Our Interpretation Of Effort

Why we leave stuff for later, and how we build habits.

image by @deuveir

DISCLAIMER: I wrote this when I was 17, a lot has changed on my opinions since. For the sake of record-keeping, I have uploaded it here on my blog. Enjoy the read.

In my inevitable drive to criticize the actions of my social peers and family, I have noticed a pattern in their behaviour, a tendency to minimize pain and effort in exchange for comfort. It is present in everyone of my social circle, some of those in a disproportionate scale, diminishing their quality of life in return for some lazy slumber. Like a person who rarely dusts their house for the sake of laziness, and starts having severe allergies because of it.

Of course that, by the lack of thinking, they are somewhat blinded to the consequences of it, and start irrationally taking every opportunity to put aside their duties. This is equivalent to seeing preferential actions — those the consequences of not doing it are worse than the burden of doing it — as something bad and avoidable, instead of something beneficial like it really is — therefore the irrational characteristic of it.

So, if this tendency for slacking off creeps into our behavior, and is such a virus that keeps us from doing stuff, how can we learn to accept the effort instead of avoiding it, and start doing it constantly?

Well, it turns out you can’t do that.

The Meaning of Effort

Effort is, by the definition of the word, something that can only be done once in a while, something “out of the ordinary”. If you take effort every single time while doing things, it stops looking like effort to you, and it becomes ordinary routine. Like a runner that runs at his highest capacity every day, he in fact isn’t putting in any effort. What happened is that, by the sole factor of doing it every day, it has become -or rather is- a habit to him.

This mistakable correlation of “becoming” to “being” is what really throws us into confusion. Because, if he were just a sedentary guy — if he decided to waste all his energy in trying to run every day- it is highly improbable that he would keep doing it, and be where he is today. It didn’t “become” a habit for him, rather it “is” a habit for him.

But then how did he actually become this good at it? Well, the role of effort in building habits is approachable in many, widely different, ways of thinking, some of those being evolutionary biology, the economy of the human action, beyond many others. Not to speak of the watered down, condensed versions of these knowledge presented in self help books, that actually make a lot of money doing it.

I could take a very long time explaining each one of these concepts in detail, but, supposing that someone else is going to read it, I think it’s always less disastrous for people to find out their own way of doing things, instead of applying my not-at-all-wise words.

Nevertheless, I recommend you browse the list below and actually take a run at some of these books, with some skepticism towards the self help cliches. And please remember that, ultimately, success and failure at doing something are concepts that depend on your own interpretation of your action. The only thing truly objective at play is an attempt at doing something, an action being made, and without it, you can’t either succeed or fail.

Recommendations:

Human Action — Ludwig von Mises

Praxeology: Who Needs It — Roderick T. Long

The Power of Habit — Charles Duhigg

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst — Robert Sapowski

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big — Scott Adams