Starting Isn't Fun

The first time I ran, I hated it.

Not the romantic kind of hate, where you secretly love it. I mean I was miserable. My lungs burned, my form was a mess, and I was sure everyone driving by could tell I had no idea what I was doing.

I remember thinking: this feels like I'm doing something wrong.

Here's what took me way too long to figure out. That feeling wasn't a sign I was doing something wrong.

It was a sign I was doing something new.

We've been sold this idea that when you find the right thing — the right sport, the right business, the right city, the right person — it just clicks. It feels good. It feels like coming home.

So when the new thing feels awkward and scary and vaguely humiliating instead, we assume we picked wrong.

We quit. We go back to the thing that feels easy.

And we call that "listening to ourselves."

But easy and right aren't the same thing. They're often opposites.

There's a concept from biology called hormesis. The short version: a small-to-moderate dose of a stressor doesn't hurt you — it makes you adapt. It makes you stronger. Researchers have started arguing this doesn't just apply to muscles and cells, but to how we perform, learn, and grow (Hill et al., 2024). The same paper makes the point that only large doses do damage — the moderate ones are exactly what trigger the response in the first place.

It's the same reason lifting heavy makes you stronger and cold water leaves you sharper instead of shivering-sick. At the right dose, stress produces increased skill, strength, health, or cognition (Rutledge, 2022).

The discomfort isn't the tax you pay for growth.

The discomfort is the growth.

The learning research says the same thing from a different angle. A psychologist named Robert Bjork spent decades studying how people actually retain things, and he landed on a phrase I can't stop thinking about: desirable difficulties.

The idea is almost annoying in how simple it is. The conditions that make performance improve fast tend to build nothing lasting, while the conditions that feel like a slog are the ones that actually stick (Bjork & Bjork, 2011).

The stuff that feels smooth and fluent? Often an illusion — a false sense of mastery that disappears the second you leave the room (Bjork & Bjork, 2020).

The stuff that feels hard and clumsy and slow? That's the stuff being carved into you for good.

And here's the part that makes it worth doing again and again.

Every hard thing you get through doesn't just teach you that one thing. It builds the capacity to get through the next one.

Psychologists call it stress inoculation. The name is deliberate — it works like a vaccine. A controlled dose of something difficult, the kind that's challenging but not crushing, trains your system to handle bigger doses later (Ashokan et al., 2016). You come out the other side better at coping than you went in.

That's the whole engine of it.

The first run makes the tenth run possible. The scary first pitch makes the next one survivable. The move to the city where you knew no one becomes the reason the next leap doesn't scare you as much.

You're not just learning a skill. You're building the person who can go get the next one.

Confidence isn't something you find before you start. It's the residue of having started anyway.

So when you take the new job and feel like an impostor. When you move somewhere new and don't know a single person. When you launch the thing and have no clue what you're doing.

That's not the universe telling you to turn back.

That's the difficulty being desirable. That's the dose doing its work.

One more, because it's my favorite.

There's a Harvard researcher, Alison Wood Brooks, who ran a study on people about to do nerve-wracking things — sing karaoke, give a speech, take a hard math test. She found that the overwhelming majority of people think the best way to handle that pre-performance panic is to try to calm down (Brooks, 2014).

Turns out that's backwards. The people who told themselves "I am excited" instead of trying to relax actually performed better — they sang more accurately and came across as more persuasive and confident (Brooks, 2014).

Why? Because anxiety and excitement are almost physically identical. Same racing heart, same sweaty hands. The only real difference is the story you tell yourself about which one it is (Brooks, 2014).

The butterflies before something new aren't a warning.

They're fuel. You just have to call them by the right name.

I still don't love the first mile. I don't love the first week of anything. The blank page, the empty room, the conversation where I don't know what to say yet.

But I've stopped waiting for the new thing to feel good before I trust it.

Now the awkwardness is almost reassuring. It means I'm somewhere I haven't been. It means the version of me that comes out the other side is going to be a little sharper, a little braver, a little more capable than the one who walked in — and ready for something bigger than I'd have dared to try before.

Starting something shouldn't be fun.

If it were easy, it wouldn't be worth becoming the person who can do it.

References

Ashokan, A., Sivasubramanian, M., & Mitra, R. (2016). Seeding stress resilience through inoculation. Neural Plasticity, 2016, 4928081. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/2016/4928081)

Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. In M. A. Gernsbacher, R. W. Pew, L. M. Hough, & J. R. Pomerantz (Eds.), Psychology and the Real World (pp. 56–64). Worth Publishers. (https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2016/04/EBjork_RBjork_2011.pdf)

Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (2020). Desirable difficulties in theory and practice. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 9(4), 475–479. (https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2021/01/RABjorkELBjorkJARMAC2020ForPostingSingleSpaced.pdf)

Brooks, A. W. (2014). Get excited: Reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 1144–1158. (https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-a0035325.pdf)

Hill, Y., Kiefer, A. W., Oudejans, R. R. D., Baetzner, A. S., & Den Hartigh, R. J. R. (2024). Adaptation to stressors: Hormesis as a framework for human performance. New Ideas in Psychology, 73, 101073. (https://pure.hva.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/50828241/1-s2.0-S0732118X24000011-main.pdf)