Since childhood, we’ve all been sold a story about what it means to grow as a person. Confront your weaknesses! Identify your inadequacies! Find what’s broken! And then get to work fixing yourself.

Performance reviews zoom in on “areas for development” while self-help books urge us to leave our comfort zones and to seek out what is difficult. The message is clear: Your deficits define you and you should follow a path in life that is devoted to minimizing them.

One of the reasons this perspective has become so embedded in our culture is because it makes intuitive sense. Overcoming weaknesses is a path to expanding our capabilities and evening out our opportunities. If you’re terrible at public speaking, shouldn’t you work on that? If you’re disorganized, shouldn’t you build better systems?

Yes—but only to a certain point. In some cases, we do need a baseline competency in critical areas; in others, we may even need mastery at things that don’t come naturally. For example, if you’re a brilliant engineer who struggles with communication but you also want to be a CEO, then you’re going to have work very hard at becoming genuinely good—not just competent—at communication.

But this doesn’t mean we should live our lives viewing ourselves as bundles of inadequacies. And it doesn’t mean that we should default to spending our limited time and energy on what’s hard. Sometimes—in fact, most of the time—doing what’s easy will be the most rewarding option.

When we organize our lives around learning to do things that don’t come naturally to us, we run the risk of becoming passably competent at many things but genuinely exceptional at nothing. We spend our finite energy dragging our worst skills from “poor” to “acceptable” while our natural gifts —the contributions only we can make—atrophy from neglect.

And it’s not just a matter of strategically building the most useful skills. It’s a matter of well-being. According to Gallup’s long-running research on workplace outcomes, individuals who regularly lean into what they do best are about six times as likely to feel engaged at work, and roughly three times as likely to rate their overall quality of life as excellent.

Ease as a Signal

When something comes easily to us, we tend to underplay it: “Oh, that? Anyone can do that.”

But most of the time, they can’t.

The thing you find effortless—whether it’s putting people at ease or structuring an argument or seeing patterns in data or sensing the pulse of a room—is often invisible to you precisely because it’s so natural. Rather than dismissing what’s easy, we should pay attention to it. Ease is information pointing you somewhere important.

There’s a cost to ignoring such information. I’ve watched talented people drain themselves trying to be something they’re not—the big-ideas person forcing herself into detail-oriented work, the careful thinker trying to become more spontaneous. Their efforts are well-meaning, but the results are regrettable. Instead of becoming “well-rounded”, they become exhausted and mediocre, making forgettable contributions when they could have made singular ones.

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It’s really quite simple. When I spend a weekend wrestling with flatpack furniture from Ikea, I don’t try to put square pegs in round holes. So why do we organize our lives around doing that with ourselves?

The Taoist concept of wu wei, which is often translated as “effortless action,” points in this direction. Effortless action is not about being lazy or doing nothing; rather, it’s about working with the natural grain of things. A skilled woodworker doesn’t force the chisel through knots in the timber. Instead, they study the wood, find where it wants to split, and work with that current. The effort is still there, but its aligned with the world instead of being opposed to it.

The work still demands everything from you. But it is demanding in a way that energizes rather than depletes.

Depth over Breadth

The Greek poet Archilochus wrote that the hedgehog knows one big thing, but the fox knows many things. In our context, this is the distinction between the specialist and the generalist, between depth and breadth.

In the age of AI, the premium will not be on doing everything adequately. AI will be able to take care of that. The premium will be on having the kind of deep domain expertise that a machine cannot replace. Ease is your signpost toward where this potential mastery lies. It shows you where the water of your effort wants to flow, where the wood of your life wants to be cut.

This is not an argument for comfort and complacency. Rather, it is an argument for seeking discomfort within the zone of our natural strengths. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on flow states shows that optimal experience emerges not from maximum struggle but from the intersection where challenge meets existing capability. We don’t develop mastery by flinging ourselves at what we’re bad at. We find it by pressing deeper into what we’re built for.

Finding a Path

How do you find where ease lives? Here are some ways to start:

1. Notice what energizes you. At the end of each day, ask: what tasks left you more alive and which ones hollowed you out? Energy is data.
2. Ask what others see. Check with trusted friends or colleagues: “What do I do that seems effortless to me but valuable to you?” We’re often blind to our own gifts.
3. Track where time disappears. Not from distraction but from absorption. Flow states are breadcrumbs pointing toward your fit with an activity.
4. Minimize, don’t fix. Instead of grinding away at weaknesses, look for ways to delegate, automate, or simply do less of that work. Not everything deserves your effort.
5. Invest in depth. Take your development hours and spend them on what already works. Go further in, not wider out.

Do the Easy Thing

When Bruce Lee said, “Be water, my friend,” he was pointing to something fundamental about human potential.

Water doesn’t try to climb mountains. It finds its course and flows where it must. And in doing so, it shapes canyons, carves valleys, and transforms landscapes and the entire planet. In a word, water performs the extraordinary by doing what comes naturally.

And that’s true of human beings, too. We can do extraordinary things—if we allow ourselves to do easy things.