After you've spent a lot of time exerting yourself, then you can let go and let your non-doing take over. I've experienced this myself with coding and music and language. Once you've got it "in your fingers", learning to relax is a big part of the Inner Game of Whatever.
But don't tell me that Katie Ledecky didn't put in a huge amount of effort in her training before her world-class swimming performances. That's a lie, guaranteed to mislead many people to not trying anything because it feels like effort.
I think a major problem with advice for a general audience is that different people need different advice. I agree with you that a path to mastery usually involves putting in a lot of effortful practice and then learning to operate without conscious effort, to let muscle memory and such take over. I think people fail at this in different ways, however. I'm sure a lot of people fall off of mastery because they mistake the feeling of effort for lack of an innate talent or the endeavor being futile, and a lot of people fail to achieve fluency because they're unable to let go of the effortful, conscious mode of thinking. Advice for either of those groups is probably going to be counterproductive for the other
That said, I do think this article frames its advice in a clickbaity way by handwaving cumulative effort while talking about instantaneous effort
Reminds me of this quote from Walter Murch, from In the Blink of an Eye I think:
"Most of us are searching-consciously or unconsciously- for a degree of internal balance and harmony between ourselves and the outside world, and if we happen to become aware-like Stravinsky- of a volcano within us, we will compensate by urging restraint. By that same token, someone who bore a glacier within them might urge passionate abandon. The danger is, as Bergman points out, that a glacial personality in need of passionate abandon may read Stravinsky and apply restraint instead."
> Katie Ledecky didn't put in a huge amount of effort in her training before her world-class swimming performances.
Although the training takes lots of energy and time, it needn't be driven by striving towards abstract goals. Rather the training can be a playful/fun practice for the sake of doing it well in the moment. This makes it feel easier to practice a lot, and also makes the practice more "productive" by freeing up attention from distractions of purpose and self.
It's hard to say if most elite athletes are able to do this all the time, but they probably don't have as bad a time of it as normies when it comes to physical exertion.
Reminds me of when I first tried to learn guitar. I tried doing fingering practices. It was so boring. I gave up after like a week.
I thought that playing music just wasn’t for me.
Many years later, I picked up a friend’s guitar next to me and just tried to play one of my favorite songs just by ear. I got enough right that it was fun and I got hooked.
Well yeah, it helps to become a good (even world-class) swimmer if you actually like swimming and do a lot of it from an early age. Same as you are more likely to become a good developer if you actually enjoy programming rather than just thinking "I want to be a developer someday because I want to earn $$$".
If a person wants to do a thing then they will engage with it on their terms. But getting that initial "hook" and then growing it is the trick.
I will never go to any physical training that involves a trainer shouting "pain is gain!". If it hurts, why would I do that? Why are we focusing on how much it hurts?!
Get me hooked on the Gain, let the pain happen naturally depending on how hard I want that Gain.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I do a lot of stuff that people think is "hard work", but as they say, physical pain is fleeting, and I typically have a half-dozen or more small and large goals that I am working towards, that requires such "hard work". So, perhaps I yearn for the vast and endless.... something?
That's... actually the exact opposite of what GP suggested, isn't it? They wrote that "training doesn't need to be driven by abstract goals", and you are suggesting abstract goals to work towards. Not saying that can't work too, just that it's something different...
The most reliable way you get ahead is boring: small levels of effort, done consistently over time. You don't notice the progress day-to-day. You don't get much to brag about on social media. But it adds up.
"Let me share my slightly unusual definition of “effort”: it’s the felt experience of expending energy beyond what an activity requires, like tensing your brow when you try to understand something, or the excess tension in your hand when you hold your phone...Using this definition, it’s clear that the appropriate amount of effort for any activity is zero."
The problem with this whole argument is that you can easily reframe the definition of the activity to suit any specific agenda.
Going with the swimming analogy: If you’re attempting to cross a pool, you can just dead man’s float and eventually you’ll get there. If you’re attempting to cross it using crawl stroke you can do slow slowly and lazily. If your goal is to build Olympic tier swimming fitness, well then you need to pull exactly as hard as you need to to optimally build muscle / neural pathways / whatever.
By the way, overgripping is proven to boost effective strength. Next time you’re struggling for a last rep, try squeezing the bar harder.
My point isn’t that we shouldn’t burn ourselves out, it’s just that it’s very hard to know what the amount of energy an activity actually “requires” is
The claim seems to be that we often try even harder than is required to succeed. By trying too hard, we wear ourselves down, and might even cause us to fail in the process.
Therefore, putting effort beyond what is needed, by their definition, is excess and should be avoided.
Now I don't know if sometimes going a bit above what is needed can help in some ways, so I'm not saying it's true, but I don't see what is fallacious about it? The rationale seems to hold.
It's a stipulative definition that allows the author to reach a conclusion that's inherently provocative when read by people who are using the lexical definition.
> Therefore, putting effort beyond what is needed, by their definition, is excess and should be avoided.
By qualifying with "beyond what is needed" you've made it clear that you're using the lexical definition of "effort". I think that should drive home how absurd the author's definition of "effort" is. They've been careful not to make it a clearly circular definition (effort = effort beyond what is required) but they are awfully close.
>But don't tell me that Katie Ledecky didn't put in a huge amount of effort
Perhaps you should try reading the article, because it doesnt say that. Its a 5 minute read, although perhaps you shouldn't bother because most others dont appear to have either.
Edit: actually, I daresay the contention of the article is the exact opposite: its likely that ledecky put in the least effort out of anyone.
When I was a child, I learned badminton from a friend[0]. He was a fairly highly ranked player in our nation and so was very good. One of the first things he said was "Don't be stiff. Relax your muscles and hit the shuttlecock fluidly not rigidly.". I couldn't. When I finally could, it's because I was much better than I was when I started. The fluidity came after some degree of unconscious muscular competence, rather than prior to.
This aligns with what I know about Flow State: it requires some degree of unconscious competence before you can access it. When playing table-tennis, I could not access it when I was rubbish, but when I reached some degree of skill I wasn't thinking while I was playing, I was playing instinctually.
Over the years, many people have given me the same "don't be stiff; relax your muscles; move fluidly" and some of the time it has worked, but it has never worked when I did not have competence because I did not even know what it was to relax something.
