A frequent guest at XOXO, John Roderick is the frontman and songwriter of The Long Winters, the receiving end of Merlin Mann’s weekly phone calls for Roderick on the Line, and one of our favorite storytellers of all time.
One of the most consistently funny talks from XOXO 2016 1 , John Roderick laid on the line the myth of no effort. 2 The idea that trying to be cool, to avoid being considered uncool, is unhealthy. Being cool is not more important than admitting to yourself and others that something required hard work. Because, as my dad likes to say, “If it wasn’t hard, they wouldn’t call it work”.
I wonder if some of this comes from the fallacy of youth. That as young people we’re not well-educated on how to take a compliment. Maybe it’s partial social anxiety at being “found out” (like imposter syndrome) so it’s easier to minimize and brush off the effort it truly took to do something. I was raised in the midwest, so part of how I was raised was to remain earnest and modest. Maybe that shortens the impact of our work and our growth as people?
In the second half of the talk Roderick got into why he kept finding himself doing things that came to him easily.
Speaking for myself (and many other people I know), some people keep doing the easy thing, or find another easy thing thinking it’s harder, but never get the courage to do the truly hard thing. Doing the truly hard thing is, unsurprisingly, hard.
So, my encouragement to you: Don’t be contented with being contented.
As Jackie put it while watching this with me, “There is always more to be done. Be ok with the ambiguity of that.”
Footnotes
- With the announcement that XOXO will be back this autumn, I decided I really need to finish re-watching all the presentations and sharing notes here.
- Terrible pun intended