This is a blog post I was first asked to write over 2 years ago but never finished. It wasn’t because I got distracted or forgot; there just wasn’t a compelling story there at the time. 2 years and 4,000 miles of running later, and I think I finally have something to write about here.
This version of the story starts early last year on a drive with my dad. I told him about how I was having a really hard time doing hard things. Taking on difficult tasks is something I’ve prided myself on for a long time, but after a few big life changes, graduating college, and taking my first ‘real’ job, doing hard things had become so much more difficult. I found it difficult to motivate myself to run as much as I did in college, I found it difficult to challenge myself at work, everything was just… harder than it used to be.
Last summer, I took a step back and focused on the little things. I had become too focused on doing the biggest runs, delivering the best hotel marketing campaigns, being the best at everything. Instead, I went on more neighborhood runs for 3 miles instead of 13 and delivered more hotel marketing campaigns with the goal of learning something instead of trying to learn everything.
It was shortly after that last year where hard things became a whole lot easier. I ran 2 and a half hours faster in a 50k race than I had the year before, and the hotel digital marketing campaigns I was in charge of at work were driving more revenue than they ever had since I had taken them over. I ran through the entire winter (in one of the snowiest ski towns in California) – through blizzards and in the dark during evenings after work. This spring, I ran my 10th Los Angeles Marathon, a 17-minute personal-record from my previous best in 2017. This summer, I ran my first 100k, and this past fall, I placed 14th in my local 50k race with over 600 participants.
That 50k race was the same race that had prompted GCommerce to ask me to write this blog back in 2022 when I placed 163rd with a time of almost 9 hours. This year, I finished in 5 hours and 9 minutes. Oh, and hotel digital marketing work has gone great too.
It’s not the ‘doing hard things’ part that brought all of those successes, but rather doing small, easier things a lot.
The desire to always do something greater and better every single day brings a lot of paralysis when it comes to just doing anything. I’ve found that to be true in not just running but just about everything, especially hotel digital marketing.
We tend to get caught up in the glitz and glamor of wanting every hotel marketing campaign to be an award winner driving record results, and so often miss the opportunities to make incremental improvements day over day and week over week. Things like launching new hotel marketing ads every other week instead of every other month or avoiding new hotel marketing targeting strategies for fear they won’t change anything.
Doing those small things isn’t just an important part of our jobs, but it might be the most important part of our jobs. Without those small improvements and perfecting the foundations of the hotel marketing campaigns we run, those out-of-the-park home runs are a lot more rare (or never come at all).
Being successful at the hard things requires doing the easy things daily. Running 60 miles well requires a lot of 3-mile runs, just like delivering award-winning hotel marketing campaigns requires a lot of really little incremental improvements year-round.
You’ll never get the first without the second.
