Effort

Effort is overrated. Success is inexplicably linked with effort. Almost no success comes with the lack of effort, but for every success story, there are many more failures that do not lack in effort.

Do you know anyone who tried to become a professional athlete, musician, or start a business? You probably know several and have heard of many more. And do most of these aspiring people succeed? Most of them don’t. Did they put in effort, did they work hard, busting their ass to achieve their dreams? Most likely the answer is “yes”. So why didn’t they succeed even after all the effort they have put in?

It is difficult to understand. Luck is definitely one of the many factors but can’t fully explain why most people fail than succeed at these endeavours. Yet it is so common to hear that if we want something, we have to put our back into it, throw in the hours, and sweat for it to get the success. It has even turn into a narrative that glorifies such hard work, such ‘hustle’, that it is something to be proud of and even boasted about.

But that’s just not how things work. Perhaps the ‘effort’ shouldn’t be directing at brute forcing your way to success, but rather into discovering the ‘easy’ way to your goal. To have reasonably sustained effort towards success, the effort should feel rather ‘effortless’.

An example can be seen when talking achieving a fitness goal . There are many ways to achieving a healthy body. If one is to persist in performing a particular form of exercise like weightlifting, but do not find much joy in it, the effort will feel incredibly ‘effortful’ and your results may not be sustainable. Instead if one were to seek a sport or a type of exercise that one finds enjoyment in, say in football or yoga, one still needs to engage some effort into the activity but that ‘effort’ will feel relatively effortless, thus more likely leading to success.

It is common to hear among entrepreneurs to keep hustling if they want to grow their business. In this context, if things feel difficult, it shouldn’t necessarily be that the correct action is just to simply ‘work harder’. It should instead be taken as a sign that the market and your product may have a poor fit. With a poor product/market fit, simply working harder is not going to cut it and will just result in lots of wasted money, time, and demotivate the team.

We have to be wise enough to differentiate between persistence and mis-directed struggles. We should persist in chasing our goals but take the ‘effort’ instead to seek the most ‘easy’ path. We can learn more to be like water – ever-flowing but flexible and effortlessly flowing down by following the contours of its terrain.

‘Be water, my friend.’ ~ Bruce Lee