The Path of Least Resistance Is Not Indiscipline

 

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

The voice floated up from the invisible depths below.

“Lower,” it said calmly.

I was thirteen years old, half-blind without my glasses, standing at the mouth of Nutty Putty Cave — a geothermal blowhole famous today for tragic reasons but at the time, just a strange adventure spot for me, a few friends, and a couple of our dads.

My guide, one of my friend’s dads, had climbed in ahead of me. From above, all I could see was darkness. When I finally worked up the courage to descend into the hole, all I could find in front of me was a small opening barely the size of my hand. Every instinct screamed that it was impossible to get through.

“There’s no way I can fit!” I shouted.

“Lower,” he repeated. “You need to get on your stomach.”

Moments from panic, I finally laid down on the warm, moist ground, and stretched out my hands into the darkness in front of me. Sure enough, a broad passage opened up beneath the tiny crevice I had been feeling.

The way forward wasn’t standing up or trying to squeeze myself through an impossibly small hole. It was below me, against the warm rock where I had to trust in gravity, squeeze a little closer to the earth, and move forward in a way that never occurred to me before.

That’s an experience that I’ve thought a lot about over the years, but lately, I’ve been thinking about it in a different way.

I had the conversation with my wife again last night. My fledgling business is not even a year old yet, and cash flow is tight. My lifelong response has always been just to work harder and smarter and also harder.

The default in my life has always been to assume that the way forward has to be harder.

I think about how often we confuse effort with progress.

Sometimes, I wonder how often the actual, workable path isn’t about trying harder at all.

It’s about finding the space where the rock has already made room; a way for us to get through without the use of a jackhammer or rock saw.

Having only been in one other cave in my life, I had a different picture in my head. I didn’t expect the rock I was pushing against to magically yield, but I did expect to find a doorway, or something I could push against that would let me through.

Instead, what I found was something that required humility. My guide was trying to tell me to get lower. He was asking me to trust the unknown and crawl. It wasn’t the way forward that I pictured (or even wanted) but it was the way forward — the only way forward — that existed.

Craig Axford once wrote, “The map has been mistaken for the territory.”

That’s exactly what happened in that cave — and it’s what happens in life all the time. We draw up maps in our heads of how progress should look: bold, forceful, heroic.

But the real territory? It’s often lower, narrower, slower than we imagine.
The way forward asks for less defiance and effort and more discernment.

Western culture, in particular, has taught us to confuse the path of least resistance with weakness and laziness.

We think if something doesn’t feel impossibly hard, we must not be trying hard enough.

Sometimes, though, the best way through is the one we fight tooth and nail for. It’s the one we find when we’re willing to lay down our assumptions and feel for the opening.

Running a young business, I catch myself (literally all the time) falling into the same mental trap that’s been my go to for most of my life:

• If cash flow is tight, work harder.
• If marketing isn’t clicking, push more.
• If growth feels slow, grind longer hours.
• If nothing’s moving, well, maybe I should just push the rock harder.

But maybe, sometimes (most of the time?), I’m standing upright and at the wrong entrance.

Maybe I’m looking for a door that doesn’t exist when the real way forward is a down to earth, less glamorous, but more possible way if I just stop fighting gravity.

Dan Pedersen once wrote,

The path of least resistance doesn’t equate to being undisciplined. It also doesn’t mean taking the easy way out when it comes to dealing with problems that need to be solved.

It’s not about being lazy or unfocused. It’s about finding the most fruitful moments and opportunities. It requires us to overcome some resistance to find them, but when we find them things just work better.

My focus is on business much of the time, but this is about so much more than business.

For you, maybe it’s in how you try to fix relationship that are strained — by pushing harder to be heard instead of “getting lower,” listening better, and finding a space to mend the relationship that might already be there.

A big one for me lately has also been in how I think about my health. “Run more” is a refrain I hear in my head all the time as I battle to lose the pounds I’ve gained and that have made me uncomfortable over the last year and a half. Consistency, more than intensity, is what builds both endurance and strength.

