If it was easy, then it wouldn't be worth doing.
This is one of the sayings that you would hear in my household on any given day. Andrew Pudewa says something similar when he says, "If it's worth doing, then it's worth doing poorly first."
Anything worth doing is going to take a process in which we will start by doing poorly, but we don't stay that way. Through hard work, we build on a solid foundation and work toward mastery.
In these two sayings, we need to acknowledge that things worth doing :
- are hard
- take time to master
In doing hard things, James (you know, the brother of Jesus), tells us to persevere. To keep going and press on toward the goal. How do we persevere? We work at a process that builds towards mastery. Which leads to the next point: Mastery is a process. It isn't instant gratification. It takes time and proactiveness. In the writing process it takes writing, editing our writing, rewriting, having someone else edit our writing, rewriting, and completing a final edit and rewrite. This process of writing a masterpiece is tedious and downright depressing, but it's what's needed to produce a masterpiece.
Our desire to produce a masterpiece is what keeps us persevering and doing hard things. Without the hard work, then we start to wonder if it is even worth doing, because: if it was easy, it probably wasn't worth doing.