So perhaps after one has acquired a base amount of skill at something, someone could "expend no effort", but that's just being in flow state.
0: not as a coach-student relationship but so that he could have someone to play against.
This is very accurate to me. In the last few years I've been learning ukulele / guitar / bass / mandolin / banjo, and it took a LOT of time and practice before I could control my muscles well enough to use less effort. When you're starting you just don't have the necessary dexterity, and it's very easy as an expert to forget about those early days, especially if you learned very young.
I learned piano starting around age 6, and I vaguely remember the first few years were spent largely on learning to control my fingers, stretch to play larger chords (as a child with fairly small hands, I couldn't stretch my hand to play an octave until around age 10 or 11), and so forth. I was learning to do this at the same time I was learning to write cursive, or hold a paintbrush, use a kitchen knife, etc - all kinds of basic childhood learning stuff.
Learning a new skill as an adult is like going back to grade school or even infancy in some cases. You can tell a small child not to grip their pencil so tightly, but until you've practiced handwriting for several years, your fingers simply don't have the control necessary to avoid using a heavy grip.
"Use a lighter touch" is fantastic advice for an intermediate or advanced student but incredibly frustrating for a beginner. Over the course of several decades of playing keyboard in bands I picked up the bad habit of playing with more force than necessary, which started to cause me problems. I had to practice playing with a lighter touch and that was actually a big help.
> This is very accurate to me. In the last few years I've been learning ukulele / guitar / bass / mandolin / banjo, and it took a LOT of time and practice before I could control my muscles well enough to use less effort. When you're starting you just don't have the necessary dexterity, and it's very easy as an expert to forget about those early days, especially if you learned very young.
Every time I learn a new instrument I'm reminded of the fact that many things just need to be drilled into your brain stem. I know how to play piano and sight read music for it but I can't do either because I haven't put the seat time in to do it in real time. I'm learning (electric) upright bass right now and there are a dozen technique issues I've noticed that I have to fix but I can only focus on a few of them at once.
Putting forth zero effort is how one ends up sloppy and stagnant. You instead need to be aware of your cognitive and parasympathetic bandwidth and how to utilize each to practice to a meaningful end.
Might be a neurological process. First phase involves low resolution control of direction and intensity. Second phase allows for tweaking. (Third phase being abstraction, where you can reflect on how to blend different ideas and movements to create a whole new pattern)
Half of all math proofs are guys walking around in nature or sitting in it. The last one I read was Ken Ono's breaththrough on partition numbers ... he was on a hike with a friend.
I might also add hard work gets you to a frustration point you might need first before it comes in its time ... IOW I'm not 100% sold on it just comes for free ... maybe better expressed as know when it's time to take a break too.
And nothing says they weren't thinking about the problem when it happened.
I've had a lot of "aha" moments not sitting by my desk, but that doesn't mean that I wasn't thinking of the problem. When people say they had an idea in the shower, I suspect it's precisely because they were undistracted enough to focus on the problem.
One of the more recent experience I've had pushing a skill from conscious competence to unconscious competence is in a multiplayer video game that involved very large scale fights that literally hundreds of players participate in (and I'm using the word literally literally here). Imagine Starcraft or a Civilization game, but rather than one player controlling an army of units, each unit is 1-is-to-1 controlled by a player.
I clearly recall how I started out, I was lost in a deluge of character models and health bars surrounding my screen, moving about, particles flashing from abilities. I had a difficult time listening to calls by the leader of my group (effectively, everyone is being coordinated by 1 person in a voice call) while trying to make sense of what's around me. I couldn't tell when I was in danger, or where I was supposed to be relative to the rest of the group. It was intense trying to parse everything around me.
But after years of practice (playing at a decently competitive level with other like-minded players who wanted to truly dedicate time to something they found worthwhile), everything in those fights just becomes clear. There's no friction in the hundreds of character models as they enter and exit my screen, reading the flow of combat is as easy as reading a cozy piece of fiction.
I think the way I'd describe the whole experience of learning this part of the game is I learned how to separate important states to non-states. When I started out, I did not know what information to immediately prune out. I was busy juggling a network of useless information and made a mesh of "non-states" that filled my mental capacity. The more I learned, the more I could actually build an intuition of real or important states to be aware of. This one flash of red means I'm in danger. This flash of yellow from an ally means I should advance more aggressively, etc.
This is the worst kind of post. If you read it carefully it barely says anything and the thing it does say is highly suspect or just wrong. I suspect most of the time when someone wins a race, for example, they aren't exerting zero effort, although the author has found an anecdote or two to the contrary, for example.
Appropriate amount of effort for what purpose? Is it appropriate for me to use ChatGPT on my mathematics test because it is the least effort required to pass the test? Or is it inappropriate because the goal should have been to learn the material?
Even something as straightforward as picking up a coffee mug runs into this. Just enough effort to be able to lift it without dropping, or enough to hang onto it if someone happens to bump into me?
I'm not disagreeing with the article, just pointing out that there is nuance that is easy to miss.
(Ok, I got a little triggered by the title, since I was just thinking about how 80% of my kid's mathematics class made it through by using ChatGPT for all of the homeworks, quizzes, and even the tests. The teacher doesn't want to police it, the administration doesn't care, and those kids learned almost nothing. "Zero effort == good" is a dangerous statement out of context.)
I agree with this. I think a lot of people try too hard, and it backfires, as exhaustion, or strain, that end up contributing more to failure than success.
I believe it's because working hard is actually easier than having good discipline, so people attempt to make up for their lack of "actually having made any progress", by trying to "make a ton of progress really fast" to catch up for it.
A lot of folks never really learned to effectively study over the course of weeks or months. One of the keys I've learned is to give yourself enough time to soak in new concepts and for practice to crystallize in your mind. I used to get frustrated at this process, but finally in my 40s I've learned to embrace how my brain and body learn new skills.
I've recently started a new job, and I've been thrown a ton of materials and systems to study. Lots of new terms, systems, etc., and only vague ideas of where everything fits in. So here's my rough process if I'm handed a product spec for a system I'm going to be building / working on:
- Skim the entirety of whatever document / deck / codebase you've been given. Make a couple notes about things you didn't understand, and plan to look into. Maybe a couple key concepts. Not too much. You're just dipping your toes. It's going to be really annoying and frustrating and you're going to want to quit. That's OK - your brain / body are telling you you're working hard and expending a lot of energy. Think of it like lifting mental weights - it's meant to be hard work.
