bcg blog

Okay With It

Chris Bosh, a member of Team USA Basketball in the 2008, clearly remembers one of the defining moments of the team heading into the 2008 Olympics. “We’re in Las Vegas and we all come down from the team breakfast at the start of the whole training camp,” Bosh recalls. “And Kobe comes in with ice on his knees and sweat drenched through his workout gear. And I’m like, ‘It’s 8 o’clock in the morning. Where is he coming from?” 
Several other members of the ‘Redeem Team’, as the group would come to be known, embraced Kobe’s extra work mentality. Stars like, LeBron James and Dwayne Wade were among the earliest adopters. On the morning of Bosh’s observation Wade added, “Everybody else just woke up. We’re all yawning, and he’s already three hours and a full workout into his day.” While it was viewed by some as obsessive, it became contagious to others. 
What few appreciated is that Kobe wasn't waking up at 4 AM because he loved it. He wasn't bouncing out of bed with joy at the prospect of predawn workouts. He did it because he understood a truth of life - you don’t get what you want, you get what you’re willing to sacrifice for. Anything worth having requires hard work, and you don't need to love hard work to do it. But, you better be okay with it.
Contrary to the stories surrounding Kobe’s legendary work ethic, he wasn’t a man in love with the grind as much as he was a man who had made peace with it. He had accepted that excellence requires doing things you don't want to do, at times you don't want to do them, for reasons that won't feel satisfying in the moment. 
That acceptance, not passion for suffering, is what separated Kobe from everyone else.
Why Should We Care?
Leadership advice abounds with guidance on ‘falling in love with the process’ or ‘learning to love the grind’ in order to achieve success. That would be great if we always enjoyed every aspect of the process or the work we do, but we don’t. Regardless of our profession or position, there are things we enjoy doing more and things we enjoy doing less. Loving every aspect of your responsibilities is not a requirement, and shouldn’t even be an expectation. 
What we actually need is something more realistic - we need to be okay with hard work. We need to accept it as the non-negotiable price of anything meaningful without requiring it to be enjoyable. Stop thinking you have to love it and start convincing yourself that you can handle it. 
So many leaders out there are waiting to feel motivated, waiting for the work to become enjoyable, waiting for some magical shift where discipline becomes effortless. It’s not happening. Meanwhile, there’s another group of leaders out there who sustain excellence and have simply made peace with discomfort. When you stop requiring yourself to love hard things and simply require yourself to embrace them, you eliminate the internal resistance that exhausts most people before they even begin. 
It’s okay to not particularly enjoy something yet do it anyway. It’s actually more than okay, it’s empowering because I know I have the power and willingness to choose it - even when it sucks. 

REAL TALK - Action Steps
Shifting from needing to love hard work to simply accepting it requires honest acknowledgment of what you're actually experiencing and deliberate practice in tolerating discomfort without drama. Here are a few thoughts to move along that path:

• Try Neutral Thinking 
  
  • Stop trying to psych yourself up about difficult work and start acknowledging it neutrally. You don’t need positive feelings for everything that needs to be done. You need the perspective and commitment to do it regardless of your feelings. Stop spending energy trying to love it and you’ll have more energy to actually do it.
    

• Pick Your Hard Things
  
  • Write down one specific difficult activity that, if done consistently, would significantly advance your leadership effectiveness or personal goals. This should be something you currently avoid or do inconsistently, not because you lack capability but because it's genuinely unpleasant. Now, ask yourself ‘Can I accept that this will always suck and do it anyway?’ 
    

• Try Tolerating
  
  • Instead of waiting until you feel motivated to do hard things, commit to 30 days where you simply tolerate them. Show up with the goal of proving you can handle it, not that you have to enjoy it. Track your tolerance, your ability to do what needs doing regardless of how it feels, rather than your enjoyment. 
    

The most sustainable path to excellence isn't falling in love with hard work. It's making peace with it. The standard worth pursuing is not a passion for suffering, but acceptance of it as the price of anything worth having. 

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