Harder Is Easier (The Figure-It-Out Principle)
Commit to the costly right thing up front, and the trust it earns makes everything else easier.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 92%
A leadership decision rule: when a principle you hold (quality, safety, encryption, design) collides with short-term profit, refuse to redirect the person raising it and instead say 'let's figure it out.' Use it every time a hard trade-off surfaces, because each dilemma is a chance to demonstrate what the company actually stands for. The counterintuitive payoff is lower CAC, higher loyalty, and forgiveness after mistakes.
Origin
Ries frames 'harder is easier' as the entry-level leadership principle in his book Incorruptible. He illustrates it with Cloudflare's Matthew Prince, who, when a junior engineer argued a better internet would be an encrypted internet, said the three key words 'let's figure it out' instead of protecting the company's most profitable product (paid SSL). Contrasted with Groupon's Andrew Mason, who couldn't defend 'one email a day' against ROI experiments and slid to eight emails.
Core principles
- 01Do the hard, principled thing for its own sake, never for the reward, or the reward doesn't come.
- 02Every impossible dilemma is a teaching moment about what you stand for.
- 03When someone brings you a 'let's betray the principle for money' idea, respond 'let's figure it out,' not 'get back on strategy.'
- 04Business often feels hard because nobody trusts you; earned trust removes friction.
How to run it
- 1
Name the principle you will not trade
Explicitly decide the one thing (quality, safety, encryption, design) you would rather struggle than sacrifice. Ries refuses to pick it for you: 'you tell me what they are.'
Pro tip Pick something concrete enough that a junior engineer could hold you to it in a hallway.
- 2
When the dilemma hits, say 'let's figure it out'
Instead of the reflexive middle-manager redirect ('we have a strategy, get back on it'), rally the team to find a sustainable way to honor the principle.
Watch out Do NOT stop at the easy 'it's too hard, give up' excuse; that is the trapdoor most leaders fall through.
- 3
Make the principled path sustainable, not martyrdom
Cloudflare drove SSL costs down with hand-rolled assembly-language software and BD deals with certificate authorities so free encryption wouldn't bankrupt them. Find the version that survives.
Pro tip Bankrupting the company won't achieve the mission; engineer the cost curve so the right thing is affordable.
- 4
Hold the line when the metric dips
When free SSL first cut premium conversion, Cloudflare could have bailed but stuck with it. Report the short-term hit to the board and stay committed; the top-of-funnel later grew by an order of magnitude.
Watch out The moment a principled move shows a short-term cost is exactly when weak leaders reverse it.
In the wild
A junior engineer pointed out that if a better internet is an encrypted internet, they shouldn't charge for their most profitable product, SSL. Prince said 'let's figure it out,' the team drove costs down, and shipped free encryption despite a conversion-rate dip.
→ Cloudflare became known as the reason the internet is encrypted; the trust earned underpins a ~$70B company.
Andrew Mason built Groupon on one deal email a day. Employees ground him down with lean-startup-sounding 'shouldn't we run an experiment?' arguments; two emails made more money, so he couldn't say no, then three, then eight.
→ Ries cites email frequency as the recurring 'tip of the spear' where leaders can't defend the right thing and erode what made them special.
Common mistakes
Doing it for the ROI
The trust rewards are real but intangible with tangible costs, so they always stack-rank to the bottom under ROI thinking. If you do the right thing for the payoff rather than the thing itself, it doesn't work.
Treating values as 'extra' work
Viewing quality/ethics/safety as add-ons on top of the 'real' business is precisely why customers seem fickle and business feels needlessly hard.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and product leaders facing a profitable-but-principle-violating decision who have any influence at all over the call.
Not ideal for
Leaders looking for a defensible ROI justification before acting; this principle is explicitly about accepting tangible cost for intangible trust.
From the transcript
“If you're willing to do the work upfront to commit to quality, to design, to ethics, to integrity, to safety, whatever the thing, I don't…”
“He said, "Let's figure it out. Figure it out."”
“Trustworthiness is the most underrated asset in all of business.”
“one of the reasons you're finding business so hard is that nobody trusts you? If they trusted you, maybe it would be a little bit…”
From the episode
How to build a company that withstands any era
Eric Ries, Lean Startup author