In my life before Collegewise, a former co-worker approached me about joining his college counseling business he’d founded. When I met with him to learn more about the opportunity and how I might fit into it, he had a long list of things he claimed to have accomplished.

Website, logo, business cards, email addresses, full-color printed materials—he laid it all out in front of me. He’d even written a business plan that showed him at that top in charge with other future people doing all the work.

But what he didn’t have was 1) customers, or 2) any plan for what to do if he actually enrolled someone. He’d spent six months hiding from the difficult part by focusing on the easy part.

It’s not difficult to pay someone else to design a logo, print materials, or build a website. The difficult part is putting yourself in front of families who may not buy from you. The difficult part is making promises to customers and keeping them. The difficult part is spending every day learning as much as you can about admissions, then turning around and using that knowledge to do work that changes the college admissions process for people.

So I passed, started Collegewise, focused on the hard part, and spent the next fifteen years finding other people who were willing to do the same with me. The reason there aren’t a hundred Collegewises out there is precisely because of the difficult part. If it were easy, lots of people would do it.

Anything worth doing—a project, a job, a role in an organization—will have a difficult part. Look behind any successful person and you’ll almost certainly see that they faced the difficult part and prevailed.

The difficult part of getting into Harvard isn’t polishing an application to perfection, writing a great essay, or even getting high test scores. The difficult part is spending your high school career doing remarkable work, achieving and pushing and leaning in so that eventually there just aren’t that many people in the college application universe who can look at you and say, “Yep, I did all that, too.”

Parenting, fundraising, leading, managing, writing, playing music, acting–they all have parts that are easy and difficult parts. Just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s necessarily not important. But the difficult part is where the differences are made.

Nobody ever became great at anything just by getting the easy parts right. When in doubt, find and focus on doing the hard part. If you can do that, just about everything else will seem comparatively easy.