But I remember a funny quote, once: "Laziness is the mother of invention."
I'm big on Personal Integrity, Habit, and Personal Challenge.
1) I Have Integrity.
This means that I have a "personal code." There's things that I will do, every time, and things that I won't do, ever. There's conscious, considered postures on various aspects of life, accompanied by rigorous self-inventory, and immediate correction/amends when I stray from beam.
I often think about why I do something, as well as how I do it. I'm constantly applying my Integrity Lens on what I do.
It's also important that I apply this lens only to myself. Life gets fairly miserable, if I am constantly measuring everyone else with my lens. There was an episode of "The Adventures of Pete and Pete," where they encountered "Inspector 34."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyEzVEvQYEc
2) I Establish good habits.
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." -Aristotle
I cannot stress enough how important habit is to everything I do.
My GitHub ID is solid green. I'm coding many, many hours a day.
I want to be a good coder, so I code. There's no substitute.
Ever watch a really good musician at work? Watch their hands, as they do it? They have a relaxed, casual demeanor, as they play a cheap, beat-up old Univox, and we say to ourselves "That's so easy! I could do it!"
Then we run out, buy a PRS guitar and a top-shelf amp, and sound like a couple of cats..."having fun."
That musician spends several hours a day, practicing the most boring stuff imaginable. I have a friend that picks up his guitar, every chance he gets, and just runs through scales, constantly. It's completely automatic and without any thought.
Also, a bit maddening...
3) I Challenge Myself
I try to always be "biting off more than I can chew." If I habitually work on stuff that makes me sweat and worry, then the basics are almost thoughtless. Works like a charm.
I write about that here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-...
TL;DR
None of those three things are unique to me. They are patterns, not inventions. I hang around a lot of folks that are always doing them, and we seem to be a fairly happy bunch.
I think that a lot of the reasons for "making hard work easy" is a sincere effort to "commoditize" experience. Corporations, especially in the Software Development industry, are obsessed with hiring cheap, inexperienced engineers (often, quite brilliant, but inexperienced), and expecting them to have output like experienced, top-shelf developers that have been doing the 3 things I mentioned above for decades.
Also, there's what I call a "cargo cult" mentality, where we think that if we dress the part, and learn the lingo, it will somehow make us what we want to be.
It makes sense, when we think about it, but never seems to actually work.
In my experience, there's no substitute for Integrity, Habit and Challenge.
"There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong." -H. L. Mencken
"Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think." -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.