The appropriate amount of effort is zero

> if you do not have enough grip, you may unfortunately spill the coffee on the floor. If you don't have enough grip while doing a sharp turn, it could be literally fatal. As a result, it is wise for the absolute majority of people in high-risk situations to exert more power than necessary. The energy investments are small, but changes in probabilities are significant.

Yes but there's still a sweet spot to find, you're not gripping your cup or your wheel as hard as you can. Over-gripping in uncertain conditions can be good but only to a certain extent.

I still agree with you though, a good example of this is climbing stairs — if you have strong legs it's much less effort to go 2 by 2 but I'd never tell someone struggling to do that, it would make no sense.

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

> 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.

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.

If only they had explicitly defined how they will be using the word effort for the rest of the article, to address exactly this obvious and silly reaction.

Gary Player (an old golf player) once quipped that the more he practiced the luckier he got!

Yes the expert brain anticipates and thus can be more relaxed. Music doesn't sound good until it's effortless, because trying hard is hearable.

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."

Sustained effort is required for muscle memory to take over, at which point throughput increases dramatically.

[dead]

>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.

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.

Flow is generally achieved when the challenge is appropriate, not too easy, not too hard.

The Inner Game of Tennis has entered the chat

But overexertion means using up more than was available. ("Running on fumes" etc.)

Expending more than an activity requires may or may not mean you have more power reserves left.

Yep. All done to create a manipulative title.

That's only when the breakthrough happened and misses all the rest of the time spent on the problem.

Thats a lot of work for tbe cheetah, especially at a cellular level. But not much effort at all.

Do you have a dog? Does it look like effort when it runs around? It is effort for it NOT to run!

Nature is the laziest fuck of them all. Lets shine this sunlight and let entropy/quantum fluctuations take care of the rest. Might get life form in one in every billion planets.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think your reply feels like what I got from the piece;

Effort would be the extra strength applied past what is needed to get a reasonable grip. It is “effort” when you squeeze hard enough to bend the lid.

I see other comments talking about dropping a cup if you don’t hold it tight enough but the idea is the baseline is “hold the cup tight enough to have it secure in your hand under normal reasonable conditions” but our default state may be “grip it hard enough all the time so a coworker couldn’t muscle it out of your hands” or “if a door opened in your face and hit it you still hold the cup” and that is the effort - the above and beyond that you don’t need to always apply which can screw up our baseline.

Like the message is we need to be mindful of not going full throttle on everything when low or medium energy / focus / brain activation / muscle activation will do.

woahhhh it's still up!

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.