{"id":2184,"date":"2011-07-26T17:00:39","date_gmt":"2011-07-27T00:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?p=2184"},"modified":"2018-04-04T02:21:30","modified_gmt":"2018-04-04T09:21:30","slug":"effort-skill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2011\/07\/26\/effort-skill\/","title":{"rendered":"The Skill of Trying Your Best"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cAs long as you tried your best,\u201d was a phrase I\u2019d hear as a kid. It was supposed to console you in the event of failure. Reminding you that, as long as you put your best effort in, then it didn\u2019t matter if you lost.<\/p>\n

Hearing that phrase as an adult, I wonder how often it really applies. How many times do we fail, even though it was impossible for us to try any harder? When do we lose, despite genuinely trying our best?<\/p>\n

\u201cI Could Have Tried Harder\u201d<\/h2>\n

At least in my life, I\u2019ve noticed that during most of my failures I wasn\u2019t really trying my \u201cbest\u201d. It\u2019s rare when I can\u2019t pinpoint a moment where I couldn\u2019t have put in more effort, showed up more consistently or worked harder. The times when I went all-in and still fall flat on my face are greatly outnumbered by the occasions when I lost, but still had some chips at the table.<\/p>\n

I took a finance class with a friend who had failed the previous three exams. He needed the class to graduate and wanted it badly. Yet, he still skipped many of the classes. When he failed the exam again, he blamed the difficulty of the course.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to judge the relative effort of other people, but I don\u2019t feel my friend is unique. Had he tried his hardest, he could still have failed, but it\u2019s far more common to fail while there is still effort unspent.<\/p>\n

The expression, \u201cas long as you tried your best,\u201d takes effort for granted. It assumes that the hard part was winning, and that everyone tries their hardest. Instead, the hardest part appears to be trying your hardest<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Difficulty in Trying Your Best<\/h2>\n

When I\u2019ll hear from other advice-writers, they often get frustrated with the apparent laziness of their audience. After all, they are giving them perfect advice that will surely solve their problem\u2014but most people never do any of it!<\/p>\n

But if the biggest obstacle is summoning the effort to try your best, then doesn\u2019t this advice have it backwards? It\u2019s telling people the second step\u2014what to eat, where to invest, how to study\u2014while ignoring the much harder first step<\/a> of building the self-motivation to execute on all those things.<\/p>\n

This means that the skill of self-motivation matters more than a lot of specific advice. Knowing how to flip on the switch that causes you to \u201ctry your best\u201d is critical; the rest are just details.<\/p>\n

Triggering Effort<\/h2>\n

If I tell people that I write about motivation, they tend to imagine me telling dramatic stories for inspiration. While inspiration is great, that\u2019s not what I mean by motivation at all. Inspiring is giving someone a temporary push. Self-motivation is knowing how to push yourself.<\/p>\n

Writing about motivation, for me, isn\u2019t about sharing inspiring stories. It\u2019s about looking deeply into the psychology of why we act or don\u2019t act. Understanding what triggers effort is worth hundreds of stories about climbing a mountaintop.<\/p>\n

Motivation isn\u2019t only emotions either. Although getting excited about something will encourage effort, a lot of motivation is coldly rational.<\/p>\n

Through hundreds of hours of self-experimentation, I\u2019ve discovered that performing a habit daily<\/a> makes it far more likely you\u2019ll keep up the effort than doing it four times per week. That isn\u2019t immediately intuitive or emotional, yet it works.<\/p>\n

The design of your project can also affect effort. If you eliminate the need to make routine decisions, effort goes up. Studies have shown<\/a> that making prenatal HIV testing in Sub-Saharan Africa opt-out instead of opt-in greatly increased results\u2014no inspiring speeches required.<\/p>\n

Effort is a Skill<\/h2>\n

If someone fails a race because they lack the skill of running, we aren\u2019t too hard on them. After all, running takes a lot of practice, and some people are better than others.<\/p>\n

But, if someone fails a project because of a lack of effort, most people are ruthless in their judgment. Laziness is treated as a sin, not an inability.<\/p>\n

I want to flip that understanding. Not one that chastises people for failing to try their best (how often does nagging work?) but by deciphering the code for improving effort.<\/p>\n

Guilt is an unproductive emotion. Yet a lot of people guilt themselves constantly for lacking the discipline or self-motivation to succeed at a particular goal. A far better use of energy would be trying to uncover what tactics successful people used to stay motivated.<\/p>\n

