What I Learned This Week: When Getting Better Doesn’t Make It Easier

The What If Journal: Reflections from a leader in progress

I’ve been watching the Olympics lately — downhill skiing, speed events, things that honestly feel a little insane. Elite athletes throwing themselves down mountains or across courses at speeds that leave no margin for error.

What strikes me isn’t just how talented they are. It’s how much work they’ve put in so they can push themselves even harder.

They don’t train for years so they can coast. They train so they can give every ounce of energy, skill, focus, and strength they have — right up to the edge. The goal isn’t ease. It’s output. It’s exhaustion in pursuit of excellence.

And that’s where I started to feel exposed.

Because if I’m honest, I often carry this quiet assumption that as I get better at something, it should start to feel easier. That growth should lead to comfort. That experience should reduce effort.

But that’s not how it works — not in sports, and not in leadership.

The Leadership Reflection

Getting better doesn’t eliminate effort. It extends it.

Elite athletes don’t experience less strain; they experience a deeper kind of strain. Their conditioning allows them to go farther, faster, and harder than they ever could before. What changes isn’t the difficulty — it’s the distance their effort can travel.

Leadership works the same way.

When I grow as a leader, it doesn’t mean the work suddenly becomes light or effortless. It means my capacity increases. My decisions carry more weight. My influence reaches farther. The stakes get higher. The responsibility gets heavier.

It’s a new kind of hard.

And sometimes I mistake “this feels hard” as a sign that something’s wrong — when it might actually be a sign that I’m operating closer to my potential. If things have become easy, comfortable, or predictable, it might not mean I’ve mastered something. It might mean I’ve stopped stretching.

I think we see this play out everywhere. In our work. In our marriages. In parenting. In faith. We assume maturity leads to ease, when often it leads to greater responsibility and deeper investment.

The goal isn’t to make life easier. The goal is to make our effort matter more.

The What If

What if the fact that your work still feels hard isn’t a failure — but evidence that you’re pushing your growth, your influence, and your impact farther than before?