---
aliases: ["The Two Types of Hard"]
Is A: Evergreen
Topics: ["[[topic-productivity-systems]]", "[[topic-mental-health]]"]
Status: Published
---
# The Two Types of Hard
There are two kinds of difficulty in creative work. The first is the hard of skill — you literally don't know how to do the thing yet. The second is the hard of resistance — you know how, but starting feels uncomfortable.

Mistaking one for the other is dangerous. If you think resistance is skill gap, you'll spend time learning when you should be shipping. If you think skill gap is resistance, you'll force output when you actually need to learn.

The tell: skill-gap hard gets easier with study and practice. Resistance hard gets easier with starting. Both are real; neither should be romanticized.

I encounter both types regularly in running Refactoring, and I have learned to diagnose them through different sensations. Skill-gap hard feels like confusion — I literally do not know what the right approach is, and more effort does not resolve the uncertainty. When I first started negotiating sponsorship contracts, the difficulty was genuine skill gap. No amount of willpower would have helped because I did not understand market rates, deal structures, or negotiation norms. The solution was learning: reading about media sales, talking to other newsletter operators, and making enough mistakes to build a mental model.

Resistance hard feels different. It feels like avoidance — I know exactly what to do but cannot make myself begin. Writing the opening paragraph of a newsletter issue is almost always resistance hard. I know how to write. I have written hundreds of openings. But the blank page triggers a predictable cycle of checking email, getting coffee, reorganizing my desktop, and generally doing anything other than the one thing I need to do. The solution is not more learning; it is starting, however badly. I have trained myself to write the worst possible opening paragraph as fast as I can, knowing that the act of starting will break the resistance and the paragraph will be rewritten anyway.

The danger zone is the overlap — tasks that involve both skill gap and resistance simultaneously. Launching a new product, entering an unfamiliar market, or giving a public talk for the first time involve genuine skill gaps wrapped in emotional resistance. The temptation is to address only one: to study endlessly (addressing skill gap while avoiding the resistance of actually doing it) or to force yourself through it without preparation (addressing resistance while ignoring the skill gap). The productive approach is to sequence them: learn enough to have a basic plan, then start despite the discomfort, then learn more from the experience of doing. The cycle of learning-doing-learning is more effective than either pure learning or pure doing.

## Key insight
The ability to correctly diagnose whether difficulty is skill-based or resistance-based is a meta-skill that determines how effectively you spend your time. Most procrastination in experienced knowledge workers is resistance, not skill gap — and the cure for resistance is always starting, not preparing. Most frustration in new domains is skill gap, not resistance — and the cure for skill gap is learning, not pushing harder. Developing the self-awareness to tell the difference is one of the highest-leverage investments a creative professional can make, because it prevents the two most common failure modes: perpetual preparation and brute-force mediocrity.

## Related
- [[on-consistency-in-creative-work]] — Consistency is the framework that handles resistance by removing the decision to start
- [[on-founder-energy-management]] — Depleted energy amplifies resistance, making it harder to distinguish from skill gap
- [[cycling-teaches-patience]] — Knowing when to push and when to hold back maps directly to the two types of hard
- [[recovery-week-in-training]] — Sometimes what feels like resistance is actually depletion signaling the need for recovery
- [[note-deep-work]] — Deep work practices as a structure for overcoming resistance