- Come back in a couple days and read it again, after you've done this process with a bunch of other things. You might realize this document has answers to questions you had about other things! You're just starting to make connections.
- Make yourself a reminder to check back in another week, and in the mean time go and ask your questions to the document author, your manager, your team, etc.
- By the next week, you probably understand what's going on enough to write a 1-pager for your plans; give it another week and you should be able to right a proper tech design.
I'm close to some kind of mastery with cello, and broadly we tell students to play with zero tension.
This is useful to say (often they have way too much tension and need to really dial it back), but in reality there is _some_ tension in everything:
- left hand: the fingers are basically a conduit for your back weight, but they need enough strength to stand up and _act_ as a conduit, otherwise they'd collapse. (but they needn't do more)
- right hand: weight flows from the back, down the arm, into the index finger, and all power derives from that + bow speed + how close you are to the bridge. However, the thumb needs to engage enough to counterbalance the weight on top of the stick, otherwise the bow would clumsily fall over.
"Let me share my slightly unusual definition of “effort”: it’s the felt experience of expending energy beyond what an activity requires, like tensing your brow when you try to understand something, or the excess tension in your hand when you hold your phone...Using this definition, it’s clear that the appropriate amount of effort for any activity is zero."
If you have experienced in racing, motocycle racing in particular, you can relate this message very well.
Trying too hard can really reduce performance or laptime, similar to run the marathon.
You have to feel very relax to get better result. And, feeling relax in death-pace or very risky situation like racing is something you need to work on overtime.
The appropriate amount of effort is the key.
Serendipitous, I recently wrote about my controversial interpretation of wu wei, which, in modern terms, is erasing effort by leveraging habits and other automatisms. If you have to be conscious about it, you’re doing it wrong. Nice to see Lao Tzu quoted in a post about (non-)effort.
Except that the conclusion is wrong because you need tolerance. A bridge is designed to tolerate a certain weight, then you factor in some large tolerance for special circumstances, the same is true of effort.
You put more effort into your team presentation just in case there are guests. You cannot suddenly have a better presentation instantaneously when you arrive and see the CTO. In sports, such as bouldering, you will grip a hold slightly harder than strictly required in case you suddenly slip or just to easily accommodate the dynamics necessary as you shift your weight without requiring ultra precision which is a different form of effort.
The additional effort you expend is based on your estimation of the risk. As you master whatever skill it is, then you are better able to estimate the risks and the need or lack thereof for additional effort. Novices expend more effort than masters because they cannot gauge the need, but they will also make more mistakes by correctly guessing the correct effort but not accommodating for the risk.
The appropriate (over)effort is never 0 because there is always some context dependent risk.
> "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." — Lao Tzu
> Nature is an enormous flow of energy, yet nature makes no effort.
I don't get these. What are they referring to? The nature I'm looking at, at all scales, from viruses, to animals, to storms, it's all so violent. Is it just that it's all in the eye of the beholder?
One way to read it: nature as a whole makes no effort. It wouldn’t even make sense to say that it does. Does a star make an effort? Yet nature encompasses all that happens.
Another interpretation may be connected to Luke 12:27 (yeah I had to look it up, I actually thought it was from Ecclesiastes, lol), which, paraphrased, is that flowers do not work to be beautiful—that’s just what they are. They can’t (be generous with the reading of “can’t”, if you would) be otherwise.
To expand: humans want what they are not, and that creates work, and stress, and so on. I want to be pretty like a flower. But I’m a person. So now I must spin cloth, and do a bunch of other work, to attain that want, or else suffer unmet desire. Animals and plants (perhaps) have wants (like: a rabbit may want food, or not to be killed and eaten) and pain and such, but don’t work in that sense. They just are what they are, and do what something like them does. This may fall apart in particular examples, but the broad poetic sense isn’t so bad.
(Yes you can nitpick this to death with stuff like “but maybe what humans are is animals that want very very much to be what they’re not, so that is their nature” but c’mon)
[edit] cf Vonnegut’s (serious? Joking? Half-joking?) suggestion in Galapagos that humans’ big brains are a curse that causes most of our trouble, and we’d be better off as something like smartish seals.
effort might mean going against the flow, so if you go where the resistance is the smallest that is likely your niche
of course this might need some tweaking, because if someone is really good at pickpocketing maybe some effort would put them on a much better long-term trajectory?
If so, what does it mean that "nature makes no effort" but humans do? Is the claim then that non-humans are literally incapable of "going against the flow"? Is it a religious argument, about us having some mental/metaphysical capacity that nothing else in nature has?
A way of making an argument is to craft a statement that at first shockingly contradicts a basic dictionary definition of a word but at a closer look highlights a characteristic you want to bring to reader’s attention, creates a finer distinction between vaguely similar terms. It’s probably the oldest form of clickbait, and perhaps the most useful one—when done correctly, it provides a lot of food for thought in a single sentence, and can present an old truth in a catchy way that is more likely to be internalised by the reader.
For example, “you should not spend effort to achieve something” is a weird thing to say at first. It poses a paradox and invites the reader to experiment: let’s pretend we can’t spend effort; but we can still do things, we can spend energy, we can end up having achieved something. Are there examples of how people do things and spend energy, but without spending effort?
This highlights a particular elusive quality of “effort” that, like many ideas in human psychology, may not have a specific dictionary word assigned to it. Having drawn such a stark distinction between spending energy and spending effort makes it easier to recall that quality, even if it doesn’t have a convenient term that rolls off the tongue.
(I’d postulate that if carrying heavy boulders up a hill is your hobby or something you can bring yourself to enjoy doing, there is certainly a way in which you can do even that without spending effort in this revised definition. By contrast, doing something you loathe may always be full of effort, no matter how little energy it requires from you.)
Could the same point be expressed in a more conservative way, like “you should not spend too much effort to achieve something”? Sure. However, for many people it wouldn’t be as easily internalised.
> When you try so hard all the time, that level of effort feels familiar and you stop noticing it.
> Put another way, years of overdoing mis-calibrate your senses so effort feels right and ease feels wrong. ...
This is the first time I've seen in writing something I've felt deeply for a long time.
