3 Reasons Business Owners Must Lean Into Hard Things

Owning a business, unfortunately, comes with doing things you don't want to.

You have to keep your business legal by keeping accounting records, file taxes, and submitting legal documents. Not to mention creating content, finalizing products, and refining your business strategy. Even if you aren't avoiding anything on those lists, it reminded you of something you are.

We spend so much time avoiding hard things, but going into 2026, you should lean into those hard things you are avoiding.

Reason 1: You'll Stop Wasting Time Thinking About How Hard It Is

Just for the next 15 second, think about how many times you've thought about doing the hard thing, but come up with some excuse why you "just can't yet."

Whatever number you came up with, it's probably double. Every time not only cost you the time to decide to avoid it, but the time to get back to whatever you were doing. Avoiding hard things becomes an endless negative loop of delay, deciding you need more information, discounting that information, and back to delaying.

Plus, it would probably take far less time just to knock it off your list than to keep putting it off.

Reason 2: You'll Become More Resilient

Fortunately, learning to lean into hard things is a muscle that can be trained.

Just like you wouldn't get back into running after 2 years and immediately run a 10k, you shouldn't try to knock out every hard thing on your list at once. Start by looking at your list and be honest about what things on it you have been avoiding, then circle the one that has the highest impact (regardless of how hard it is). Take some time—today—to cross it out completely or at the very least get over the "hard" hump so it seems more attainable.

The goal isn't to eliminate hard things from your list, but to consistently tackle 1 hard thing every day so you get used to doing it.

Reason 3: You'll Get Farther in 2026 Than You Have Since 2020

If you start tackling hard things instead of putting them off and develop that consistency in December, you'll be surprised how far you've come by this time in 2026.

Once you start consistently tackling 1 hard thing every day, your "normal" level of difficulty increases and things won't seem as hard. You'll notice that your list starts looking more manageable because you're more on top of things and not constantly feeling behind. Plus, you'll have discovered you suddenly have more time to work on less difficult things because you're not constantly procrastinating.

Aggressively pursuing hard things has compounding results and, ultimately, you'll outpace your competition because you refuse to let yourself say, "Oh, but I don't want to because of excuses x, y, z, and it's hard."