One summer I spent a week at Peak Potential’s personal development Warrior Training camp. Of all the content and reinforcement I received that week, the expression, “Do what’s hard and life will be easy,” seemed to trigger a nerve.

Why? Because it’s directly related to Business Attention Deficit Disorder. People with Business ADD will often ignore parts of the business they don’t like, or don’t do well in, because, well, they don’t like it or do it well!

Why don’t they like it and why don’t they perform that part of the work in their business? Because it’s hard. And when we believe something is hard we spend a lot of time and energy focusing on how hard it is rather than looking at it objectively or just plowing through and doing it.

This past week I noticed some of my new found Warrior traits were falling victim to my conditioned mind. I wasn’t practising all I learned because it was ‘hard’. It’s hard to get up at 5:30 and go for a 5 km walk in the dark. It’s cold too. I thought of every good excuse and some pretty poor ones so I could stay under my warm covers and go back to sleep.

In my business, I was finding it harder and harder to get bookkeeping caught up. And of course, each week more receipts and cheques come in, more invoices and cheques go out and the paper pile is growing.

Now it’s really hard because I have to spread all the papers out on a large table and sort by month before I can even consider sorting by credit card and bank statement and matching invoices to customer statements.

And then I heard it in my head.The booming voice I heard every day for 5 days this summer. And all it said was, “Do what’s hard and life will be easy.”

Since what I was doing (which was nothing) wasn’t getting my bookkeeping done I decided to choose one ‘hard’ thing, do it, and see how life could be easier.

Sorting out paper receipts and invoices and then matching them to bills and statements is one of the hardest jobs for me. It’s picky detail work and I don’t like it. [surprised are you???]

I chose sorting out all the paper, receipts, invoices and statements. And it was hard. I had to read receipts that were smudged, interpret dates [does 07/06/09 mean July 6 or June 7, 2009 or is it one of my left over receipts from June 9 2007?] and then sort them into months. Then I had to take each month and sort by credit cards and match invoices to statements.And then match all the deposit slips to the bank statement.

It’s an ugly job and if I had kids I’d pay them to do it! But I digress.

I accomplished the paper work, put all the papers together and put each month in its own file folder. The file folders went on my desk ready to be entered.

That was Friday last week. Today is Monday. The folders are still sitting where I left them. I did what was hard and then decided I didn’t have to do anything else hard.

Apparently that’s not how the system works.

I decided that ‘Do what’s hard and life will be easy’ needs some fine tuning. For me, it’s now ”Do what’s hard and do it until it’s finished, and life will not only be easy, it will be enjoyable’.

I’m thinking now of all the fun things I COULD be doing on a cool and sunny afternoon. Instead I’m doing what I don’t like – accounting.

I’ve resolved that as of today, I’m finishing what is hard and then life will not only be easy, it will be enjoyable.

And next month this process won’t be hard [because I said it won’t be] and I’ll be able to relax and enjoy life.

That’s my story. I’m sticking to it.