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Go Hard to Go Easy

avitalbalwit


For those who know me, it may shock them that I once spent 14 days in the wilderness, purifying water from streams, almost getting frostbite, and yes, shitting in the woods. 


I was never cut out to be a camping person. I love nature, quiet, waking and sleeping with the sun, and bright, clear stars, but I also love my heels and a nightly bath. 


I went to a boarding school for two years in New Mexico. It was part of a collection of international boarding high schools (the one that birthed the IB, in fact), but the only US campus was in NM. This initially struck me as odd, but this was apparently so that students could enjoy the rugged beauty of the American Southwest through hiking and camping alongside their more traditional boarding school activities. 


The school itself was a castle on a hill in the middle of the wilderness 90 minutes north of Santa Fe. It had originally been a luxury hotel for consumption patients in the days of the Wild West. It had been placed there because of the dry mountain air and the presence of natural sulfur hot springs. 


Thus, at the end of my first year, I was confronted with the question of whether I would do the optional wilderness program. This involved ten wilderness first aid classes, a 14 day trip, and then leading a 3 day trip with new students the following fall. I was on the fence, but I thought when else would I get the chance — so I signed up. 


We had a wilderness leader named Anders. He was a wiry black haired Scandinavian man who ran the wilderness program with his wife. They had a healthy, expansive sense to them that came from lots of time outside and having their dream jobs. 


The trip ended up being far harder than expected. It was May, but on about the third day of hiking in the Pecos wilderness, we encountered snow left over from the winter — and as we walked on, the snow deepened, sometimes as high as our waist and covered in an ice crust which you punched through when you walked. I guess some decision was made by our leaders, Anders and a woman whose name I can’t remember, that while it took this hike from moderately hard to intensely hard, we likely wouldn’t die, and so we wouldn’t turn back. So we kept going. For over 7 days, we hiked in snow and slept in snow. On one particular summit, it even started to snow afresh. One of my friends got frostbite in her toes and wouldn’t regain feeling for months. Some days, as we went uphill “postholing” through the snow, we walked eight hours and only went 3 miles. For the most part, it was miserable. There were some beautiful vistas: a mountain crater lake, a desolate meadow slope with a large bleached white animal skull, mossy lush forests, absolutely silent except for us, and of course, the clear black sky shot through with stars. 


The trip ended up being fully worth it — one because I will never do that again, that was my chance and I’m glad I took it. I will likely not have the luxury of being completely disconnected for 14 days for decades. 14 days are hard to come by, and I likely wouldn’t spend it like that ever again. 


But it was also worth it because of a piece of advice I received — Anders would tell us again and again: “Go hard to go easy.”


I only vaguely remember the contexts: properly packing your bag so the weight was distributed right, not just jamming it all back in there. Purifying all your water at once so you had enough for however long you stayed in that camp site. Taking the time to set up a tent right so it wouldn’t fall down in the night. 


This is not a unique piece of advice. It is also worded as: Take the time to do things right. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Measure twice, cut once. Haste makes waste. Do it nice or do it twice. Pay now or pay later — with interest. Shortcuts make long delays. Take time to be fast. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Time spent sharpening the axe is not wasted.


The paradoxical phrasing made it stick — as did the clear applications. Everything about that trip was so damn hard that there was a constant temptation to go easy. To fall into bed without hanging up your wet socks (only to wear them miserably the next day).  To not redo the tent when it seemed a bit shaky (only to have it blow down at 2am). Anders made this look as easy as it could — and we learned to mimic him. The lesson was clear: rushing led to suffering later on, and methodical effort led to (relative) ease. 


I think about that lesson often, though in a very different setting. To this day, I struggle far more with exactness than speed. I was Claude pre-Claude — my edge was that I could produce pretty good content amazingly fast. You wanted a memo? I’d have it in an hour. You wanted talking points? I can rattle them off right now. Inbox zero every day — takes me seconds to deal with most emails. But this came at a cost: 1 in 20 things would have issues. A typo, some aspect of communication not totally clear to the other party, failing to loop the right person in. 


Once upon a time, my partner and I worked together. He is a stickler for detail, and I remember he’d send me things to redo. This was not always well received. I remember snapping at him when he told me to fix the formatting in one of my slack messages. Yes it was janky formatting. But it was the FORMATTING of a SLACK MESSAGE. 


Now, I’ve come to respect his attitude (perhaps no longer working together helps). He is slower than me — but still very fast. And he rarely makes mistakes. He revises his documents multiple times, he proofreads all of his emails, not infrequently checking important ones with another person. He has the mentality of “always take the time to do it right” — because doing so conveys a level of professionalism and care to the outside world, should be done as a matter of pride, and because you almost always regret hasty work later. 


Speed is important! Particularly in start up environments, you should be moving fast. You just get so much more done. I have always been described as being fast and having a bias towards action — and it's a point of pride. But sometimes my speed does slow me down later on. Mistakes, even minor ones, are costly — both time consuming to fix, but also can come with emotional baggage (you feel embarrassed, someone else feels upset) which slows you down more. On the margin, I should trade some speed for quality. I should probably become 5% slower to get a 10% bump in quality — which seems very achievable. 


I am an avid setter of New Year’s resolutions, and one of them this year is “Go Hard to Go Easy.” Once a week, I’ll reflect on how I did — times when I embodied it, times when I failed to, when I’ll have an opportunity to do so the next week. 


I never camped again after leading my three day new student trip — but I hope with this, I can still make Anders proud. 





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Ironically, I did write this blog post in ~1 hour and did ~no revisions. Speed does have something going for it!




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1 Comment


Eli Friedman
Eli Friedman
Jan 29

Thank you for this. I needed the hear this now.

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