I have a long history of (sub-clinical) stress and anxiety problems and experimenting with mindfulness and embodied exercises etc it hit me so strongly that it feels alien/wrong to be relaxed, and that very fact makes it harder to be so.
Same, though my problem is more about overthinking and "trying too hard" than anxiety. When I manage to relax into something it tends to go well, but getting to that relaxed state is very hard, and my natural inclination is to try harder, which usually doesn't go well.
It's like the thing of "slow is smooth, smooth is quick" when I'm trying to do something in a hurry.
The article reminds me of the similarly ridiculous take in Effortless Mastery. These authors are selling your own hopium to you. The appropriate amount of effort is as much as possible - just don’t do it in such a dumb awkward way.
I’ve noticed something like this while playing the game Hollow Knight: Silksong. Most of the time when I was trying to beat a difficult boss, I wasn’t trying to beat it while it’s hard and would take a lot of effort. Instead I was working on making beating the boss easy (which was hard). So typically by the time I would beat a boss, it did feel like comparatively little effort was being expended.
> These scripts team up with one of the core principles of Alexander Technique: Faulty Sensory Appreciation
Someone mentioned to me that we have a disease of hard-working. The article correctly identifies it as a sensory problem.
I would go further inquiring why this happens. The motivation that propels you towards too much effort is incorrect. You should question your ambitions, the need and your value system that values your effort vs returns and justifies the effort.
Yes its great to be in flow state where everything is peachy. But people who have tried to build something know that you will constantly bang your head against different walls that need effort and solving. And you dont know how much effort is required until the task is done.
This is certainly relevant to aikido, and in particular the somewhat nebulous concept of "aiki". Unnecessary tension in a technique creates a reaction in your partner which tends to block things. Skilled practitioners make things look effortless, and use much less tension - they are more relaxed. It's a fascinating study - and lots of fun.
Very different sport - but check Shane Benzies and his books and videos on running and technique - how technique makes a huge difference, with less effort.
This is my problem when I try to open a jar with a stuck lid. In the act of gripping the lid well enough to have traction to turn it, I end up squeezing the lid so hard that it deforms and becomes harder to turn.
Grip seems like a bad example since in most cases gripping something a little bit stronger will make your grip a little more robust to an unexpected perturbance (e.g. you stumble, or someone bumps into you). Unless you have good data on how common such perturbances are, how changes in grip strength affect robustness in the face of perturbance, and what drop rate is acceptable, how would you know whether you're gripping things too strongly?
that's true for some folks out there. But, ultimately its about these 3 questions:
- what you are?
- what you want to be?
- when you want to be there?
I think if you don't have an answer to the last question, you should be fine with 0 efforts.
Confusion of effect for cause. Unconscious or effortless processing by the brain is usually way more accurate and reliable than conscious processing, but outside of being "gifted" you only get to consistent unconscious processing after years of training and conscious practice that ingrain muscle memory etc.
I've seen a lot of references to this "Alexander Technique"[1] lately but no indication that it's anything other than the latest trendy pseudoscience that you can conveniently use to explain just about anything. (There seems to be a fair amount of overlap between it and what I can only describe as "rationalists who think they invented meditation".) Does anyone know why it's so popular now or who's behind the push?
The author of the blog produced one of the first online courses in AT and is active on twitter. When that launched, he was the first person I saw talking about it a lot online.
Meditation/mindfulness was growing in popularity in the 2010s and this stuff is just further along the tech tree. It was already well known with actors but the cross-over with meditation-like practices is pretty obvious if you look into both.
The (post) Rationalists you mention are mostly exploring technologies/methods around the connection between mind/body/emotion. There's no single figure pushing it along.
"You don't get your best performances by trying harder" is just another way of saying that our talents come so naturally that they don't feel like work.
Does that mean that if you're trying, you're fighting a losing uphill battle against something you'll never excel at? I think many skills are learned and must be earned with discipline. But the culture places excessive weight on excelling in specific fields that most people simply can't brute-force. Hence the prevalence of chemical assistance at the highest ends of productivity, intellectual competition, and athletics.
We probably need to place more emphasis on doing things that come naturally to us. Emphasis on doing. But also enjoy downtime and not-doing occasionally.
As alluded to in another comment, this post kind of makes a lot more sense if you've read The Inner Game of Tennis.
It kind of glosses over competence of practice, but the TL;DR is once you've built up some competence with a skill, staying in a constant state of effortful tension won't give you better results. Entering flow state requires getting into "unconscious competence" effectively.
...which is effectively a reframe of how The Inner Game of Tennis says it: to practice your still with non-judgement while you do it.
What a bunch of nonsense. Top performers aren’t top performers because they’re relaxed and don’t put in extra effort. They’re relaxed and don’t put in extra effort because they’re top performers. This is like saying that the way to run fast is to put a gold medal around your neck, since that’s what the fastest runners do. It’s a complete reversal of cause and effect.
> Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished
I don't know, you ever seen a video of a cheetah hunting a gazelle? Lots of hurrying going on there.
After you've spent a lot of time exerting yourself, then you can let go and let your non-doing take over. I've experienced this myself with coding and music and language. Once you've got it "in your fingers", learning to relax is a big part of the Inner Game of Whatever.
But don't tell me that Katie Ledecky didn't put in a huge amount of effort in her training before her world-class swimming performances. That's a lie, guaranteed to mislead many people to not trying anything because it feels like effort.
I think a major problem with advice for a general audience is that different people need different advice. I agree with you that a path to mastery usually involves putting in a lot of effortful practice and then learning to operate without conscious effort, to let muscle memory and such take over. I think people fail at this in different ways, however. I'm sure a lot of people fall off of mastery because they mistake the feeling of effort for lack of an innate talent or the endeavor being futile, and a lot of people fail to achieve fluency because they're unable to let go of the effortful, conscious mode of thinking. Advice for either of those groups is probably going to be counterproductive for the other
That said, I do think this article frames its advice in a clickbaity way by handwaving cumulative effort while talking about instantaneous effort
Reminds me of this quote from Walter Murch, from In the Blink of an Eye I think:
"Most of us are searching-consciously or unconsciously- for a degree of internal balance and harmony between ourselves and the outside world, and if we happen to become aware-like Stravinsky- of a volcano within us, we will compensate by urging restraint. By that same token, someone who bore a glacier within them might urge passionate abandon. The danger is, as Bergman points out, that a glacial personality in need of passionate abandon may read Stravinsky and apply restraint instead."