Perhaps it’s in how we wrestle with disappointment (remember the one about pre-rumination?). We brace ourselves for a fight that never comes or miss the quiet invitation to adapt, to let go, and to move forward a bit differently than we had planned.

We think it’s discipline when we grit our teeth and push harder, but discipline is about recognizing when to stop pushing in the wrong direction.

There are those times when the real work isn’t in conquering the obstacle, but in finding the real passageway. It’s the one that was always there; just a little lower than our pride wanted to look.

Do any of these define how you approach things? This is a page out of my favorite “how to approach hard things book”:

• We mistake discipline for defiance.
• We mistake effort for wisdom.
• We mistake force for experience.

This is exactly how we wear ourselves out standing at the wrong entrance, when the way forward is patiently waiting at ground level.

That’s why the path of least resistance isn’t indiscipline.

It may well be a deeper kind of discipline. It’s the kind that asks us to stay open, aware, and trust that not every battle is meant to be won.

Especially in business, sometimes accepting that fact can be taken as humiliating when really it’s just humbling.

Most of the time, the way forward isn’t blocked because we’re not strong enough and not because we’re not tenacious enough. It’s blocked because we’re too proud to admit that we’re carrying too much or assuming that the struggle is the only proof that we’re moving.

Sometimes, the answer is to get lower and crawl; to trust the quiet voice inside (typically shut down by our own inner critic) that’s whispering, “The path is there. You just can’t see it yet.”

That day in Nutty Putty comes to mind a lot. I’ve told that story a hundred times or more. I was so close to giving up as the panic closed in around me. I was certain there was no way forward, but all I needed to do was change how I approached the problem.

Listen.

Crawl.

Life’s like that all the time.

While I believe we can find meaning in all hard things, that doesn’t mean we’re meant to power through every hard thing. Some fights are not worth fighting.

Conversely, not everything that feels easy is necessarily shallow. Profound lessons can be learned by spending time thinking about why something comes easy to us.

Sometimes, all we need to do is breathe, flatten ourselves against the rock, and keep moving forward.

The maps we carry — all our previous experience and the advice from others — are just maps. They don’t define the territory we’re in now. Real life, real love, real work, and real growth are things that hardly ever follow the neat routes we draw for them.

Sometimes, the way through is lower, smaller, and quieter than we ever expected (or wanted) but it’s still the way through.

And that’s what matters.

Don't Confuse the Waves for the Current

 

Photo by Silas Baisch on Unsplash

When I was 13, I stood less than 20 feet from a mother moose and her calf. I was with some friends from Boy Scouts, hiking above our camp in the mountains, when we stumbled onto a meadow and saw them grazing.

None of us knew how dangerous that encounter was.

We were kids — curious, loud, and full of bad instincts. We walked away quietly, “borrowed” a head of lettuce from our coolers, and tossed it in her direction. I don’t remember if she ate it or just kept staring. One thing, though. I’ll never forget the stillness.

Thankfully, she didn’t charge us. She just stood there. We were studying her and she was studying us.

It was a peaceful moment that could’ve turned violent without any warning. She made the decision for both of us, and thankfully, that was to turn and walk away into the trees.

It’s probably for the best that we never saw her or her calf again.

It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about that experience. It wasn’t a storm in my life but it had all the ingredients to become one. We were fortunate. None of us had any idea how protective a moose can be of its calf.

The experience seems like a good analogy for life: sometimes quite on the surface; underneath, the potential for or an actual, violent storm.

When a storm first hits, it’s hard to tell if you’re just feeling the ripple of waves passing through or if those ripples are a sign of something deeper and more serious.

A shift in the current, if you will.

Waves are the everyday, surface-level disruptions like a hard day, an argument, some bad news. They crash over you sometimes loud and sudden, and sometimes relentless.

The current is what’s happening underneath — your direction, values, and long-term momentum. It doesn’t always show up immediately. Most of the time, you’re not even aware it’s there because it’s been created by a lifetime of experiences and values. Ultimately, however, it’s what decides where you end up.

