One of Hanks’ best players is quitting the team. She tells him, “It just got too hard”, and he tells her off, saying something like, “Of course it’s hard. If it were easy, everyone would do it. That’s why it’s good. It’s the hard that makes it good.”
It’s the hard that makes it good.
Many of the best things in life require effort – graduating from school, having a baby, even, sometimes, staying married – but the coach said more than that. He didn’t just say good things take effort, he said, “It’s the hard that makes it good.”
Among the best experiences in my life was learning to scuba dive when we lived in Bermuda.
I’m a good swimmer, but the dive course was hard. As part of the final test we each had to go to the bottom in about 15 feet of water, take off all our scuba gear – mask, fins, tank, weight belt – go to the surface, take a couple of deep breaths, then go back down to the bottom and put all the gear on again.
Getting the gear off is fairly easy. The first challenge for me was getting back down to the bottom. The laws of physics say that fat floats, and I am a champion floater. I normally wore 10 pounds of lead weight around my waist just to get my butt under water. Without the weight belt, I really had to struggle to get to the bottom.
The next challenge was getting my mask on again. When you breathe air through a regulator under water you are normally wearing a mask over your eyes and nose. This creates a little pocket of air over your face that makes it a whole lot more comfortable to breathe. When I got back to my gear, I grabbed my weight belt, and reached for my regulator to get more air. At this point my lungs were screaming “breathe” but my brain was screaming “don’t breathe you fool, you’re under water, you’ll suck water up your nose”. I had to pinch my nose shut in order to breathe through my mouth. This left me only one hand to put my mask on. Once the mask was on, I had to clear the water out of it by pressing it against my forehead and exhaling through my nose until the air replaced the water.
I passed the test on the first try, thank goodness. It was hard, but it was good. I got my license to scuba dive and I spent many enjoyable hours exploring the reefs and ship wrecks around Bermuda. The best part of every dive was getting back in the boat with a deep feeling of accomplishment. I was a diver – and I lived to tell about it.
Losing weight isn’t easy either. It’s not easy to come home from a long day at work and get on the treadmill for 40 minutes, but walking off the stresses of the day is good. It’s not easy to watch other people in a restaurant order anything they want while I’m mentally counting calories and portion sizes, but it’s good to leave the restaurant feeling satisfied, but not stuffed, and it’s good to have a bag of leftovers to make a lunch for the next day, instead of having heartburn.
So next time you tell yourself you’re going to quit because it’s “just too hard” to lose weight, or get strong, or stay healthy, I want you to hear Tom Hanks telling you “It’s the hard that makes it good” and I want you to stay on the team.
I always end with a poem, but it’s going to be a short one today because the blog was so long.
By Edna St Vincent Millay:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.
