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.
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