Do Hard Things 💪

Work is any activity that helps you move forward toward to reaching your goal. These are some thoughts on the subject of work.

Razvan Muntian

Oct 07, 2025

Hello friend,

I start my newsletters calling you “friend”.

Now, because you are my friend (and even if you’re not), I want to motivate you to work harder.

This post might be pure motivational. But maybe not.

These are some thoughts on the subject of work.

Keep reading.

TL;DR

Work is any activity that helps you move forward toward to reaching your goal.
Be aware of your current situation and pick a path you want to follow.
Work doesn’t have to be unpleasant or difficult all the time.
Work means a multitude of things: some of them are really easy and rewarding. Make sure to alternate difficult and easy tasks.
Some things are below your level, some are way above. Find what’s achievable, challenging but not too difficult.
“Do hard things.”
“Do scary things.”

Work doesn’t have to be unpleasant or difficult all the time.

My social media presence is mostly focused on Twitter (or X if you will) since the community there is great. I met amazing people. We call it “Tech Twitter” because many people who are active in tech tend to be active on Twitter as well.

Someone even said: “I’ve seen you all over the Twitter timeline”. And that’s true: I spend many hours on Twitter.

Work doesn’t have to be unpleasant or difficult all the time. Building your social media presence and personal branding is still work, but it’s rewarding. I wasn’t a social media guy. I hated it.

But understanding that social media is not necessarily about me, but about other people, and having a coherent personal branding strategy, things changed 180 degrees.

And that’s still work.

What do I consider work

The word “work” can mean a lot of things. You can consider working as in getting a job and going to work. Or maybe work means freelancing, or starting a business.

Let me give you some examples of what work means for me:

writing this newsletter
planning my next projects
creating content
posting the content online according to all the platforms
replying to others and engaging with other people’s posts
participating to X/Twitter spaces
recording videos
designing my apps
building my apps
coffee chats
promoting friends’ posts
finding interesting resources, great tools, maybe great AI startups, finding new startup ideas or problems
studying other social media accounts, understanding how and why they create content the way they do
reflecting and reviewing my progress

So what’s exactly work? I think work is any activity that helps you move forward toward reaching your goal. Depending on your goal, the types of activities you do might change.

“You have to take a decision”

While I was writing this post I encountered a video on YouTube (that I won’t share). It was an inspirational video aiming to get your career unstuck.

I watched 1 minute and 20 seconds and stopped it because there was a piece of advice I really disagreed with.

I’m paraphrasing: “The person you were yesterday does not exist if you take the decision to change your life. Let’s imagine this: today you have your car in your garage, but someone steals it. So tomorrow, it’s not there. You have to make a decision: what do you do? Because the car simply isn’t there.”

You cannot simply ignore your past. It doesn’t work like that.

My friend

Eddie Jaoude

had a great example when speaking about coding and contributing to open source. Learning is not a one day thing. You cannot spend today 20 hours writing code or contributing to open source today and become successful instantly.

It doesn’t work that way. He compared it to brushing your teeth: you don’t brush your teeth the whole day at the end of the month just because you didn’t do it every day.

Your daily decisions of doing or not doing something have consequences. You cannot simply decide “starting from today I’ll be someone else”. Just because you didn’t do something for an entire month, doesn’t mean you’ll become a brand new person next day.

At best, you can decide you want to start a journey in that direction, but you still work with your past self. You have to work, put in the effort, reflect on your own, change your mindset, learn. All sorts of things.

Remember the New Year’s resolutions? They don’t really work, do they?

You cannot ignore your past. You have to work with it!

And visit a dentist soon!

“Do hard things”

I don’t know where I picked up this line: “Do hard things”. But it’s true: you move forward if you do harder things.

How do you define “hard”? How do you know what to do?

That’s an important question. Some things are way above our level. The analogy with going to the gym is perfect. Lifting heavy weights if you don’t have enough muscular mass or exercise can damage your body.

Same with work: if you’re used to wasting your evenings in front of the TV or scrolling on the internet in search of a dopamine dose, you cannot simply concentrate for 4 hours, or read a book for the whole evening starting from tomorrow.

It doesn’t work like that. It’s too hard. You end up not wanting to put in the effort, and going back to the instant gratification of the social media videos.

Some things are way below your level. If you’re already in the process, if you do a great job at work, and you’re an expert in a field, you need a new challenge. Simply staying in the same spot means you are in a comfort zone. Find a new challenge. Do something harder.

So what’s the sweet spot? Find something that’s achievable, hard enough that’s challenging but not too difficult. Learn a new programming language or a new technology, start writing a newsletter or a blog article, are just a few examples. Or if you’re into reading, there are books that are more difficult than others. Pick one of those.

“Do scary things”

Sometimes you have to make the jump. Do something scary.

This is an article I wrote about posting on social media.

Since I’m not a native English speaker, I was worried about speaking in English, and people making fun of my skills. I was worried about what friends would say about my posts. It turned out well.

Read the rest of the article here: