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Josh Waldron | Hard is Fun

@hardisfun

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Author, Productive Difficulty. Built companies no investor would touch. I help founders choose the right hard things. Comment AUDIT for the audit.

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Productive Difficulty is out today.

Easy is crowded. Every competitor you have is running the same play: cut friction, ship faster, skip anything that takes years to pay off. The only ground nobody is standing on is the hard ground.

The book is a seven-criteria framework for deciding which hard things are worth doing. Difficulty on its own is not a strategy. Plenty of hard things are simply expensive.

I wrote it from the wheelchair I destroyed on purpose, a 24-unit apartment complex bought from parking lots and rest stops, and a lot of mornings that looked like nothing was working.

If you pre-ordered, thank you. Your copy shipped early so you could say something honest about it first. If you have read it, a review today does more than anything I can post.

The book is at hardisfun.com. Sign up there so you don't miss the events and what's next.

#hardisfun #productivedifficulty #newbook #booklaunch #entrepreneurship by @hardisfun

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24 days ago

Get the ebook today, please leave a qualified purchase review! #productivedifficulty #hardisfun by @hardisfun

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a month ago

To drive a black cab in London you have to pass the Knowledge: about 25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks, recited from memory. Three to four years. Half who start never finish.

In 2011, Woollett and Maguire at UCL scanned 79 trainees before they started. Four years later, the 39 who qualified had grown grey matter in the hippocampus, every one of them. The 20 who put in the years and did not pass scanned like the people who never started.

Tomorrow's post is about those twenty, and what quitting most of the way through actually buys.

Comment LINK and I'll send you the post.
#hardisfun #productivedifficulty #neuroplasticity #memory #lifelonglearning by @hardisfun

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5 hours ago

McDonald's franchised its way to roughly 40,000 restaurants. In-N-Out refused, owns all 440 of its stores, and needed about 75 years to open east of the Mississippi.

The easy path was obvious. Franchise, freeze the patties, ship nationally. Nearly every competitor took it. In-N-Out took a harder one. No franchises, no freezers, and a rule that no restaurant opens more than a day's drive from one of its own distribution plants.

You can see that rule on a map. Draw the circles around the patty plants and you have drawn everywhere the company is allowed to exist. The governor on its growth is a physical fact, not a slogan.

What does the hard path buy? One protected variable: fresh, never frozen, every day, every store. In 2025 that was about 2.6 billion in sales with zero franchises. If the bet had failed, they would still own the stores, the plants, and the recipe.

The teachable part is the test. When you choose the hard path, can you point to the one variable it protects? If you cannot name it, you are just saying no.

What is the one variable your hard path protects?

#hardisfun #businessstrategy #constraints #longgame #smallbusiness by @hardisfun

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2 days ago

Charles Darwin wrote out his theory of evolution in 1844 and put it in a drawer. Then he spent 1846 to 1854 dissecting and classifying every known barnacle, living and fossil. Four volumes. Thousands of specimens. Much of it while chronically ill.

He hated it. He wrote that he hated a barnacle as no man ever did before, and later that he doubted the work was worth the consumption of so much time.

A friend had told him nobody had the right to theorize about species without first describing a great many of them. So he did. The barnacle years gave him the standing and the evidence that made Origin land in 1859.

Two things I take from this. The boring reps adjacent to your goal are what make the goal believable to anyone else. And Darwin misjudged the value while he was inside it. If he could not score productive difficulty by how it felt in year three, you probably cannot either. That is not a reason to skip the barnacles.

Comment AUDIT and I'll send you the free self-audit.

#hardisfun #productivedifficulty #charlesdarwin #historyofscience #patience by @hardisfun

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3 days ago

Three to five classes at once. Spanish, drawing, photography, music composition, iPad. About fifteen hours a week for three months.

The students were 58 to 86 years old.

Six weeks in, their working memory, cognitive control, and episodic memory matched middle-aged adults roughly thirty years younger.

The instinct at that age, at any age, is to pick one manageable thing and take it slow. The study did the opposite, and the gain came from the load rather than despite it.

Being a rank beginner at several unrelated things at the same time is what worked. Nobody sells that, because it sounds like a bad time.