So often, we mistake the waves for the current. We panic when we feel the jolt of impact and assume we’re being dragged somewhere new, but not every wave means the current has changed. In fact, most waves don’t signal a change, but not every current shift comes with noise either.

Waves demand attention, sometimes for a long time and sometimes for just a moment. Currents require discernment.

So how do we know when the waves matter, and when they’re just passing through?

Reality is, that’s a hard question to answer, and I’ve answered wrong both ways.

There was a time in my life when everything felt off. Work was stressful, I felt like my wife and I weren’t on the same page on a lot of thing, and I was a lot less patient than I typically am with our kids. I chalked it up to a rough season of choppy waters and endless waves, nothing more. Like I typically do, I figured I could just push through (just keep swimming, right?). I didn’t need to talk to anyone because things would eventually settle down.

But they didn’t.

Weeks turned into months, and that sense of “off” didn’t fade. It worked its way deeper into my life. I wasn’t just tired from pushing through. I was depleted.

One evening, standing in front of the spice cabinet in our kitchen, I realized that this wasn’t a series of bad days.

The current in my life had shifted.

You could argue that it took me too long to admit it, but perhaps the lessons I needed to learn were still building enough momentum to break through the surface of those turbulent waters.

It was, however, one of those moments that stopped me right where I stood and caused me to question what changed. What values had I laid down to carry the burden I’d lashed to my own back?

I’m not exaggerating when I say that moment was life-altering, standing in my kitchen holding a dusty, old container of dried rosemary. It was a dramatic change where I realized the current I was swimming in was not where I wanted to be, so I got out of the turbulent water.

Then again, we’ve all had those moments in life when we’ve made big decisions because of a single wave. An unfriendly comment from a co-worker or family member. A disappointing outcome. A brief identity crisis when something you put your heart and soul into failed. In those cases, abandoning ship isn’t generally the right move. Sometimes, all you need is a bit of rest, a bit of perspective, and a good snack.

“Wow, those are great little anecdotes,” you might be saying to yourself, “but Aaron, you still haven’t answered the question.”

I said it wasn’t easy. The challenge is knowing when to ride it out and when to course-correct (or pick a completely new boat). Look, there’s no clean formula for that. Sometimes, a wave feels like it’s drowning you, until you realize the water’s only a foot deep and you can stand up. Other times, it feels manageable until one day you realize how exhausted you are from swimming in the wrong direction for months. Sometimes, you are swimming the right direction, but the current is so strong you feel like you’re not moving.

That’s the quiet danger of confusing waves and currents. You either overreact to something temporary or you miss something lasting until it carries you somewhere you never meant to go.

There are some practical questions to ask when the water starts getting rough:

• Is this exhaustion or disconnection?
• Am I reacting to a moment or drifting from who I want to be?
• Is this feeling new or is this a pattern I’ve been ignoring?

Those are a few drops in the sea of questions you could ask yourself, and the questions you ask may not give you immediate answers. But they can help you take a breath. Questioning is an invitation to notice whether you’re being tossed around by a storm but are still where you belong or if you’ve slowly, silently drifted into another ocean altogether.

Back in that meadow of nearly thirty-five year ago, the moose didn’t charge us. We got to walk away and tell the story. We even convinced more friends to come with us to see if we could find the moose again. We were too ignorant to know the danger we faced, but that mother was experienced enough to know we weren’t a threat. We were fortunate that we didn’t push her boundaries enough to make her change her mind.

When you’re staring down a metaphorical moose or being buffeted by waves, presence of mind is required to decide whether to stand your ground or swim away. Knowing how to decide is part of the wisdom we collect as we go.

We’ll all face storms (or moose). Sometimes we feel pulled by undercurrents we don’t even notice until we’re miles from where we started. Sometimes, like a group of clueless kids in a meadow, we just get lucky. Luck isn’t a great strategy. At some point, we all have to learn how to tell the difference between the wind at our back and the tide that’s dragging us out.

When we do, the important thing to remember is that we get to choose how we respond — with wisdom, clarity, and hopefully, without a moose deciding for us.

Thanks for reading, and before you go. . .

