There's a belief among high achievers that if something is hard, it must be working. Pain is progress. Struggle is signal. If you're not grinding, you're not growing.

And it's not entirely wrong—you get strong by pushing boulders uphill. But there's a distinction that changed how I think about effort: pushing a boulder up a new hill is growth. Pushing the same boulder up the same hill, watching it roll back down, and doing it again—that's Sisyphus.

the trap

The myth of Sisyphus resonates because most of us have lived some version of it. You're in a role, a situation, a pattern—and it's hard. Relentlessly hard. But you stay because you've internalized the idea that enduring difficulty is virtuous. That walking away means you're weak. That ease is for people who don't want it enough.

High achievers are especially prone to this. The belief that maximum effort always equals maximum results runs deep—so deep that when something stops working, the instinct isn't to question the direction. It's to push harder. The boulder becomes familiar. The hill becomes routine. And you mistake the repetition for discipline.

But difficulty isn't inherently meaningful. It's information. When something is consistently hard in a way that drains rather than develops you, that's not a test of character. It's data.

ease as leverage

Here's what's been sitting with me lately: sometimes the best use of yourself is where things feel easy.

Not easy because they're trivial—easy because you're leveraged. You have a specific skill, a disposition, a way of approaching problems that makes the work flow. The challenge is still there, but it's the right kind of challenge. The kind that stretches you forward rather than grinds you down.

The instinct to dismiss ease is strong. If it doesn't hurt, it doesn't count. But that instinct can keep you trapped in the wrong arena—grinding through problems that aren't yours to solve, while ignoring the ones where you'd make real impact.

Your stress is a compass. Not a badge of honor, not proof you're on the right path—just a compass. When the same friction shows up in the same place over and over, it might not be asking you to push harder. It might be asking you to push somewhere else.