I finished my degree in my forties with a career and a family already running, and the full workload is exactly what made it work. Hard, and a lot of fun, and I am in no hurry to repeat it.

The discomfort is where the gain comes from.

Comment AUDIT and I'll send you the free self-audit.

#hardisfun #productivedifficulty #lifelonglearning #neuroplasticity #cognitivehealth by @hardisfun

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3 days ago

Three weeks ago we filled the basement at Mac’s Place in Salt Lake City to celebrate the release of Productive Difficulty, and I’m still a little stunned by who showed up. Old friends, family, and a few people I met for the first time at the signing table who somehow felt like they’d been around all along.

Writing a book is lonely work. That night was the opposite of it, and I’m grateful to everyone who came out, grabbed a copy and stayed to talk.

Thanks to Mac’s Place for the room and to Nocea for the photos, which turned out better than I imagined. The full gallery is up at hardisfun.com/launch-night-photos. Download whatever you want, and if you post one, tag me so I can see it.

If you’ve finished the book, an honest review on Amazon still goes a long way. by @hardisfun

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3 days ago

They handed people a row of paper shapes and asked them to cut them out.
First one, clean. Last one, clean. Everything in between, sloppy. They literally cut corners.
The same shape shows up in whether people cheat on a task and whether they keep a religious ritual. Beginning and end get the standards. The middle does not.
The driver is identity. We judge who we are by how we start and how we finish, so the middle gets filed under not really me, and the standards drop where nobody is grading.
Which means the middle is where you stop counting. More willpower does not fix a measurement problem.
Shrink the stretch you are measuring, or put a marker inside it. Make the middle countable again and it starts producing wins you can see, which is usually where the enjoyment was hiding.
Where is your middle right now, and what would you have to count to make it visible?
#hardisfun #productivedifficulty #habits #goalsetting #selfcontrol by @hardisfun

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4 days ago

He started building a cathedral in 1961. No plans, no permits, no training.
Justo Gallego worked on it outside Madrid for 60 years, mostly alone, with scrap and donated materials. He died before it was done, and he always knew he would.
He kept showing up anyway, six days a week, into his nineties.
The finish line was never load-bearing. The days were. He picked something worth a lifetime and gave it one.
What would you keep showing up for if you knew you'd never see it finished?
#hardisfun #craftsmanship #architecture #purpose #spain by @hardisfun

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6 days ago

If we were starting from today's facts instead of yesterday's history, would we make the same choice?

I ask that about anything a business has been carrying too long: the product line that still gets the first dollar, the customer who keeps getting concessions, your own role, the process everybody hates and nobody wants to replace.

Sometimes the answer is yes and you keep exactly what you have. That's fine. At least now you're keeping it on purpose.

Today's post walks one decision through five questions, starting with what you'd choose if the current setup didn't exist and ending with where another year of no change leaves you.

Comment LINK and I'll send you the post.

#hardisfun #productivedifficulty #strategy #founders by @hardisfun

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7 days ago

Once the business works, comfort gets hard to see. It stops looking like fear and starts sounding like good judgment: we know this market, that customer has been with us for years, let's give it another quarter.
Some of those calls are right. Let comfort make enough of them and you end up with a company that stopped growing years before anyone noticed.
Tomorrow's post is about taking familiarity out of the deciding vote. It goes up in the morning.
Comment LINK and I'll send you the post.
#hardisfun #leadership #decisionmaking #businessowners by @hardisfun

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7 days ago

97 miles from the South Pole, and nobody has ever stood there.
January 1909. Shackleton has food to reach it. He does not have food to reach it and get home. So he turns around, and every man on the expedition lives.
Better a live donkey than a dead lion, he told his wife.
The part that gets skipped: if he had made the dash and taken the record, he would be a moment in a book. Amundsen gets there three years later anyway.
What people actually know him for is the harder call and everything after it. Keep the team alive. Endure. Go back for them. That story has held for over a century, and it only exists because he walked away from the thing he had spent years chasing.
The right hard paid him in a way the record never would have.
Comment AUDIT and I'll send you the free self-audit.
#hardisfun #shackleton #leadership #decisionmaking #antarctica by @hardisfun

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9 days ago