Push Things That Roll
One of the big questions of my life has been this: some things in life are difficult.
Sometimes, they're difficult in some sense "because" they're worthwhile.
Other times, the difficulty is a cue that you're doing the wrong thing (for you), and if you stopped trying to do it you could do easy things instead, and the easy things would also be more worthwhile.
How do you tell the difference?
I don't know. But here's an image that comes to mind for me: some projects are like pushing a big round rock across a hilly terrain. Others are like pushing a big cube across a hilly terrain.
Obviously on the downhill, the sphere is much easier to roll: every time you push it it gains some momentum and rolls forward on its own.
Whereas the cube requires pushing the entire time.
A lot of projects require activation energy, and that energy will be hard either way: on the uphill, pushing a sphere or a cube are comparably difficult [^1]. And (alas) few things are truly "runaway successes": the terrain of life is full of ups and downs and choices about which direction to go, so you'll rarely just get to coast: you usually have to do some uphill pushing, and that will be difficult.
But fundamentally, when I think about my successful projects, they usually felt like pushing a sphere. By contrast, I don't think I've ever succeeded with a project that involved pushing cubes. (Admittedly this is partly endogenous: I have not been the most perserverant person, so perhaps there's projects I could have succeeded with but gave up on).
In board game world, I meet a bunch of designers who are kind of incredulous at how "easy" things have gone for me with my first game. And on the one hand, it still took a ton of work to get it designed and produced and distributed; it was not an "easy" thing to do. But at various points along the way, people discovered the game and got obsessed with it and helped it develop its own momentum, without me having to push it every inch of the way.
[^1]: ok technically it is easier to push the sphere uphill than the cube, probably 2x as easy on average, but metaphors are difficult.