Do what will cost you the most

“Do what will cost you the most” is a maxim about choosing the difficult path, introduced through Simone Weil and considered alongside Flannery O’Connor’s insistence that worthwhile writing is painful. The passage presents it not as an easy answer but as a demanding question: what does it mean to follow advice that measures a decision by its cost?

The Maxim and Its Source

The narrator imagines asking Flannery O’Connor what Simone Weil meant by the counsel, “When you have to make a decision in life, about what you should do, do what will cost you the most.” The phrasing makes cost a test for choice, but the passage supplies no particular decision to resolve and no simple method for calculating what the greatest cost would be. Its emphasis stays on the severity of the instruction and the uncertainty it creates.

Difficulty as a Measure

The maxim is restated in a shorter, more categorical form: “Do what is difficult because it is difficult. Do what will cost you the most.” The repetition joins difficulty to sacrifice, presenting neither as an incidental obstacle nor something to avoid automatically. The narrator’s immediate question, “Who were these people?”, registers distance as well as fascination: such counsel sounds absolute, and the passage does not claim that its meaning or authority is self-evident.

Writing and Pain

The reflection follows a passage about Betty Hester, who, at seventy-five and thirty-four years after O’Connor’s death from lupus at thirty-nine, shoots herself to death. Against that stark account, the narrator wonders what might have been asked of O’Connor as a mentor, then turns to the cost of action. The connection is not presented as an explanation of Hester’s life or death; rather, the juxtaposition gives the question about difficult choices a grave context.

O’Connor’s view of writing sharpens the passage’s concern with difficulty: if writing were not painful, she says, it would not be worth doing. That claim echoes the maxim without making the two statements identical. Together, they place meaningful work beside discomfort, while leaving open whether pain is a reliable guide to what one ought to choose.