For a long time, I thought difficulty was evidence that I was doing something worthwhile.

I got very good at the hard way

Or maybe more accurately: if something was difficult for me that didn't seem difficult for everyone else, I assumed the appropriate response was to get better at it.

Try harder. Learn the rule. Build the compensating system. Figure out what everyone else seemed to know.

I got very good at this.

The concept of legally mandated accommodations forced me to reckon with the possibility that I hadn't been on a level playing field. It still took me years to accept that I was disabled enough to deserve—and, more importantly, need—things that made some parts of life easier.

Easier was the part I struggled with.

I had internalized a strange standard of evidence: if I could do something at all, then I couldn't really need help doing it.

The cost didn't seem to count.

It didn't matter how much preparation it required, how exhausted I was afterward, what else I couldn't do because I had spent my capacity there, or how elaborate the systems around the task had become. Successful completion was treated as evidence that the environment worked.

Including by me.

I had already demonstrated that I could do it the hard way. I could white-knuckle my way through an environment that wasn't particularly interested in how my brain worked. I could compensate. I could build systems around myself. I could learn how to word things so another person didn't find offense where none was intended. I could survive a tremendous amount of sensory and cognitive load and still perform.

Being capable of surviving something is not the same as being well supported by it.

Good engineering doesn't prove the strength of a material by repeatedly loading it in the direction where it is weakest. It pays attention to its properties.

That isn't indulgence. It's design.

This has changed the way I think about rigor more broadly.

Some difficulty belongs to the problem.

Some difficulty belongs to the way we've designed the work.

Those are easy to confuse because both feel hard to the person experiencing them.

Building something genuinely new is difficult. Making consequential decisions with incomplete information is difficult. Learning something you do not yet know is difficult. Caring for people is difficult.

But finding the information you need because it lives in six systems isn't rigor. Waiting three weeks for an approval nobody can explain isn't rigor. Sitting through a recurring meeting because nobody has clarified who can make the decision isn't rigor. Making someone infer expectations that could simply have been stated isn't rigor.

It's friction.

And removing friction doesn't lower the standard. It leaves more capacity for the difficulty that actually belongs to the work. Some difficulty is inherent to the work. Building something new is difficult. Making consequential decisions with incomplete information is difficult. Telling someone the truth when the truth is uncomfortable is difficult. Learning a genuinely new skill is difficult. Caring for other people is difficult.

We have plenty of real difficulty available to us.

Then there is difficulty created by the environment: unclear expectations, inaccessible tools, unnecessary approvals, information trapped in someone's head, communication norms nobody has articulated, meetings that exist because the underlying decision architecture doesn't.

Those two kinds of difficulty aren't the same.

Removing the second does not cheapen the first.

Maybe good design isn't about making everything easy. Maybe it's about being much more discerning about where we spend difficulty.

The standard can remain high. The work can remain hard. The problem can remain ambitious.

We can spend our difficulty somewhere more interesting.