"It Has to Be Hard to Be Good" (Situational Psychology - 7) Difficult Situations
This is a difficult article to write so I start with a bad joke. Some of you may recognize the quote in the title as the punchline of an old jest about virtue. For those of you who don’t know the joke, the setup line is a question from a younger person to a more experienced one, “Why is it so hard to be good?” The title is the answer to that question.
Like most jokes, it contains a large pearl of wisdom in the double entendre. While not all difficult things are worth doing, but when something is worth doing and it is difficult, it is always more valuable. Easy situations attract competition, which is why they inevitably lead to contention. Difficult situations separate the wheat from the chaff, the gold from the ore. This is a simple concept in economics, rare skills are more valuable than common ones just as rare metals are more valuable than common ones.
There are many easy examples of difficult situations. My first idea was the true story of a poor boy, raised on nothing in the middle of nowhere who educated himself and lost every political race he entered only to become president of the United States, a man named Lincoln. My second idea was to write a person from our own times who acts like a magnet attracted to the most difficult challenges in our world: on-line financial transactions, creating a new car company, building a rocket to Mars, but I have already written about Elon Musk in discussing open situations.
I chose to tell another, more universal story about the most difficult situation that we all must face in life.
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