Well said.
> Katie Ledecky didn't put in a huge amount of effort in her training before her world-class swimming performances.
Although the training takes lots of energy and time, it needn't be driven by striving towards abstract goals. Rather the training can be a playful/fun practice for the sake of doing it well in the moment. This makes it feel easier to practice a lot, and also makes the practice more "productive" by freeing up attention from distractions of purpose and self.
It's hard to say if most elite athletes are able to do this all the time, but they probably don't have as bad a time of it as normies when it comes to physical exertion.
Reminds me of when I first tried to learn guitar. I tried doing fingering practices. It was so boring. I gave up after like a week.
I thought that playing music just wasn’t for me.
Many years later, I picked up a friend’s guitar next to me and just tried to play one of my favorite songs just by ear. I got enough right that it was fun and I got hooked.
Well yeah, it helps to become a good (even world-class) swimmer if you actually like swimming and do a lot of it from an early age. Same as you are more likely to become a good developer if you actually enjoy programming rather than just thinking "I want to be a developer someday because I want to earn $$$".
Sounds like a "train the motivation" approach.
If a person wants to do a thing then they will engage with it on their terms. But getting that initial "hook" and then growing it is the trick.
I will never go to any physical training that involves a trainer shouting "pain is gain!". If it hurts, why would I do that? Why are we focusing on how much it hurts?!
Get me hooked on the Gain, let the pain happen naturally depending on how hard I want that Gain.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I do a lot of stuff that people think is "hard work", but as they say, physical pain is fleeting, and I typically have a half-dozen or more small and large goals that I am working towards, that requires such "hard work". So, perhaps I yearn for the vast and endless.... something?
That's... actually the exact opposite of what GP suggested, isn't it? They wrote that "training doesn't need to be driven by abstract goals", and you are suggesting abstract goals to work towards. Not saying that can't work too, just that it's something different...
The most reliable way you get ahead is boring: small levels of effort, done consistently over time. You don't notice the progress day-to-day. You don't get much to brag about on social media. But it adds up.
But what OP is saying, and what I agree with, is that I don't think Katie Ledecky put in small levels of effort consistently over time.
Sammy Hagar interviewing Eddie van Halen for Guitar World a few decades back: "Ed, what percentage of notes do you actually play consciously?"
"I guess about 30%?"
"Let me share my slightly unusual definition of “effort”: it’s the felt experience of expending energy beyond what an activity requires, like tensing your brow when you try to understand something, or the excess tension in your hand when you hold your phone...Using this definition, it’s clear that the appropriate amount of effort for any activity is zero."
The problem with this whole argument is that you can easily reframe the definition of the activity to suit any specific agenda.
Going with the swimming analogy: If you’re attempting to cross a pool, you can just dead man’s float and eventually you’ll get there. If you’re attempting to cross it using crawl stroke you can do slow slowly and lazily. If your goal is to build Olympic tier swimming fitness, well then you need to pull exactly as hard as you need to to optimally build muscle / neural pathways / whatever.
By the way, overgripping is proven to boost effective strength. Next time you’re struggling for a last rep, try squeezing the bar harder.
My point isn’t that we shouldn’t burn ourselves out, it’s just that it’s very hard to know what the amount of energy an activity actually “requires” is
This is a fallacious argument.
What is fallacious about it?
The claim seems to be that we often try even harder than is required to succeed. By trying too hard, we wear ourselves down, and might even cause us to fail in the process.
Therefore, putting effort beyond what is needed, by their definition, is excess and should be avoided.
Now I don't know if sometimes going a bit above what is needed can help in some ways, so I'm not saying it's true, but I don't see what is fallacious about it? The rationale seems to hold.
That's not the lexical definition of effort.
It's a stipulative definition that allows the author to reach a conclusion that's inherently provocative when read by people who are using the lexical definition.
> Therefore, putting effort beyond what is needed, by their definition, is excess and should be avoided.
By qualifying with "beyond what is needed" you've made it clear that you're using the lexical definition of "effort". I think that should drive home how absurd the author's definition of "effort" is. They've been careful not to make it a clearly circular definition (effort = effort beyond what is required) but they are awfully close.
Sustained effort is required for muscle memory to take over, at which point throughput increases dramatically.
>But don't tell me that Katie Ledecky didn't put in a huge amount of effort
Perhaps you should try reading the article, because it doesnt say that. Its a 5 minute read, although perhaps you shouldn't bother because most others dont appear to have either.
Edit: actually, I daresay the contention of the article is the exact opposite: its likely that ledecky put in the least effort out of anyone.
The contention of the article is premised on using a nonstandard definition.
And THAT is done to let them make a clickbait title.
One might say - by their definition? - that if you need to resort to a clickbait title to get engagement, you're putting in too much effort!
When I was a child, I learned badminton from a friend[0]. He was a fairly highly ranked player in our nation and so was very good. One of the first things he said was "Don't be stiff. Relax your muscles and hit the shuttlecock fluidly not rigidly.". I couldn't. When I finally could, it's because I was much better than I was when I started. The fluidity came after some degree of unconscious muscular competence, rather than prior to.
This aligns with what I know about Flow State: it requires some degree of unconscious competence before you can access it. When playing table-tennis, I could not access it when I was rubbish, but when I reached some degree of skill I wasn't thinking while I was playing, I was playing instinctually.
Over the years, many people have given me the same "don't be stiff; relax your muscles; move fluidly" and some of the time it has worked, but it has never worked when I did not have competence because I did not even know what it was to relax something.
So perhaps after one has acquired a base amount of skill at something, someone could "expend no effort", but that's just being in flow state.
0: not as a coach-student relationship but so that he could have someone to play against.
This is very accurate to me. In the last few years I've been learning ukulele / guitar / bass / mandolin / banjo, and it took a LOT of time and practice before I could control my muscles well enough to use less effort. When you're starting you just don't have the necessary dexterity, and it's very easy as an expert to forget about those early days, especially if you learned very young.
I learned piano starting around age 6, and I vaguely remember the first few years were spent largely on learning to control my fingers, stretch to play larger chords (as a child with fairly small hands, I couldn't stretch my hand to play an octave until around age 10 or 11), and so forth. I was learning to do this at the same time I was learning to write cursive, or hold a paintbrush, use a kitchen knife, etc - all kinds of basic childhood learning stuff.
