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.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
> "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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
I agree and note that what people are responding to here is not an essay but an advertisement. It really doesn't merit that much deep thinking! The guy just wants to sell you a course for $250.
As for the topic, getting good at anything requires repetition, attention to detail, and discipline. At the same time, "you're trying too hard" can sometimes be useful advice.
The author's idiosyncratic definition of "effort" is banal and unhelpful.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
50 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 60.8 ms ] threadBut 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.
One reason why performance of a master (art, music, sport, whatever) looks so effortless is because of crude and unforgiving practice.
- Office Space (1999)
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.)
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/614121-it-s-dark-because-yo...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_technique
> 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?
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.
The Inner Game of Tennis (1970s)
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.
> Let me share my slightly unusual definition of “effort”: it’s the felt experience of expending energy beyond what an activity requires
https://www.anxietyculture.com/
> 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.
As for the topic, getting good at anything requires repetition, attention to detail, and discipline. At the same time, "you're trying too hard" can sometimes be useful advice.
The author's idiosyncratic definition of "effort" is banal and unhelpful.
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.
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.
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.