Everything is hard

There’s this thing I always say at work.

“Nothing is ever easy around here.”

The person I’m saying it to will usually look at me and smile. Maybe because there’s nothing else to say, and all we can do is accept reality.

I’ve grown accustomed to saying this of late, because it feels like even the simplest request will often require hours of research and analysis to come up with a solution.

I was thinking about this yesterday and realizing you can say this about most things. Nothing is easy. Everything is hard.

For example, as thrilled as I am that my blog has managed to evolve into what it is today, I also still see plenty of areas that need improvement. I want the site to be faster, have more functionality and, most importantly, have more users.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past several years, it’s that software is hard, and marketing might be even harder.

As someone without any experience in either, I find myself frequently getting frustrated by how long things take. How sometimes a seemingly simple fix can require hours of planning and development work. How getting people to try something new, no matter how magical or amazing I may think it is, can be impossibly hard.

Someone in the eCash community introduced me to this idea in the software world known as the 90/90 rule, which states:

“The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.” — Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

To put it differently, developing software tends to always be harder, and take longer, than expected. But I think this is true in a lot of areas, including at my workplace.

Maybe what I’m getting at is that it’s in our nature to always look for the easy way out. Doesn’t it feel natural to want something for nothing? In nature, if you gave a lion the choice to eat a steak that’s been thrown at him, or go hunt down a zebra for his next meal, I’m guessing he’s going to eat the steak.

Now that I think about it, humans are probably the only animals that choose to go on these individual side quests to feel a sense of accomplishment. While other species merely do what it takes to survive, people will risk life and death to achieve that which has never been done before and to make new breakthroughs and discoveries. In other words, choosing to do hard things is what sets us apart.

Sometimes we get paid to do these things like I do at my job, and sometimes we do them because we either see the potential to profit, or we find it rewarding in some other way. No matter the reason, the point I’m making is that to maintain our humanity, we need to keep doing the hard things, and to me, that’s exactly what the eCash project represents.

While most crypto projects tend to focus on short-term gratification, the eCash project strives for long-term impact. This is evidenced by the years of hard work the team has put in, but also in their unwavering dedication to building digital cash for the internet.

And while I accept it won’t be easy, I’m confident that the eCash crew will keep grinding away until the job is finished. This is what sets eCash apart.