Learning a new skill as an adult is like going back to grade school or even infancy in some cases. You can tell a small child not to grip their pencil so tightly, but until you've practiced handwriting for several years, your fingers simply don't have the control necessary to avoid using a heavy grip.
"Use a lighter touch" is fantastic advice for an intermediate or advanced student but incredibly frustrating for a beginner. Over the course of several decades of playing keyboard in bands I picked up the bad habit of playing with more force than necessary, which started to cause me problems. I had to practice playing with a lighter touch and that was actually a big help.
> This is very accurate to me. In the last few years I've been learning ukulele / guitar / bass / mandolin / banjo, and it took a LOT of time and practice before I could control my muscles well enough to use less effort. When you're starting you just don't have the necessary dexterity, and it's very easy as an expert to forget about those early days, especially if you learned very young.
Every time I learn a new instrument I'm reminded of the fact that many things just need to be drilled into your brain stem. I know how to play piano and sight read music for it but I can't do either because I haven't put the seat time in to do it in real time. I'm learning (electric) upright bass right now and there are a dozen technique issues I've noticed that I have to fix but I can only focus on a few of them at once.
Putting forth zero effort is how one ends up sloppy and stagnant. You instead need to be aware of your cognitive and parasympathetic bandwidth and how to utilize each to practice to a meaningful end.
Might be a neurological process. First phase involves low resolution control of direction and intensity. Second phase allows for tweaking. (Third phase being abstraction, where you can reflect on how to blend different ideas and movements to create a whole new pattern)
Flow is generally achieved when the challenge is appropriate, not too easy, not too hard.
The Inner Game of Tennis has entered the chat
Half of all math proofs are guys walking around in nature or sitting in it. The last one I read was Ken Ono's breaththrough on partition numbers ... he was on a hike with a friend.
I might also add hard work gets you to a frustration point you might need first before it comes in its time ... IOW I'm not 100% sold on it just comes for free ... maybe better expressed as know when it's time to take a break too.
That's only when the breakthrough happened and misses all the rest of the time spent on the problem.
And nothing says they weren't thinking about the problem when it happened.
I've had a lot of "aha" moments not sitting by my desk, but that doesn't mean that I wasn't thinking of the problem. When people say they had an idea in the shower, I suspect it's precisely because they were undistracted enough to focus on the problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_effect
One of the more recent experience I've had pushing a skill from conscious competence to unconscious competence is in a multiplayer video game that involved very large scale fights that literally hundreds of players participate in (and I'm using the word literally literally here). Imagine Starcraft or a Civilization game, but rather than one player controlling an army of units, each unit is 1-is-to-1 controlled by a player.
I clearly recall how I started out, I was lost in a deluge of character models and health bars surrounding my screen, moving about, particles flashing from abilities. I had a difficult time listening to calls by the leader of my group (effectively, everyone is being coordinated by 1 person in a voice call) while trying to make sense of what's around me. I couldn't tell when I was in danger, or where I was supposed to be relative to the rest of the group. It was intense trying to parse everything around me.
But after years of practice (playing at a decently competitive level with other like-minded players who wanted to truly dedicate time to something they found worthwhile), everything in those fights just becomes clear. There's no friction in the hundreds of character models as they enter and exit my screen, reading the flow of combat is as easy as reading a cozy piece of fiction.
I think the way I'd describe the whole experience of learning this part of the game is I learned how to separate important states to non-states. When I started out, I did not know what information to immediately prune out. I was busy juggling a network of useless information and made a mesh of "non-states" that filled my mental capacity. The more I learned, the more I could actually build an intuition of real or important states to be aware of. This one flash of red means I'm in danger. This flash of yellow from an ally means I should advance more aggressively, etc.
If anyone's interested at what I'm describing, here's someone's gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaZhda3rWvU
[delayed]
This is the worst kind of post. If you read it carefully it barely says anything and the thing it does say is highly suspect or just wrong. I suspect most of the time when someone wins a race, for example, they aren't exerting zero effort, although the author has found an anecdote or two to the contrary, for example.
Appropriate amount of effort for what purpose? Is it appropriate for me to use ChatGPT on my mathematics test because it is the least effort required to pass the test? Or is it inappropriate because the goal should have been to learn the material?
Even something as straightforward as picking up a coffee mug runs into this. Just enough effort to be able to lift it without dropping, or enough to hang onto it if someone happens to bump into me?
I'm not disagreeing with the article, just pointing out that there is nuance that is easy to miss.
(Ok, I got a little triggered by the title, since I was just thinking about how 80% of my kid's mathematics class made it through by using ChatGPT for all of the homeworks, quizzes, and even the tests. The teacher doesn't want to police it, the administration doesn't care, and those kids learned almost nothing. "Zero effort == good" is a dangerous statement out of context.)
I think part of this is:
- you need to have clarity on the what the goal is
- then you can adjust your effort to meet the goal
no one can tell you what your goals are.
I agree with this. I think a lot of people try too hard, and it backfires, as exhaustion, or strain, that end up contributing more to failure than success.
I believe it's because working hard is actually easier than having good discipline, so people attempt to make up for their lack of "actually having made any progress", by trying to "make a ton of progress really fast" to catch up for it.
A lot of folks never really learned to effectively study over the course of weeks or months. One of the keys I've learned is to give yourself enough time to soak in new concepts and for practice to crystallize in your mind. I used to get frustrated at this process, but finally in my 40s I've learned to embrace how my brain and body learn new skills.
I've recently started a new job, and I've been thrown a ton of materials and systems to study. Lots of new terms, systems, etc., and only vague ideas of where everything fits in. So here's my rough process if I'm handed a product spec for a system I'm going to be building / working on:
- Skim the entirety of whatever document / deck / codebase you've been given. Make a couple notes about things you didn't understand, and plan to look into. Maybe a couple key concepts. Not too much. You're just dipping your toes. It's going to be really annoying and frustrating and you're going to want to quit. That's OK - your brain / body are telling you you're working hard and expending a lot of energy. Think of it like lifting mental weights - it's meant to be hard work.
- Come back in a couple days and read it again, after you've done this process with a bunch of other things. You might realize this document has answers to questions you had about other things! You're just starting to make connections.
