4-3-2-1 method with the 20 minutes of hell method.
20 minutes of hell is something that I’ve spoken about in multiple interviews over the years, but it’s a strategy that I came up with to keep my willpower muscle strong after I had “made it” in the world of business.
Every day, I select the thing that I am avoiding. I don’t care what it is. It can be business or personal. Then I put my timer on for 20 minutes and get that thing done as far as I can in those 20 minutes.
The strangest thing happens every time.
About 10 minutes into it, you get into the flow.
Yes, you heard that right. When you move into resistance, with willpower, you get into the flow.
And if you do this regularly, you’ll find yourself burning down the backlogs of “horrific projects” that were scaring you because you were simply too unclear or fearful to face them.
And what happens over time is that you habituate to the levels of difficulty, much like a game, that you have been facing daily, and you become a force of nature, looking for even more difficult, even more challenging things to pursue.
This is the same phenomenon that you experience when you get in the gym, do yoga, run, swim, or undertake any physical exertion, even cold exposure. You get to a point where you become comfortable with the discomfort, and a flame starts to burn inside you that makes you chase that dragon.
That’s the thing that I want to convey.
Resistance is a coach, your personal performance consultant.
You can avoid and ignore the calls to do what needs to be done, or you can suit up and get it done.
The goal is not to find the path of least resistance. The goal is to find the correct path and then develop the willpower needed that makes that exact path your path of least resistance.