The recipe said ‘hands-on time: 7 minutes, total time: 25 minutes’ and like a sucker, I believed them.
I started on the waffles 30 minutes before my friends were due for brunch. “I’ll serve you waffles fresh off the griddle!” I said. “I can’t wait to show you this new recipe!” I said.
My friends arrived to find me flustered and flour-covered, yelling about Waffles These Days and OMG did you know that waffles think they deserve whipped egg whites? Who do these waffles think they are?!
In more experienced hands, maybe these fancy-ass waffles would have only required seven minutes of hands-on time, but in my not-accustomed-to-sifting-flour hands, this was a one-hour kind of recipe.
But instead of mentally berating myself for my waffle-making failings, I remembered something my friend Katie told me.
“The more you do it, the easier it gets.”
And while that might seem like the most obvious statement to ever grace your screen, I think it’s worth remembering.
I’ve been driving a stick shift since I was 16. It is well and truly second nature, as easy as breathing or changing stations during commercials. I’ve been writing for 15 years – I can bang out a month’s worth of blog posts in a few uninterrupted hours. After 12 years of serious travel, I can pack for a month of travel – in a carry-on – in an hour.
But ask me to assemble an IKEA desk? That ish will take me three days – because I’ve only done it a few times. The same goes for cooking any type of meat, sewing things, training dogs, mathing or (apparently) making new recipes. I hope you’re prepared to wait because this is going to take a while. And it’s probably going to be painful to watch.
And for a long time I viewed these struggles as an excuse to quit, because if I’m not immediately good and it’s not immediately easy, then clearly it’s not meant to be. If you don’t keep doing it, it will never get easier. Share on X
This applies to every area of our lives.
The more you negotiate for better pay and benefits, the easier it gets.
The more you walk away from toxic relationships, the easier it gets.
The more you reach out to people you want to befriend, the easier it gets.
When we’re in the midst of doing that difficult thing – asking for a raise, whipping egg whites – instead of viewing the struggle as a failure in the making, what if we viewed it as an investment in future ease?
Our future selves will thank us for putting in the hours to make this easier. Our future selves will befriend and waffle and negotiate with ease because our current selves made the effort.
What did you struggle with in the past that’s easy now? What do you wish was easy? Tell us in the comments!
P.S. Do you have a bad habit of giving up when things get tough? This might help – and it’s free!
I don’t “cook” anything for my friends. Instead I only serving things that require “assembling” so salads and build your own yogurt bowls, etc. If we need warm things, you best believe they come from the trader joes frozen section.
For me, it got easier to have a talk with people at work and say, ‘You’re going to need to do ABC in order to get the result XYZ.’ I wanted to be honest without being mean, and the best way to do that is to just be straight-forward about it. Gets easier and easier.
Great post.
So many things — travel, writing, life in general. Although I do think sometimes things don’t get easier, the bar just gets raised higher.
I needed to be reminded of this, too! This applies with everything – exercising, cooking, being more social. The more practice we get, the better we get!
Love this. I’ve got weirdly good at uprooting and moving towns/cities. Not sure that’s a good thing to be good at. I’d like to be better at business writing 🙂
For baking I started trying one new recipe once every other week- it’s definitely an all day affair and I look a LOT like what you did, but definitely worth it. Gives me a chance to learn something new. But ask me to cook actual food and not cupcakes. It’s even worse haha!
I used to struggle with typing on the computer, and using the square number keypad. I used to hate that part of the keyboard thinking, “Why is it even there?!” Now I’m a pro at using it and 95% of the time I don’t even look down while typing.
I so wish that doing squats was easy. They are so hard and awkward for me.