Stop equating suffering with success. Discover how to apply the ‘Choose Your Hard’ philosophy strategically to maximise growth and minimise useless burnout.
You have likely heard the viral adage on social media. It usually goes like this:
‘Marriage is hard. Divorce is hard. Choose your hard.’
It is a powerful sentiment. It reminds us that life implies difficulty regardless of which path we walk. But in my decades of working with teams, I have seen this philosophy twisted.
We have begun to view exhaustion as a symbol of pride. At my former organisation, I observed competent professionals who:
- Worked 60+ hour weeks on low-value tasks
- Believed that suffering equals succeeding
- Wore their burnout like a badge of honour
This mindset ignores burnout prevention. This is the ‘Martyrdom Trap’. We mistakenly equate the volume of our pain with the value of our output. But resilience is not about how much punishment you can endure.
True resilience is about adaptability. We need to shift from a culture of hustle to one of ambition and contentment. Strategy is not about avoiding difficulty. It is about upgrading the quality of your problems.
Key Takeaways
- Effort needs direction: working harder on the wrong things is the fastest route to irrelevance.
- Friction is a budget: you have limited energy, so spending it on frustration steals from strategic innovation.
- Identity drives action: shifting from a ‘fixer’ to an ‘architect’ mindset lets you solve root causes rather than symptoms.
The Lie of ‘Doing It All’
We often tell ourselves we can handle everything.
- We accept every meeting invite.
- We try to correct every minor error personally.
- We believe this behaviour makes us indispensable.
In reality, it makes us ineffective. While working on a complex project, I unintentionally succumbed to this trap. I tried to shield the team from every political wave.
The result was not a protected team. It was a bottlenecked project and a fatigued leader. I struggled with avoiding micromanagement.
I had chosen the wrong ‘hard’. I chose the grind over the discomfort of setting boundaries.
Success requires us to distinguish between useful struggle and useless suffering. If we do not make that choice consciously, the workplace will make it for us. The workplace rarely prioritises our long-term growth.
Defining the Friction Budget
Imagine your emotional and cognitive energy acts like a bank account. I call this your ‘Friction Budget’. Every time you confront a repetitive issue, you pay a tax.
If you spend your budget navigating office politics, you have nothing left. You can’t afford the mental cost of strategic planning.
This aligns with cognitive load theory. Our brains have a biological limit. Reaching that limit results in a significant decline in our ability to make sound decisions.
The situation involves symbiotic relationships. Every dollar of energy spent on ‘Useless Hard’ is a dollar stolen from ‘Useful Hard’. You can’t innovate when you are merely surviving.
Deconstructing ‘Hard’: Masochistic Grind vs. Strategic Friction
Not all difficulties are created equal. In my experience, work struggles fall into two distinct categories.
Category A is Masochistic Grind
This is the ‘Useless Hard’. It is suffering caused by poor systems or conflict avoidance.
I recall working with a team that manually corrected a specific report every Friday. They hated it. It took hours. But they did it because ‘that is how things are done’.
That is legacy suffering. It includes enduring a toxic client because you fear navigating difficult conversations. It is hard, but it yields no return.
Category B is Strategic Friction
This type of friction is referred to as ‘Useful Hard’—the intentional discomfort necessary for growth. It looks like this:
- Learning a complex new skill
- Delivering radical candour to a peer
- Enforcing a boundary with a senior stakeholder
This struggle moves the needle. When you engage in learning from success, you are investing energy in building capability.
Masochistic grind is a tax. Strategic friction is an investment. You must know the difference.
The Psychology of Struggle: Why We Choose the Wrong ‘Hard’
Why do we cling to the grind? Often, the grind feels safe. Being busy soothes our ego.
If I run from meeting to meeting, I feel important. If I stop to think, I might feel guilty. Such an attitude requires deep self-awareness.
- We often choose the familiar hard path of overworking.
- We avoid the uncomfortable hard path of admitting we are overwhelmed.
- Our stress signals to others that we are working.
To change this, we need an identity shift. We must move from being ‘The Fixer’ to ‘The Architect’.
The Fixer derives worth from enduring problems. The Architect derives worth from designing solutions.
This job requires cultivating quiet confidence. It means accepting that a calm day is not a sign of laziness. It is a sign of effectiveness.
Operationalising the Choice: How to Audit Your Friction
Philosophy is useless without action. You need to transition from passively enduring whatever happens to actively selecting what is important.
I recommend conducting a ‘Pain Audit’:
- List: Sit down and list every struggle now draining your energy. Be specific.
- Categorise: Is this ‘Grind’ (systemic and avoidable) or ‘Strategic’ (growth-oriented)?
- Purge: Pick one piece of ‘Grind’ to remove, automate, or delegate
- Reinvest: Use the recovered time to tackle one ‘Strategic’ challenge you’ve been avoiding
I once worked with a manager who worked 60 hours a week covering for a weak team member. That was a low-ROI grind.
We shifted his focus. He invested his emotional energy in the challenging process of terminating that employee. That was high-ROI friction. This approach provided a permanent solution to the problem.
Conclusion: Your New Hard
High-performing leaders do not seek an easy life. They seek a high-value struggle.
They understand that energy management for peak performance is not just about rest. It is about stopping the leaks in your bucket.
Reframing resilience means ruthlessly eliminating low-value friction. It means refusing to pay the tax of inefficiency.
Ask yourself today: Is this struggle tiring me out, or is it building my professional legacy?
Stop paying the tax. Start making the investment. Choose your hard wisely.
Wrapping Up
We often drift into difficulty because we fail to set a course. By distinguishing between useless grind and strategic friction, you reclaim your energy. Do not just endure the day; design the struggle that serves your future.
🌱 Choose Your Hard: The Growthenticity Connection
The core ideas explored in this article aren’t just isolated concepts; they resonate with the principles of what I call ‘Growthenticity’:
‘The continuous, integrated process of becoming more oneself (authentic) through leading with questions, learning through action, and growing by embracing uncertainty and imperfection, all fuelled by curiosity.’
Choosing your hard forces you to question the status quo of your own busyness. It requires you to learn through the action of saying ‘no’ to low-value tasks. You must face uncertainty to let go of the ‘Fixer’ identity. Doing so lets you become the ‘Architect’ of your own growth.
👉 I encourage you to check out my free and paid Substack offerings at Lead, Learn, Grow. You can further explore concepts like ‘Growthenticity’. You will also gain access to practical tools and connect with a supportive community. This community focuses on encouraging authentic and impactful growth.
Join us as we unpack these ideas and support each other on our journeys.
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Your Turn
What is one ‘useless hard’ task you are now enduring that you will delegate or remove this week?
nom@d learning 
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