Short-term easy is long-term hard. Short-term hard is long-term easy.

I was reminded of this when one of my kids came home with a grade that wasn’t up to his standards. Rather than look at the feedback and dive in, he said, “oh, I understand it now.”

I called his bluff. When I asked him to “explain it to me” because I didn’t understand it, he stalled. He didn’t understand. This lesson isn’t just for kids.

We’d rather do the easy thing than the hard thing. That’s natural and normal. I call this the mountain. You can climb it, or you can avoid it, but it’s not going away. There is always a mountain. There is always something in front of us that we know we should do, but it just seems so … hard.