Flippin' your fins you don't get too far

When I was in the seventh grade, a few friends and I auditioned for parts in The Little Mermaid with a local youth theater company. The cast list was posted a few days after the audition. In the brief seconds it took me to scan the list, find my name, and view my role, my heart rode the emotional equivalent of Great America’s Drop Zone. The exhilaration that came with learning that I had been given a role was immediately squashed by the role itself: “Fish (chorus).”

Extremely embarrassed about my insignificant role and worse, telling fellow cast members, friends, and family about it, I did the easiest possible thing I could do: I quit before the first rehearsal. At that point in my life, I was the figurative (and given my age, literal) small actor.  

A few weeks later, I heard from my friends (who weren’t exactly cast as Ariel) that the whole darn thing was really quite fun. They had made new friends. They were learning fun dance routines. They were enjoying an all-around exciting experience. Thanks to my hasty decision, I was SOL. I spent my summer doing other things, but also completely missing out.

A few weeks ago, my team met with our director about different tests we are running to learn about customers and improve our product (for the techies out there, my company is a Lean Start Up MACHINE, baby). In reviewing our testing plan, our director commented, “It feels like you guys are testing all the easy stuff first. Take the opposite route. Go figure out the hard stuff. The easy part will always be there.” 

He illustrated with a pretty interesting pricing example. On a previous team, his group was having trouble acquiring customers. One suggestion was to simply lower prices. Senior management immediately scrapped this idea. Lowering prices is the easiest fix. But it’s also the last thing you should do. Once you lower prices, there’s no going back. If you then try to raise back up your prices, your customers are going to be pissed. Understand why customers aren’t buying. Figure out how to make your product experience worth the money. Fix that.

If you know anything about Steve Jobs (so basically, if you haven’t been living under a rock), you've probably heard of his reality distortion field. When he was initially diagnosed with cancer, the easiest way for him to cope was to simply ignore reality and cast aside his doctor’s recommendation of conventional treatment. He convinced himself that he was fine and later that there were better, more natural remedies. We all know how this story ends, but I (and many others) frequently ask myself how things may have been different if he had gone down the undeniably difficult path of suspending his own strong beliefs and accepting prevailing expert advice (Some may argue that ignoring his beliefs would have been the easy way out. That’s a discussion in itself.).

We all know this but sometimes we forget: Life isn't a Disney movie all wrapped up in a bow, where we can use magic to easily figure out the hard stuff. From difficult conversations to difficult situations, we’re continually faced with choosing between the hard and easy way out. While the easy way out is always, for obvious reasons, the more tempting option, it takes a level of intellectual finesse to realize in the moment that once you take the easy way out, there’s just no going back. Though the difficult route is typically the bumpier path, it’s usually the one where you learn more, gain more, and ultimately thrive and succeed.