You know what nobody tells you about doing hard things? The hardest part usually isn’t the thing itself—it’s dealing with everyone else’s opinions about why you shouldn’t be doing it.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because Christian and I seem to have a talent for making our lives more complicated than they need to be. We started a homestead when we had no idea what we were doing. I built a business around skills I was still learning. We moved to the middle of nowhere and then wondered why everything was so hard. We started a charter school in a town of 200 people because apparently we thought we didn’t have enough impossible projects on our plate.
Each time, people thought we were crazy. And honestly, sometimes we thought so too.
But here’s what I’ve discovered after years of voluntarily taking on challenges that most people would run from:
Here’s What I’ve Learned About Doing Hard Things:
1. It’s actually NOT about the hard, it’s about the flow.
This might sound counterintuitive, but the difficulty of a task isn’t what determines whether you should do it or not. What matters is whether it aligns with your strengths, interests, and long-term goals.
Some things are hard because they’re wrong for you. Other things are hard because they’re exactly right for you.
Building our homestead was incredibly difficult, especially in the beginning when we were learning everything from scratch. But it was the kind of difficulty that energized me rather than draining me. Every challenge felt like a puzzle to solve rather than an obstacle to endure.
Starting the school, on the other hand, has been a different kind of hard. It’s challenged us in ways that push against our natural strengths and preferences. But it’s also aligned with our values and long-term vision for our community, so we’ve found the energy to persist through the difficulties.
The key is learning to distinguish between hard-but-aligned and hard-but-wrong.
2. The more you push yourself, the more your capacity grows.
Your comfort zone isn’t a fixed boundary—it’s more like a muscle that gets stronger with use. Every time you do something that feels impossible, you expand your sense of what’s possible.
But this only works if you’re strategic about how you expand.
You can’t jump from couch potato to marathon runner overnight, and you can’t go from suburban life to completely self-sufficient homesteading in a single move. The growth has to be gradual enough that you can adapt, but challenging enough that you actually grow.
I’ve learned to look for challenges that are about 10% beyond what I think I can handle.
That’s enough stretch to create growth without creating overwhelm. It’s enough difficulty to build confidence without creating trauma. It’s the sweet spot where hard becomes possible.
3. Very few people will understand why you do what you do. (And yes, that includes friends and family.)
This might be the most important lesson I’ve learned, and it’s also the most painful one. When you choose to do difficult things that aren’t required, most people will not understand your motivation.
They’ll assume you’re trying to prove something, or that you enjoy suffering, or that you think you’re better than everyone else.
Family members will worry about you. Friends will question your judgment. Strangers will feel compelled to explain why your approach is wrong or unnecessary. Everyone will have opinions about how you could make your life easier, as if ease were the ultimate goal of human existence.
Learning to be okay with other people’s confusion and concern is essential for doing anything worthwhile.
This doesn’t mean being arrogant or dismissive of feedback. It means developing the confidence to pursue your vision even when other people don’t share it or understand it.
4. It’s hard to find people who’ll run with you.
Most people prefer the comfort of familiar challenges to the uncertainty of new ones. They’d rather complain about problems they know how to handle than attempt solutions that might not work.
This isn’t a character flaw—it’s just human nature.
But it does mean that when you decide to tackle something difficult, you’ll often be doing it without much company. You’ll have to find motivation from internal sources rather than external encouragement. You’ll have to celebrate small victories privately because other people won’t understand their significance.
The upside is that when you do find people who understand and support your vision, those relationships become incredibly valuable.
The few people who will run with you toward difficult goals become your most trusted advisors, your most reliable sources of encouragement, and your strongest allies when things get tough.
5. The skills transfer, but not in ways you expect.
Every hard thing you do teaches you skills that apply to other hard things, but not always in obvious ways. Learning to milk a cow doesn’t directly prepare you to run a school, but both require patience, consistency, problem-solving skills, and the ability to stay calm when things go wrong.
The meta-skills—persistence, adaptability, resourcefulness—are more valuable than the specific technical skills.
This is why I encourage people to do hard things even when they’re not sure where they’ll lead. Every difficult challenge you complete builds your capacity for handling future challenges, even if you can’t see the connections yet.
6. Success looks different than you expect.
When you’re considering a difficult challenge, you usually imagine that success means achieving your original goals efficiently and without major setbacks. In reality, success usually means achieving something better than your original goals, but through a completely different path than you planned.
Our homestead doesn’t look anything like what I imagined when we started. Our business evolved in directions I never anticipated. The school is solving problems I didn’t even know existed when we began.
The value wasn’t in executing our original plans perfectly—it was in developing the capacity to adapt when our plans inevitably changed.
7. The hardest things often lead to the most meaningful outcomes.
Easy things rarely change you in significant ways. Difficult things force you to grow, to discover capabilities you didn’t know you had, to develop character traits that serve you for the rest of your life.
The challenges that feel impossible when you start them are often the ones you’re most grateful for when you look back.
Looking back at the past fifteen years, the decisions that felt hardest at the time—leaving our comfortable suburban life, starting a business from scratch, taking on the responsibility of educating other people’s children—have led to the most meaningful and satisfying aspects of our current life.
Not because they were hard, but because they were aligned with who we were becoming.
So if you’re considering doing something difficult, something that other people think you’re crazy for attempting, something that pushes you beyond your current capabilities, here’s my advice:
Make sure it’s aligned with your values and long-term vision, then figure out how to make it 10% easier than impossible.
Break it down into manageable steps. Find at least one person who believes in what you’re doing. Accept that most people won’t understand your motivation. Prepare for the journey to look different than you expect.
And remember that the goal isn’t to do hard things for their own sake—it’s to become the kind of person who can handle whatever life brings.
Doing hard things one impossible step at a time,
-Nichole
P.S. If you’re in the middle of something difficult right now, remember that the hardest part is often right before the breakthrough. Keep going, even when you can’t see how it’s going to work out. Especially then.