I’m Aaron Pace. I write about life, business, and lessons learned from navigating life with curiosity and a touch of humor. As a lifelong problem-solve with a love of storytelling, I’d like to invite you to follow me here (on Medium.com), where I explore the happy union of growth, human value, and innovation.

Rewriting the Stories We Tell Ourselves

 

Photo by Reuben Juarez on Unsplash

I’m a professional ruminator. I’m so good at it, in fact, I often pre-ruminate — stress about conversations I haven’t even had.

If you’ve ever rehearsed an argument or tough conversation in your head ten different ways, you know what I mean. We imagine every worst-case response, every possible misinterpretation and misrepresentation. We script the whole thing like we’re prepping for trial instead of a human conversation.

Years ago, I had one of those conversations. I was a leader in an organization tasked with resolving a conflict that had dragged on for months. Three parties were involved, which made things even messier. When it came time to make a decision, I made the wrong one.

To be fair, I did the best I could with the information I had, but I was close friends with one of the parties. Unfortunately, they were the ones hurt most by my decision.

I spent several nights lying awake, playing out a hundred different versions of the conversation I needed to have with them. In my head, they were furious. Betrayed. I imagined every word they might say, on repeat.

When the time came, the conversation didn’t go like that at all. They were hurt, sure, but they were also gracious. Forgiving. They reminded me our friendship mattered more than one bad call.

I wish I could say that realization helped me stop the pre- and post-rumination spiral, but it hasn’t. What it did do was help me notice that not every thought was negative, just that most of them weren’t grounded in real listening. I wasn’t making space for truth: that my friends cared deeply about me, and I cared deeply about them. I ignored the years of trust and the dozens of ways we’d shown up for each other. Instead, I absorbed fear, spun it into fiction, and treated it like fact.

So what if the real problem isn’t overthinking — but poor listening?

Being honest, I often listen passively — nods, mhmms, a half-hearted attempt to absorb what someone’s saying without interrupting. That doesn’t qualify as active listening, but for a long time, that’s how I thought of it.

In his book Shy by Design, Michael Thompson wrote, “Rather than creating an empty space for people to bounce their own ideas around, bounce ideas back by asking thoughtful questions.”

He was referencing a study of active listening written about in Harvard Business Review by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman. Michael’s thought and the HBR article completely reframed the concept of active listening for me.

They wrote:

While many of us have thought of being a good listener being like a sponge that accurately absorbs what the other person is saying, instead, what these findings show is that good listeners are like trampolines. They are someone you can bounce ideas off of and rather than absorbing your ideas and energy, they amplify, energize, and clarify your thinking. They make you feel better not merely passively absorbing, but by actively support-ing. This lets you gain energy and height, just like someone jumping on a trampoline.

A good listener doesn’t just hear you. They reshape your thoughts. They ask better questions. They give your words space to become more than they were.

My dad’s dad was like that. I lived with my grandparents for a time, and when I’d come home from school, Grandpa would ask thoughtful, probing questions about what I was learning. Even when the topics were outside his wheelhouse, he listened closely enough to ask something that made me think harder. He gave my thoughts more shape than they had when I spoke them out loud.

That quote made me think about those conversations — and that’s when it hit me: What if that kind of listening isn’t just something we offer others, but something we owe ourselves?

We’re often more generous with a friend than we are with ourselves. We reflect, reframe, and ask questions for them. But when it comes to our own inner voice, we let the harshest version win by default.

If bad self-talk is a sponge, maybe the answer isn’t to ignore it or shut it down — but to trampoline it. Let it bounce. Engage with it. Ask better questions. See what clears up in the process.

If you’ve ever helped a friend navigate something difficult, you listen carefully, ask questions, push gently on negative assumptions, and remind them of relevant truth they may have overlooked. We help them bounce around with care, not drive them deeper into the spiral.

So, when it comes to our own thoughts, why is it that we rarely offer ourselves the same generosity?

Instead, we absorb thoughts like:

• “I’m going to screw this up” or “I always screw this up.”
• “I’m just not as good at this as they are.”
• “I’m going to say something stupid in that interview, and I’m not going to get that job” or “I said something stupid in that interview, and that’s why I didn’t get that job.”