- Make yourself a reminder to check back in another week, and in the mean time go and ask your questions to the document author, your manager, your team, etc.
- By the next week, you probably understand what's going on enough to write a 1-pager for your plans; give it another week and you should be able to right a proper tech design.
Appropriate amount of effort is the least required to make it work. Without effort object would fall to the floor because grip was too weak.
One reason why performance of a master (art, music, sport, whatever) looks so effortless is because of crude and unforgiving practice.
Your definition is more correct.
I'm close to some kind of mastery with cello, and broadly we tell students to play with zero tension.
This is useful to say (often they have way too much tension and need to really dial it back), but in reality there is _some_ tension in everything:
- left hand: the fingers are basically a conduit for your back weight, but they need enough strength to stand up and _act_ as a conduit, otherwise they'd collapse. (but they needn't do more)
- right hand: weight flows from the back, down the arm, into the index finger, and all power derives from that + bow speed + how close you are to the bridge. However, the thumb needs to engage enough to counterbalance the weight on top of the stick, otherwise the bow would clumsily fall over.
The key is, as you say, doing the bare minimum.
"Let me share my slightly unusual definition of “effort”: it’s the felt experience of expending energy beyond what an activity requires, like tensing your brow when you try to understand something, or the excess tension in your hand when you hold your phone...Using this definition, it’s clear that the appropriate amount of effort for any activity is zero."
If you have experienced in racing, motocycle racing in particular, you can relate this message very well. Trying too hard can really reduce performance or laptime, similar to run the marathon. You have to feel very relax to get better result. And, feeling relax in death-pace or very risky situation like racing is something you need to work on overtime. The appropriate amount of effort is the key.
Serendipitous, I recently wrote about my controversial interpretation of wu wei, which, in modern terms, is erasing effort by leveraging habits and other automatisms. If you have to be conscious about it, you’re doing it wrong. Nice to see Lao Tzu quoted in a post about (non-)effort.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46267098
“Governing [ourselves] is like cooking small fish.” — Lao Tzu, paraphrased.
This is a completely obvious conclusion with an unexpected definition of "effort" to justify a click-bait title.
Except that the conclusion is wrong because you need tolerance. A bridge is designed to tolerate a certain weight, then you factor in some large tolerance for special circumstances, the same is true of effort.
You put more effort into your team presentation just in case there are guests. You cannot suddenly have a better presentation instantaneously when you arrive and see the CTO. In sports, such as bouldering, you will grip a hold slightly harder than strictly required in case you suddenly slip or just to easily accommodate the dynamics necessary as you shift your weight without requiring ultra precision which is a different form of effort.
The additional effort you expend is based on your estimation of the risk. As you master whatever skill it is, then you are better able to estimate the risks and the need or lack thereof for additional effort. Novices expend more effort than masters because they cannot gauge the need, but they will also make more mistakes by correctly guessing the correct effort but not accommodating for the risk.
The appropriate (over)effort is never 0 because there is always some context dependent risk.
Right?
Such a clear fallacy of definition in the opening paragraphs that it renders the rest of the article a pointless read.
Yes, if you arbitrarily redefine terms you can reach arbitrary conclusions.
> "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." — Lao Tzu
> Nature is an enormous flow of energy, yet nature makes no effort.
I don't get these. What are they referring to? The nature I'm looking at, at all scales, from viruses, to animals, to storms, it's all so violent. Is it just that it's all in the eye of the beholder?
One way to read it: nature as a whole makes no effort. It wouldn’t even make sense to say that it does. Does a star make an effort? Yet nature encompasses all that happens.
Another interpretation may be connected to Luke 12:27 (yeah I had to look it up, I actually thought it was from Ecclesiastes, lol), which, paraphrased, is that flowers do not work to be beautiful—that’s just what they are. They can’t (be generous with the reading of “can’t”, if you would) be otherwise.
To expand: humans want what they are not, and that creates work, and stress, and so on. I want to be pretty like a flower. But I’m a person. So now I must spin cloth, and do a bunch of other work, to attain that want, or else suffer unmet desire. Animals and plants (perhaps) have wants (like: a rabbit may want food, or not to be killed and eaten) and pain and such, but don’t work in that sense. They just are what they are, and do what something like them does. This may fall apart in particular examples, but the broad poetic sense isn’t so bad.
(Yes you can nitpick this to death with stuff like “but maybe what humans are is animals that want very very much to be what they’re not, so that is their nature” but c’mon)
[edit] cf Vonnegut’s (serious? Joking? Half-joking?) suggestion in Galapagos that humans’ big brains are a curse that causes most of our trouble, and we’d be better off as something like smartish seals.
effort might mean going against the flow, so if you go where the resistance is the smallest that is likely your niche
of course this might need some tweaking, because if someone is really good at pickpocketing maybe some effort would put them on a much better long-term trajectory?
If so, what does it mean that "nature makes no effort" but humans do? Is the claim then that non-humans are literally incapable of "going against the flow"? Is it a religious argument, about us having some mental/metaphysical capacity that nothing else in nature has?
Has the author redefined “effort” such that the amount of effort required to carry a boulder up a mountain is, by his own definition, always zero?
> Let me share my slightly unusual definition of “effort”: it’s the felt experience of expending energy beyond what an activity requires
A way of making an argument is to craft a statement that at first shockingly contradicts a basic dictionary definition of a word but at a closer look highlights a characteristic you want to bring to reader’s attention, creates a finer distinction between vaguely similar terms. It’s probably the oldest form of clickbait, and perhaps the most useful one—when done correctly, it provides a lot of food for thought in a single sentence, and can present an old truth in a catchy way that is more likely to be internalised by the reader.
For example, “you should not spend effort to achieve something” is a weird thing to say at first. It poses a paradox and invites the reader to experiment: let’s pretend we can’t spend effort; but we can still do things, we can spend energy, we can end up having achieved something. Are there examples of how people do things and spend energy, but without spending effort?
This highlights a particular elusive quality of “effort” that, like many ideas in human psychology, may not have a specific dictionary word assigned to it. Having drawn such a stark distinction between spending energy and spending effort makes it easier to recall that quality, even if it doesn’t have a convenient term that rolls off the tongue.
