Do the Hard Thing: You can't afford not to

In the first training meeting of the year for a group I’m in, Ian Carroll taught about 2025: The Year of Hard Things. We all have things we need to learn in order to grow our business, families, influence, or ministry: people skills, finances, etc. We are talking about skills, not gifts. He challenged us all, “Do the hard things.”

We all need to understand this: what we invest in will grow. Health, finances, purpose, calling, and relationships will grow as we invest in them. Disappointment and dissatisfaction will also grow if that is what we choose to invest in. We must be careful what we are stewarding, watering, and planting in our hearts, imaginations, and lives.

I know, we've all heard this before! But it's true! I'll help you see why.

Ignorance Tax: The price you pay for not doing the hard thing

Ian challenged us to learn what we need to learn, do what we need to do, because we can’t afford not to. Here was his example: if I have a goal of earning $1,000,000 per year (he is focusing on business, not church), and I currently earn $50,000, I am paying an ignorance tax of $950,000 per year. That’s how he justified the statement, “You can’t afford not to.”

We all have things we need to grow in, get better at, or learn in order to close that gap between the 50K earner and the 1M earner (or whatever your goal is). We need to learn new skills, learn to scale, take risk, implement ideas, be willing to fail, fill in the blank. That’s what Ian means when he challenges us to do the hard thing.

Do the hard thing.

Figure out how.

It costs you too much not to.

You can’t afford not to.

We need to figure out what our self-saboteurs are. We need to figure out what needs to be sacrificed. We need to learn how to transition and have greater faith. Faith=Risk.

What are your self-saboteurs? What keeps you from doing the hard thing?

I have been thinking about that message for the past few months. Not coincidentally, I have been on a healing journey of my own. There are things I do that seem normal to me, that I realize have been holding me back from progressing. For instance, sometimes I get paralyzed by decision making. I get so overwhelmed by not knowing, that I do nothing. I was talking to my friend Daniel about another topic recently, and he said, “It’s better to make the wrong decision than to make no decision.” He went on to explain (in military terms) that if you stay in one spot, you die. But if you make a decision and keep moving, even if it’s the wrong decision, you can change directions on the fly. But if you just stay stationary, you’re eventually going to get hit by the enemy. This may seem dramatic unless we realize we really are in a battle. The Lord is leading towards His purposes and callings for our lives, and the enemy is trying to take us out. There is no neutral ground.

As I started to dive into some areas in my heart I needed healing, I started to see why I get paralyzed sometimes in decisions. I’m sure this will come to no surprise: fear. There were some things that happened in my past that caused me to form a belief that it wasn’t safe to make a bad choice. If I chose wrong, there would be severe punishment. In my head, I know all the sayings about how failure isn’t bad, we just need to fail up, if we aren’t failing, we are staying too safe, etc etc etc. But, the beliefs in my heart overrode all of those words of wisdom. In my heart, I believed it wasn’t safe to fail. And I was so afraid of failing, I would choose nothing. Fear was taking over my decision making process, so yielding to fear was one of my major self-saboteurs.

I don’t have issues with dreaming! I have issues with implementation, because as soon as I bump up against a decision that doesn’t feel like there’s a safe option, I freeze. Now that I know, it’s on like Donkey-Kong (to use a phrase from my childhood).

The Cost to Do the Hard Thing

Yesterday, I did a hard thing. Sometimes I teach people to hear from God, to ask Him questions, or lead them in meditation of scripture. I even wrote a book about learning to hear God, because I believe He is always speaking to us, we just aren’t great at tuning in to Him. We have to be intentional about shaping our beliefs because our beliefs shape our lives. I have been dreaming about creating some content for YouTube and other social media with little snippets of how to do what I teach. I have a list in my phone of a bunch of different ideas.

I had some cool ideas about what it would look like. Here’s one: I was dreaming about recording a prayer or a meditation, and then figuring out how to put it with one of those soundwave visualizers, typing out the transcript, and then uploading it onto Youtube for people to listen to or share with their friends. As I thought about the logistics, I was paralyzed by fear. What should I record with? What program should I use? Could I learn how to use it? How do I get the music and the prayer on the same file, and then how do I use the visualizer? How do you start a YouTube Channel? What mic should I use? Do I need my whole podcast setup? So many things.

Yesterday, I didn’t let fear stop me from doing the hard thing. I used the voice record app on my iPhone to record a prayer. I found a site that has royalty free music, and chose a 15 minute track to download. Then, I used Garage Band to put the tracks together and edit. I found a site called echowave and signed up for the cheapest account they offer. It took about 1 hour to learn how to use the editor, choose the waves, edit the transcript, change the font color, and render the video. It wasn’t too difficult to start a YouTube channel, name it, give it a description, and upload my first video. Normally I would have used a bunch of excuses, but instead, I used what I had, and learned what I needed to learn.

Doing the hard thing:

30 minutes - recording the prayer, even though I was super nervous

5 minutes - finding and downloading a 15 minute music track from Pixabay

45 minutes - learn how to use Garage Band and trim my prayer to match the music

60 minutes - learn how to use Echowave, edit, and render the video

30 minutes - start the YouTube channel, set up the description, upload my first video

60 minutes - listen to the content again, criticise it, tell myself no one is ever going to listen to it, and if they do, they will probably rip it to shreds and call me a heretic. Convince myself it’s not good enough and I should probably just let it sink into the depths of where YouTube videos go to die.

60 minutes - convince myself we are doing the hard thing. It’s OK if it’s not perfect. My first podcast sucked. My first prayer meditation was going to suck. My first TikTok sucked too, and I didn’t die then either. I needed to share this with someone, I need to put it out there.

2 minutes - share it with one friend and one prayer group, even though it made me want to throw up!

________

4 hours 52 minutes - to learn a few new skills, push through fear, and Do The Hard Thing!

Whittle away at that Ignorance Tax!

Fear didn’t win yesterday, and it won’t win tomorrow. Maybe I won’t be a famous YouTube influencer, and I’m totally OK with that. But, I will Do the Hard Thing! Day by day, project by project, skill by skill, I’ll close that gap and reduce that ignorance tax!

Check out Belief Rehab: You Are Enough, or you can find me on YouTube now, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, learning and growing and taking risk and sucking at some things, but hopefully gaining skill! Leave a comment or share with someone you want to hold you accountable to DO THE HARD THING! Y'all feel free to hold me accountable too.