I first heard this phrase from a fitness guy on Instagram and immediately liked it. It's a nice punchy piece of good advice for learning a new skill. Let's unpack it.

Bring to mind something you're learning, whether it's a physical, mental, or spiritual practice. Like a golf swing, or how to gracefully apologize to your life partner.

"Make": You have to put in effort. If you didn't have to make it easy because it was already easy, then you wouldn't be learning anything.

"Easy": Something easy doesn't take a lot of effort.

So "Make it easy" means "Use effort to get to a state of low effort."

Is it a paradox? No. You practice deliberately, observing the outcome each time you repeat the exercise, and reduce your effort as the outcome becomes more consistent.

When something that was difficult has become easy, you know you've really learned it.

And you can keep following this path. As it becomes easy, look for what has become possible, but is still difficult.

Can you do it faster? Twice as slowly? With more precision? Standing, sitting, lying down? In front of an audience? While remaining relaxed? With a huge grin on your face?

As you follow this path, you may begin to notice other things in your life that you think you already know how to do, but are still difficult. Make them easy.