(I’d postulate that if carrying heavy boulders up a hill is your hobby or something you can bring yourself to enjoy doing, there is certainly a way in which you can do even that without spending effort in this revised definition. By contrast, doing something you loathe may always be full of effort, no matter how little energy it requires from you.)
Could the same point be expressed in a more conservative way, like “you should not spend too much effort to achieve something”? Sure. However, for many people it wouldn’t be as easily internalised.
These ideas are probably as old as humanity, which is I guess why author did not bother to explain further.
The trick is that perceived effort != actual effort.
So the big question is: how much you can reduce this perceived effort?
Looks like it, yes.
“The Strength of Ease” — a mantra I tell myself
> "Money don't matter", - rich people
> "Looks don't matter", - attractive people
> "Just relax", - world class champions
> When you try so hard all the time, that level of effort feels familiar and you stop noticing it.
> Put another way, years of overdoing mis-calibrate your senses so effort feels right and ease feels wrong. ...
This is the first time I've seen in writing something I've felt deeply for a long time.
I have a long history of (sub-clinical) stress and anxiety problems and experimenting with mindfulness and embodied exercises etc it hit me so strongly that it feels alien/wrong to be relaxed, and that very fact makes it harder to be so.
It sucks.
Same, though my problem is more about overthinking and "trying too hard" than anxiety. When I manage to relax into something it tends to go well, but getting to that relaxed state is very hard, and my natural inclination is to try harder, which usually doesn't go well.
It's like the thing of "slow is smooth, smooth is quick" when I'm trying to do something in a hurry.
I think Aldous Huxley said it well:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/614121-it-s-dark-because-yo...
The article reminds me of the similarly ridiculous take in Effortless Mastery. These authors are selling your own hopium to you. The appropriate amount of effort is as much as possible - just don’t do it in such a dumb awkward way.
I’ve noticed something like this while playing the game Hollow Knight: Silksong. Most of the time when I was trying to beat a difficult boss, I wasn’t trying to beat it while it’s hard and would take a lot of effort. Instead I was working on making beating the boss easy (which was hard). So typically by the time I would beat a boss, it did feel like comparatively little effort was being expended.
> These scripts team up with one of the core principles of Alexander Technique: Faulty Sensory Appreciation
Someone mentioned to me that we have a disease of hard-working. The article correctly identifies it as a sensory problem.
I would go further inquiring why this happens. The motivation that propels you towards too much effort is incorrect. You should question your ambitions, the need and your value system that values your effort vs returns and justifies the effort.
Yes its great to be in flow state where everything is peachy. But people who have tried to build something know that you will constantly bang your head against different walls that need effort and solving. And you dont know how much effort is required until the task is done.
When you are cheerfully and methodically banging your head against walls, the solutions come more fluidly than when you are in a rush.
And the more furious you are about wall proliferation more likely head banging will result in unwanted consequences.
This is certainly relevant to aikido, and in particular the somewhat nebulous concept of "aiki". Unnecessary tension in a technique creates a reaction in your partner which tends to block things. Skilled practitioners make things look effortless, and use much less tension - they are more relaxed. It's a fascinating study - and lots of fun. Very different sport - but check Shane Benzies and his books and videos on running and technique - how technique makes a huge difference, with less effort.
This is my problem when I try to open a jar with a stuck lid. In the act of gripping the lid well enough to have traction to turn it, I end up squeezing the lid so hard that it deforms and becomes harder to turn.
Grip seems like a bad example since in most cases gripping something a little bit stronger will make your grip a little more robust to an unexpected perturbance (e.g. you stumble, or someone bumps into you). Unless you have good data on how common such perturbances are, how changes in grip strength affect robustness in the face of perturbance, and what drop rate is acceptable, how would you know whether you're gripping things too strongly?
that's true for some folks out there. But, ultimately its about these 3 questions: - what you are? - what you want to be? - when you want to be there? I think if you don't have an answer to the last question, you should be fine with 0 efforts.
This reminds me of Anxiety Culture. There is some wisdom buried in this ancient website (and some malarky).
https://www.anxietyculture.com/
woahhhh it's still up!
"Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything I thought it could be."
- Office Space (1999)
Confusion of effect for cause. Unconscious or effortless processing by the brain is usually way more accurate and reliable than conscious processing, but outside of being "gifted" you only get to consistent unconscious processing after years of training and conscious practice that ingrain muscle memory etc.
Wu wei.
I've seen a lot of references to this "Alexander Technique"[1] lately but no indication that it's anything other than the latest trendy pseudoscience that you can conveniently use to explain just about anything. (There seems to be a fair amount of overlap between it and what I can only describe as "rationalists who think they invented meditation".) Does anyone know why it's so popular now or who's behind the push?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_technique
The author of the blog produced one of the first online courses in AT and is active on twitter. When that launched, he was the first person I saw talking about it a lot online.
Meditation/mindfulness was growing in popularity in the 2010s and this stuff is just further along the tech tree. It was already well known with actors but the cross-over with meditation-like practices is pretty obvious if you look into both.
The (post) Rationalists you mention are mostly exploring technologies/methods around the connection between mind/body/emotion. There's no single figure pushing it along.
"You don't get your best performances by trying harder" is just another way of saying that our talents come so naturally that they don't feel like work.
Does that mean that if you're trying, you're fighting a losing uphill battle against something you'll never excel at? I think many skills are learned and must be earned with discipline. But the culture places excessive weight on excelling in specific fields that most people simply can't brute-force. Hence the prevalence of chemical assistance at the highest ends of productivity, intellectual competition, and athletics.
We probably need to place more emphasis on doing things that come naturally to us. Emphasis on doing. But also enjoy downtime and not-doing occasionally.
As alluded to in another comment, this post kind of makes a lot more sense if you've read The Inner Game of Tennis.
It kind of glosses over competence of practice, but the TL;DR is once you've built up some competence with a skill, staying in a constant state of effortful tension won't give you better results. Entering flow state requires getting into "unconscious competence" effectively.
...which is effectively a reframe of how The Inner Game of Tennis says it: to practice your still with non-judgement while you do it.
What a bunch of nonsense. Top performers aren’t top performers because they’re relaxed and don’t put in extra effort. They’re relaxed and don’t put in extra effort because they’re top performers. This is like saying that the way to run fast is to put a gold medal around your neck, since that’s what the fastest runners do. It’s a complete reversal of cause and effect.