Choosing Your Hard: Why Every Meaningful Path Comes With Tradeoffs
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Weekly Dose of Work Recovery Vol. 5.20.26
"Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life." - Gregorek
A note on choosing our hard…
There's a stretch of road in Northeast Minneapolis in the riverfront district that's made entirely of cobblestones.
It's beautiful. It's also genuinely difficult to walk on, especially if I'm wearing anything with a heel. I've caught myself thinking about that beautiful but also challenging stretch of road: why would anyone leave a modern road this way?
And yet I love how it looks. Because there's something about the texture and the history of it that makes the walk feel like it means something. The cobblestones aren't a flaw in the road. They're part of what gives it such great character.
It's that road that came to mind when I was recently in the pain cave, berating myself for making what felt like the “wrong choice” that created feelings of betrayal and hardship.
And then it occurred to me: we were never taught how to think about tradeoffs for any situation. We are instead taught to optimize everything. To always search for the best option, remove any friction, eliminate time and energy waste. Those skills serves us beautifully in a spreadsheet or project plan.
But it becomes genuinely confusing when you apply it to a life, because life doesn't work that way. Hard things are just part of being human.
Every version of my career, every role, every season of my entire professional identity has come along with its own specific costs and drawbacks.
My current work life costs me predictability and comes with significant risks, alongside bigger rewards. My executive title cost me my time and sense of self. My pivot from legal cost me the security of being known and established in a law firm I co-founded and an industry that for 15 years felt like home.
None of those were wrong answers or choices. All of them pushed me to grow and evolve in new ways and at times led me to ask whether I was okay with the cost of the “hard” thing in any given season.
Taking it one step deeper, I've also had to work real hard lately to unschool my related belief that when it gets hard or messy or painful or inconvenient that it means I should stop and change course. Because I've believed for too long that difficulty is evidence of a wrong turn.
Instead, in true How Good Can It Get? fashion, I'm coming around to see how it's far more powerful to see the challenge and pain not as a reason to stop or shrink but instead as a normal feature of any path worth being on.
Because here's what I've observed, in research and in real conversations with women navigating genuinely complex professional lives: the people who feel most grounded in their careers aren't the ones who found a difficulty-free path. They're the ones who got clear about which hard they were choosing, and why the gain was still worth it to them.
Gains and growth travel together. The tradeoff is the portal to the best kind of growth, not the problem to be eliminated. That framing won't make the cobblestones smooth and easeful. But it will change my relationship to the pain of walking on it in heels 💃
Before you close this email, I'd love for you to sit with one question:
What does your current path actually give you in gains? And is that still worth what it costs?
By noticing what comes up when you let yourself look at both sides of the tradeoff honestly, without the pressure to make any decision, you may find more goodness right where you are, even when it's hard.
Sincerely,
Bree
P.S. I'm so excited about our new program. Be is a quick-start Work Recovery Method program I created for busy women who want to actually enjoy summer without losing sight of themselves in it. Weekly recorded group sessions plus one monthly 1:1, designed to keep your goals and your sense of self front and center all season long. Apply here.
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This week's did you know…Are you a “napkin mom”
In honor of arguably the busiest month of the year (yep, worse than December in my house…), this mom's assessment of volunteer hierarchy at schools is spot on.
At the top: Laminator Moms with a parking spot and a binder for everything. In the middle: Field Trip Moms with expertly cut fruit. And at the bottom with quiet dignity: Napkin Moms, who grabbed one package of napkins off the Valentine's Day signup sheet and felt genuinely proud.
The real takeaway, even for napkin moms like me? Teachers in the comments said every level matters. Basically, it's Choose Your Hard at the school too, and napkins are just as necessary as being an A+ class mom.
Source: A ‘napkin mom’ explains school volunteer hierarchy. Which type are you? Today Show
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