It’s Different Over There

There’s a pattern that you find everywhere.

You find it in engineering.
You find it in design.
You find it in relationships.
You find it in personal development.

The pattern is this:

It’s simple over here.
It’s complicated to work on something different.
It gets simple again over on the other side.
And on the other side, it’s different.

—

In engineering: it will take a few refactors before you can tell others that this is the version of the code that describes well the domain.

In design: it only becomes obvious after the fact, after settling on your website’s new information architecture that these are the links you need up there, and that these ones be down in the footer.

In relationships: your client will be resisting your ideas until you’ve shown the value of your mettle, fighting for their interest when it hurt you too.

In personal development: you won’t get clarity on your personal preferences and your core values until you’ve had to defend them.

—

It’s almost always more difficult when you get started before it becomes easy again. All designs are obvious in retrospect. The scarier the slope on the way down, the richer the view on the way up.

You knew all this, you’ve been living this reality. You’ve been making progress on your own self.

And yet, you choose to make it easy on your clients. Clients who were just hoping you’d take them way over there, where it’s different. Maybe they’d like for you to lead them by going there first, show them the way.