We accept them as fact. In reality, most of these thoughts would (and do) fall apart under even the smallest amount of curious questioning.

That’s where the trampoline comes in.

Instead of absorbing the thought and letting it drag you down, bounce it back with a question:

• “Is that actually true or just familiar?”
• “What else might be going on here?”
• “If a friend said this about themselves, what would I say?”
• “Is this thought helping me move forward or just punishing me?”

Trampolining thoughts isn’t about toxic positivity or pretending everything is fine. It’s about becoming an active participant in your own thought process, rather than the passive recipient and (sometimes) unwilling entertainer of whatever story shows up first.

Maybe being kind to ourselves starts with listening to ourselves better.

Good parents and teachers teach us how to talk to each other. In the current climate, sometimes the civil discourse isn’t so civil, which may feed the wrong-headed way we approach talking to ourselves and listening. If the idea of bounding your thoughts feels strange or even a little weird, that’s okay. Fluency in self-criticism seems innate for most of us but curiosity takes practice.

You don’t need a perfect system, really just a pattern to interrupt the mental autopilot.

Try this:

1. Name the thought. Literally say it or write it down. Getting it out of your head shrinks its power.
2. Ask one better question. Not ten. Just one that invites a second interpretation.
3. Respond like you would to a friend. Say it out loud if you need to. “That was a tough thing, but it doesn’t have to define you.”

You don’t have to win the argument. You just have to stay in the conversation.

With time and practice, the inner voice starts to shift from the harsh narrator to the curious companion. I’m not sure it’s even good for us not to have an inner voice, but it’s so nice when it becomes less critical and more helpful.

Sometimes, the thoughts that shape us shout. Sometimes, they whisper. Often, it’s on repeat until even the lies sound like truth. Unless we learn to challenge them, to bounce them back and ask better questions, we risk letting the wrong stories define us.

That’s the real work of rewriting the stories we tell ourselves. It doesn’t happen by ignoring hard truths or drowning out doubt with blind optimism. It does, however, happen by offering ourselves the same kind of thoughtful attention we’d give a friend. Or a grandchild walking in the door after school, backpack heavy with questions.

Talking to my grandpa, I wasn’t looking for him to give me answers, just someone to listen, and he asked the kinds of questions that made the answers more apparent. He wasn’t trying to absorb everything I said. Instead, he helped me shape my own thoughts into something better.

That’s what I’m doing now with my own thoughts, assumptions, and spirals. I’m not shutting them down, but I’m also not letting them take over. I’m learning to bounce them gently, ask better questions, and see where they land. Sometimes, it’s okay to ask them to kindly get off the trampoline.

If the stories we tell ourselves shape the lives we live, don’t we owe it to ourselves to listen to ourselves like someone who cares?

We’re the ones who have to live with and inside these stories, right?

So let’s make them worth coming home to.

Mistaking Effort for Progress

 

Photo by Anna Samoylova on Unsplash

I was 30 hours into building an amazing software platform for one of my clients. I was so excited about its potential. It had all the bells and whistles and access to more data from their sales system than you could possibly imagine.

When I committed the project to production, I couldn’t have been more pleased with myself. It was, at the time, my own magnum opus.

I presented it to my client.

Where they awestruck by my creation?

No. They hated it.

I spent 30 hours in “know it all” mode. I knew the data. I knew what I wanted to see, but I never stopped to ask the client what they wanted outside of the original idea. I built something for them for me.

In their book, “Software as a Science,” Dan Martell and friends make the argument: “You can do the right things in the wrong order and still lose.”

In that circumstance, that loss for me was unfortunate, but not catastrophic. I was able to go back and remake what my client wanted. I mean, I had to do it for free, but when I was done redoing it, the client was happy.

There’s a sometimes painful truth: it is possible to spend a lot of time building the wrong thing. In my case, I didn’t take the time to really understand the client’s requirements.

Of course, I learned a valuable lesson along the way, so I wouldn’t necessarily call it wasted time, except that I did about 50 hours of work for the price of 30. When you’re being paid to do something, it’s beneficial to know the requirements before you create the wrong magnum opus.

