'What Is Difficult For You Is Also Difficult For Somebody'

The Effort Paradox/The Paradox of Effort.

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Have you observed that the 1% in anything are likelier to be more excellent at leisurely activities they set themselves on than other people are? Great debating champions who write in their pastime will likely make phenomenal writers. Phenomenal writers who pick up marathon participation as a leisure activity are likely to be medal winners.

When the (auto)biographies of great people are read, you will often find the most unlikely fun facts about them. You can hear that Ms Babatunde, who ran five companies, also spent at least five hours daily doing Yoga and sometimes volunteered as a Yoga and meditation instructor. Or that Mr Jibril, known for his academic prowess, is also a prolific gunslinger in his spare time.

A deviation from this transferred excellence is seen in people who do second degrees. When I was in the university, a significant fraction of the much older people who already had excellent practices in other professional endeavours —and merely came back because they could— performed very well in school.

A backdoor explanation for this transferred excellence is that those people are ‘geniuses’ anyway and just do extra activities to flex on you. Or that they are privileged people who tap into their privileges. While those might be true, there are known ‘geniuses’ and high-IQ people with (and without) privileges who have failed.

What is difficult for you is often difficult for others to execute. Running a business or a marathon, shooting a film or a shot at an opportunity; those who succeed, among other things, have one crucial factor going on for them: effort!

The Effort Paradox

When was the last time you committed to learning a new skill? A new language? How many times have you sworn that you would put more effort into learning a new language but have done little to advance this? How many things have you abandoned because you did not have time for them?

Let’s flip the script.

Since you started working on a new skill, how many other skills have you found exciting and planned to start learning? Since you started learning a new language, how many new books have you read? Since you started reading (again), how better has your performance at other things been? Since you started working out consciously, has your attitude to work and results changed?

Those who have avoided challenging themselves anew are likely to feel stressed by work, compared to those who think challenge is something you eat for breakfast. And that is the principle of the effort paradox.

A 2018 paper on cognitive science explains that:

“Humans and non-human animals alike tend to associate effort with reward and will sometimes select objects or activities precisely because they require effort (e.g., mountain climbing, ultra-marathons). Effort adds value to the products of effort, but effort itself also has value. Effort’s value can not only be accessed concurrently with or immediately following effort exertion, but also in anticipation of such expenditure, suggesting that we already have an intuitive understanding of effort’s potential positive value. If effort is consistently rewarded, people might learn that effort is valuable and become more willing to exert it in general.”

Therefore, people who acknowledge that putting more effort yields more results are likelier to take on even more challenging activities to improve the probability of their reward being multiplied when it yields.

On the transfer of this successful effort from one endeavour to another, Scott H. Young wrote that:

“while in grad school, [a friend] noticed a lot of people became much better students after they had kids. This is paradoxical because children are time-consuming, and thus, it ought to be much harder to succeed academically. I noticed something similar in myself, when I decided I wanted to run my own business. There were a lot of spillover benefits to other areas of my life, even though they weren’t related to entrepreneurship. I started reading books, exercising regularly and eating healthier, for instance. The difficulty of the new challenge forces you to take things seriously. Cal’s observation was that, with fearsome time constraints, procrastinating is out of the question. Taking studying seriously pushes you to do better than you might have, absent those constraints. In my case, becoming my own boss was a difficult enough goal that it forced me to build better habits throughout my life.”

Of course, not everyone will run in the path of more work for more effort. The 2018 paper acknowledges that the intrinsic nature of people is to avoid as much effort as possible for them to get the most reward for the least amount of effort. But the research leaves a nuanced view:

According to prominent models in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and economics, effort (be it physical or mental) is costly: when given a choice, humans and non-human animals alike tend to avoid effort. Here, we suggest that the opposite is also true and review extensive evidence that effort can also add value. Not only can the same outcomes be more rewarding if we apply more (not less) effort, sometimes we select options precisely because they require effort. Given the increasing recognition of effort’s role in motivation, cognitive control, and value-based decision-making, considering this neglected side of effort will not only improve formal computational models, but also provide clues about how to promote sustained mental effort across time.

The point of the effort paradox is that the more challenging a situation is, the easier it eventually becomes. The more effort it takes to do something, the more rewarding it gets. And as Scott H. Young wrote, “life is often easiest when it is hardest”.

So, those who can wake up at 5 am in furtherance of a goal are also likelier to read books, eat healthily, and have a better approach to executing those goals than those who just wake up and jump start.

If you can wake up at 5 am daily on weekdays and be rewarded by the results you get at the end of the week, why not spend your weekends practising painting or preparing for a marathon? Why not try gardening or collecting artefacts?

Those people recognise very religiously that what is difficult for you is also difficult for somebody. And instead of sitting down and complaining about the difficulty like you would, they let the effort paradox guide them.

This is how the 1% are created.

TEA

In a concerted effort to build habits that push me towards the top percentile, I recently started learning a new skill. It is an ‘ordinary’ skill that many people know as kids, but I did not have the privilege to do so. Almost as if trying to make up for lost years, I have now gone from being ridiculous at attempting this skill to being ridiculous at not knowing what my limits are.

I am, in fact, now considering participating in physical competitions with this activity (I have been winning virtual medals with my performances), and my 0 to 100 skilling up is now almost conceited.

What the activity is and why I have found so much joy in the said activity is a story I will soon tell. Hopefully, when I return to using social media later this month or next month.

In the meantime, can you guess what the activity is?

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Until the next NAN, be kind to yourself and the world around you; be patient with yourself and others; love yourself and the people around you; do not give up on things that matter to you unless giving up will provide you more peace and security.