Effort Isn\u2019t Universal<\/h2>\n

Another common assumption is that effort is a character trait, irrespective of context. Lazy people are always lazy, and industrious people are always hard-working. This is nonsense<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m great at summoning up my effort for particular types of goals. I generally finish projects well ahead of time and I\u2019m highly focused doing my work for the day. While I don\u2019t embrace workaholism, I can summon the effort to work without interruption for 12 hours in a pinch.<\/p>\n

Yet I\u2019m a disaster when it comes to summoning effort for other types of goals. When searching for an apartment for August, I procrastinated terribly. Now that I have the apartment, I\u2019ve also been procrastinating a lot on searching for furniture.<\/p>\n

Now I could rationalize this to myself by saying that my work is more important, and that I procrastinate on the second tasks to focus on the first. But, if I\u2019m honest with myself, that\u2019s not the real reason. The reason is that I\u2019ve carefully trained the skill of self-motivation with certain types of work and projects, but not in others.<\/p>\n

Learning Context-Specific Self-Motivation<\/h2>\n

Hunting for furniture may be a fairly trivial task. But we all have strengths and weaknesses of self-motivation that are far larger. Certain goals that we always show up for and try hard, and others where we fail miserably to put in the effort.<\/p>\n

It could be that we simply have less intrinsic motivation for some goals, but that can\u2019t be the full explanation. My self-motivation skills work better for my work life than my social life, even though I care about both.<\/p>\n

But the two goals are also completely different in structure, which means certain self-motivation tactics will work well on one but not on the other. Habits and endurance are critical to summoning the effort to work, but flexibility and boldness matter a lot more for meeting people.<\/p>\n

How Do You Learn to Try Harder?<\/h2>\n

Just as it\u2019s okay to be a lousy runner, it\u2019s okay to lack certain self-motivation skills. You can learn to run, most of the time, and you can learn effort too.<\/p>\n

The two ways I\u2019ve learned effort are by experiment and modeling.<\/p>\n

By experimenting, you pay great attention to how you do things when you are motivated, and how you do things when you aren\u2019t. Most people try the same approach of emotional force of will, and so they tend to fail repeatedly at the same goals. It\u2019s smarter to observe carefully the differences between sticking and slipping, so you can engineer them from scratch.<\/p>\n

Modeling is simply looking for people who have achieved in the area you want to build effort in. People reveal their heuristics for self-motivation when they talk. It doesn\u2019t take too many success stories of entrepreneurs to observe how they tackle fear of uncertainty, or successful dieters revealing how they avoid temptation.<\/p>\n

When I listen to inspiring stories, what interests me most are uncovering the mental heuristics the person used to commit themselves to effort. I\u2019m currently reading the memoirs of Richard Feynman<\/a><\/strong>\"\", Nobel laureate and physicist, and what interests me most aren\u2019t his accomplishments, but the mental heuristics he applied to motivate himself in science.<\/p>\n

Trying Your Best<\/h2>\n

Do failures still happen when you\u2019re trying your best? Of course they do. But 100% self-motivation, where not a single opportunity is wasted and effort is at a maximum is rare. Reaching the point of \u201ctrying your best\u201d is the limiting constraint for most people.<\/p>\n

If you recognize that effort is a skill, then you can also try to figure out how it works. Learn the skills of self-motivation, instead of wasting years of effort on guilt over opportunities lost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cAs long as you tried your best,\u201d was a phrase I\u2019d hear as a kid. It was supposed to console you in the event of failure. Reminding you that, as long as you put your best effort in, then it didn\u2019t matter if you lost. Hearing that phrase as an adult, I wonder how often […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[9,12,4,679],"tags":[671,263,23,29,632,143,454],"class_list":{"0":"post-2184","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-courage","7":"category-discipline","8":"category-goal-setting","9":"category-nc-habits","10":"tag-discipline","11":"tag-effort","12":"tag-emotions","13":"tag-learning","14":"tag-self-motivation","15":"tag-skill","16":"tag-willpower","17":"entry"},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Skill of Trying Your Best - Scott H Young<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2011\/07\/26\/effort-skill\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Skill of Trying Your Best - Scott H Young\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u201cAs long as you tried your best,\u201d was a phrase I\u2019d hear as a kid. 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