Do the hard thing

Protecting yourself against laziness.

After finishing the arduous task of writing a novel by hand, the late Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy, Leviathan) would turn to his old Olympia typewriter and begin the process of transcribing everything he’d already written. It would take him weeks to get a finished manuscript working this way, and leave him physically and mentally exhausted as he sat hunched over his machine typing up the handwritten pages of his novel line by line. It was “an incredibly tedious process,” according to Auster, and he recalled on many occasions, as he watched the finished pages pile up with “excruciating slowness,” how he wished he’d switched to a computer.

In 2003, he was asked why he persisted with the typewriter:

“It protects me against laziness,” he said. “The typewriter forces me to start all over again once I’m finished. With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can’t get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch.”

Auster published 18 novels, five memoirs, and ten non-fiction books* before his death in 2024 at the age of 77. He used the same Olympia typewriter for all of them. The act of transcribing his handwritten pages, painstakingly typing up every word and sentence all over again, was how Auster refined and shaped his stories and narratives into extraordinary works of literature.

Beware the allure of shortcuts, quick fixes, and hacks.

There will always be an easier way available to us. But just because it’s there doesn’t mean we should take it. What’s more important—getting it done quickly or getting it done right? Doing the hard thing keeps you sharp. It forces you to think deeply about the task, to lose yourself in the details of the work. The hard way is the right way if it protects you against laziness because that’s what separates your work from everyone else’s.

In other words, it’s good that it’s a struggle.

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*He also published eight poetry collections and four screenplays—Auster was highly regarded for his remarkable range as a writer.