“If you really want to separate your work from everyone else’s,
every time you come to a Y in the road, don’t think about which way to go;
automatically take the toughest route. Everybody else is taking the easiest one.”
– Richard Serra in Leonard Koren’s What Artists Do (2018)
brettworks 
I think he’s wrong both ways, that folks will inevitably choose the “easy” path or that the toughest one produces some extra strength in the results or the artist.
And frankly, we often (usually) don’t know toughest or easiest when choosing, we find out later.
All we know on earth and all we need to know if from the teaching of the Yogi, Berra: when you come to a fork in the road, take it.
I think your writings here on process say essentially: Find more forks. Make more choices.
Good points, and yes, difficult paths don’t necessarily produce interesting results, and yes, finding forks moves process along. Although I interpret Serra as: interesting things invariably happen when one applies more attention to a project. It sometimes seems as if there is no end to levels of attention and the levels of detail they can reveal.