I am forever asking how to make hard things easier. This starts with asking what it really takes to get where you want to go—or for you to become who you want to become. And then? Like a sculptor, you chip away all extraneous material. You go until you are left with the true form within the marble.

You can start by shedding the easy stuff of course. Easy here means more comfort in the present—and less in the future. I don’t know about you but I’d be far more at-ease eating takeout in front of a Netflix series than, say, having a high-stakes conversation. That’s the trade-off. This is important, of course. Essential. You should do this eventually. But you don’t always have to start here.

I more often recommend chipping away at the hard stuff first. Being overly harsh to yourself is a great example of making things unnecessarily hard. Not sleeping enough. Grinding to serve outdated commitments, beliefs, and priorities. Picking up the phone every time it rings. Anything that is high-cost, low-reward fits here. Buff, hack, or smash any of these things away and life becomes easier. Lighter. And closer to who you truly are.

Once a chunk has fallen away, the temptation is to add something to the space. Nature abhors a vacuum, they say. But you can also keep it. You can fill it with something immaterial. Slack. Sleep. Effortlessness. Contrary to popular belief, this doesn’t make you softer or less capable. It frees up bandwidth for you to do the hard things.

When it comes to fitness, I think we do both easy and hard. I have—along with our wonderful team—built Bang to fit this framework. We make it easy to show up. We make it easy to start your workout. We make it easy to find opportunities for progress. We also make it easy to choose to push hard. These moments are where you feel safe, capable, and able to harness the deepest levels of your motivation. This is also where you develop the skill of resilience. Hard always exists. But it’s better when you choose where to push—then having it chosen for you.

If Bang is a unicorn, then that last piece—the option to push hard—is its horn. That’s where a disproportionate amount of our magic lives. So, we eliminate every bit of friction possible to get there. And that’s what I mean by making hard things easier.