The hard part is the work

In the medina in Marrakech, half the stalls along one lane sell the same leather slippers. Same yellow, same pointed toe, same stack by the door. Making them is no longer difficult, and selling them asks only that someone sits there.

A few doors down, one man measures your foot before he will sell you anything. He traces it on paper, asks how you walk, presses the leather with his thumb and tells you to come back tomorrow.

His neighbours think he is making life hard for himself. He is. That is where his value sits.

Work used to mean strain you could see. You knew who had worked by how tired they looked at the end of the day. For a lot of people that is no longer how value gets added, and it is tempting to conclude that opening the shutter and being pleasant is the whole job.

It is still work, though. The difficulty has simply moved. It now lives in the part nobody else wants to do: the fitting, the extra day, the patient conversation with the customer whose foot is an awkward shape.

Anything that becomes easy becomes common. The moment a step can be done without effort, every stall on the lane does it, and nobody has a reason to walk to your door in particular.

So the small seller who wants to matter has to go looking for the hard bit on purpose. Not the hard bit that is merely tiring. The hard bit the others step around.

The difficulty is not in the way of the work. It is the work.