In short, I had learned a hard truth: Effort doesn’t always equal progress.

I have a bad habit of not writing my to do list down, but I still derive pleasure from checking things off mentally. It’s that mini-dopamine hit that comes when the checkbox has a, well, check in it.

It’s productive. That’s creates energy, especially when I’m building something cool. I was in the zone for a lot of those 30 hours. I don’t enjoy “the flow state” often so it was great to be head’s down, moving fast.

In that instance, doing wasn’t the same thing as progress.

Progress isn’t doing. Progress is moving toward the right thing. Directionless effort is just motion. Since I didn’t slow down to validate or clarify, I ended up further from the goal.

Where I thought I was building value, I was really building a monument to my own assumptions.

Go me!

The Emotional Debt of Unchecked Assumptions¹

The more time you spend engaged in something, the more it can hurt when you admit it’s wrong. Economically, it’s the sunk cost fallacy. We’ve invested a bunch of time and money, therefore we have to see “the thing” through to conclusion.

In business, you end up racking up a lot of financial and emotional debt, especially when you skip the feedback part.

That, of course, is just what I did. I had my tools polished and ready to use, I knew the data, I knew what was possible, but I never stopped to know what the client’s priorities even were. They wanted something lean, focused, and simple.

Not the Brahm’s Rhapsody #2 in G minor.

I didn’t know that because I didn’t ask.

Here’s a harsh truth: effort without validation is a liability.

Busyness Feels Safe

There’s nothing subtle about the comfort a lot of people in business feel just being busy. You can avoid the vulnerability of asking questions by convincing yourself that you’re making progress.

You can avoid the hard conversation by doubling down, saying, “I’m moving fast,” while not asking, “Am I moving fast in the right direction?”

Blind effort hides our fear of being wrong. It’s also where pride masquerades as productivity.

I wish I could say I’m consistent in doing things differently, but I repeated the same mistake with a smaller project and a different client just a few days ago. He wanted what ended up being nothing more than a bullet-point list of how to do something. I gave him a 25-page document outlining all the different ways something could be done, 99% of which he would never use.

Oops.

Where I thought I was building value, I was really building a monument to my own assumptions.

So, let me give myself some practical advice to follow. Maybe this will resonate with you. Before I build or write anything whether software, business process document, or a consulting recommendation, I need to ask three simple questions:

1. Do I understand the problem clearly? To be fair, this one isn’t usually the issue, but can be really problematic if you don’t understand this one before getting started.
2. Have I heard what the other person needs in their own words? This is almost always where I go wrong.
3. Am I creating to serve or to impress? Vanity, anyone?

If I can’t answer all three of these, I’m really not ready to start building.

This Happens Everywhere

We’ve already touched on the fact that this isn’t isolated to software and process development.

• It happens when you’re working 80 hours a week in a job you know you should leave.
• It happens when you throw yourself into organizing the house, hoping it will fix tension in your relationship.
• My personal demon; it happens when you keep running harder in a race you never wanted to be in.

It sounds like I’m vilifying effort. Effort’s not bad. Effort’s required to move anything forward. When it’s misdirected, however, it becomes a kind of show — impressive movements that don’t get you anywhere.

Hobbies are great effort just for the sake of effort, but if you’re building toward something, the real work isn’t in the building. It’s in slowing down to make sure you’re building the right thing.

Sometimes, you have to ask questions that might feel awkward to clarify the conversation. Then, you have to be humble enough to let go of the version of success you had in your head.

Progress, then, is measured in alignment and the baby steps in the right direction, not in effort.

When you’re building something, time invested doesn’t always equate to value created. So, the next time you’re running as fast as you can, give yourself permission to stop and make sure you’re running the right direction.

¹ Let me be an apologetic for my own writing. I know that effort that seems aimless is almost always required to figure out both what the end goal is and where it lives. Progress is never a straight line. Where we run into trouble is when we persist down a path that we know is wrong but choose not to make course corrections because of pride.