Why Humans Need Hard Things
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about a phrase I recently heard:
“Effort may be becoming an endangered species.”
AI is removing friction from almost everything: Writing. Analysis. Research. Planning.
The promise is simple: work will become easier.
But if you study human performance long enough, something interesting emerges.
Humans don’t actually thrive when things get easier.
We thrive when things get harder...in the right way.
Years ago in graduate school studying exercise science, I became fascinated with the research on flow pioneered by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and expanded by modern researchers like Steven Kotler. Their work revealed something powerful:
People experience their highest levels of focus, motivation, and satisfaction when challenge slightly exceeds skill.
Too easy? We get bored.
Too difficult? We get overwhelmed. We snap instead of stretch.
But right at the edge of capability, something remarkable happens.
We become fully engaged.
As an endurance athlete that competes at a fairly high level, I know this instinctively.
No one signs up for an race because it’s convenient.
The appeal is precisely the opposite.
The training is demanding. The race is uncomfortable. The outcome is uncertain.
And yet the experience is deeply meaningful because the challenge forces growth.
I’ve noticed the same pattern studying top performers inside organizations.
At Exemplary Performance, we spend our time interviewing and analyzing the top 1% inside companies - the people whose results consistently stand apart from the rest.
One of the most surprising discoveries?
The best performers rarely have better tools or more information than everyone else.
They simply engage the work differently. Very differently.
Where average performers seek efficiency, the best often seek challenge.
They volunteer for the harder client conversation. They tackle the ambiguous problem first. They push deeper when the easy answer would suffice. In other words, they consistently operate at the edge of their capability.
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Most organizations unintentionally remove the very friction that drives human performance.
Processes are simplified. Decisions are automated. Complex work is broken into smaller tasks.
The intention is good: make work easier. But the unintended consequence is disengagement.
Because when challenge disappears, so does the opportunity for mastery.
And mastery is one of the most powerful motivators humans have.
This is why studying Positive Deviants - the top performers already succeeding within your system - is so important.
They show us something critical: Excellence isn’t random. It’s patterned.
When we analyze what the best employees actually do, we often discover they have quietly designed ways of working that keep them operating at the edge of their capability.
They create challenge where others avoid it. They build skills where others plateau. And they pursue mastery where others pursue comfort.
The lesson for leaders isn’t to make work harder for the sake of difficulty.
It’s to design environments where meaningful challenge can exist. Because when challenge and skill evolve together, something powerful happens.
People enter flow. Performance accelerates. And excellence becomes sustainable.
Designing for repeatable Exemplary Performance In endurance sport, there’s a simple truth:
The athletes who improve the most aren’t the ones who avoid hard days.
They’re the ones who learn how to train at the right intensity.
Organizations are no different.
The future of high performance may not belong to the teams that remove the most effort.
It may belong to the leaders who understand how to design the right kind of effort.
Question for leaders:
What kinds of challenges are your top performers pursuing that others avoid?
Because somewhere inside your organization, someone has already figured out how to operate at the edge of capability.
The real opportunity is learning from them.