Stop Worshipping Hard Work — Smart Shortcuts Beat Brute Effort

Full text

Low-agency people tend to believe in what I call the “myth of willpower,” the idea that virtue lies in exerting extreme effort to overcome obstacles. This is different from putting on a show of effort to impress others or to cover your ass. This is about truly believing that success attained without effort is actually bad, bordering on immoral. You can see this in the discourse around Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs, in the way some people insist on shaming those who “cheat” at weight loss instead of “earning” it via diet and exercise.

The alternative mentality looks like U.S. Navy officer William Sims. In the year 1900, he was serving abroad in Hong Kong and learned that a British captain had developed a new way of shooting from ships in rocky seas. It was much more accurate than the default way, which was to wait until the point in each wave where the ship happened to be tilted the right way, and then fire. The British captain instead had his sailors continuously adjust the gun. This might seem obvious in retrospect — you know, aiming the gun — but it required additional training and modifications to equipment. Sims recognized this method as superior and wrote several reports about it, which the officers above him ignored. So, he took a shortcut. He wrote a letter directly to President Roosevelt, who realized that Sims was correct. In 1902, Sims was appointed Inspector of Target Practice. He saw that the new system was implemented, and the U.S. Navy became much more effective in gun battles.

“Just write to the president” is the kind of shortcut that, in my experience, high-agency people are always looking for. They are never thinking, “I need to increase my hours of grinding hard work.” They’re thinking instead, “How can I get results faster by optimizing my effort?” I learned from those I know to try to accomplish goals with as little effort as possible, because there are endlessly good uses of my time. Spending less energy on a task when I can frees me to spend it on the next thing. This is another rendition of what is perhaps this book’s most important advice: Resist the seduction of artificial goals and go after what you want directly.

I’m not saying you should never work hard, and there is probably something vital about the human condition that you miss out on if you never experience the application of dogged endurance to an endeavor that can’t be accomplished in any other way. Training for narrowly difficult tasks that require mastery or conditioning — like playing Bach’s violin partitas or tackling the Alps — can force you to confront your physical and emotional limits in a way that’s both personality expanding and healthily humbling.

What I’m saying is that you should choose hard work if hard work is the desired result. If it’s not, and you can take a shortcut, take a fucking shortcut.

This is [a] lesson that was brought home to me by addiction. When you are addicted, you are fundamentally dealing with an unfair fight. The enemy substance has infiltrated your reward centers and eaten your joy until taking more of it is your only relief. Quitting would mean giving up the only thing you still love. But the thing you love is destroying you.

To have a hope of winning against addiction, you have to make the fight as easy as possible. If you’ve made addict friends, as many people do, you almost always have to cut them out of your life. You also have to change your environment, placing yourself as far as possible from stimuli that might trigger you to relapse, like a bar where you used to get wasted. The point is to eventually find a way to frictionlessly live without the substance, to the extent possible.

Having won this fight, I have zero compunctions about making my goals as easy to achieve as possible. For example, my body has made it clear that I need to do resistance training with weights, or I’ll wither up and go crazy. But I find the gym powerfully repellent — I don’t consider the scrutiny of scantily clad strangers motivating. So, I pay a trainer who comes to my house and berates me for not picking up the weights. Maybe I could demand more discipline of myself if I didn’t have a job that requires most of it. But given that I never managed to make time for exercise when I was a poker player, it seems unlikely. I feel more than fine about this shortcut because I am happier and healthier as a result.

Hiring a personal trainer is a fairly common shortcut. There are some lesser-known tactics I would also advocate. Here’s one.

Right-Sizing Your Task

Let’s say there’s a viewpoint you want to promote. Do you really need to write a 400-page treatise or a 10-part blog series to lay out every single argument in favor of your position? Or would a short, crisp manifesto do the job better? Perhaps you would get more credit from a certain group of intellectuals for writing the treatise. But maybe you’d have a larger effect on the world with the pamphlet.

Consider the example of philosopher James Carse. He wrote a sprawling book extolling his theory of reality and then lost the manuscript. A few years later, he sat down to summarize what he remembered. That effort became Finite and Infinite Games , and it’s become a cultural classic, probably because it’s not a cumbersome tome.

But it’s not always easy to tell when you’re doing things the hard way. (Weirdly, many philosophers think all of their words are necessary.) To get clear on this, I find it helpful to import some concepts from negotiation practice. In negotiation, the thing you claim to want from a negotiating partner is your “position,” but the thing you ultimately want is your “interest.” To use an example popularized by the classic book Getting to Yes , by Roger Fisher and William Ury, saying “I want all the oranges, I need them to make orange juice tomorrow,” is a position, but “orange juice tomorrow” is the underlying interest.

It’s almost always better to negotiate based on interests rather than positions, because your current position might not actually be the only (or best) way to achieve your interest. Perhaps the person lusting after your oranges just wants the zest to bake a cake, and if you know that, you can keep the juice while giving them the zest. Or they might be happy to drive to the store later to get some more oranges for juice if you agree to let them have the current bag now.

High achievers, like everyone else, vary in how much they can grind — but what is almost invariable is a commitment to cutting to the nub without much wasted effort.

The way to downsize a task is to apply this negotiation principle to yourself. It might be your position that you want to run a marathon. Cool, why? Is it because you want to improve your cardiovascular health? Well, interval training could be a lot more efficient. Is it because you want to impress your dad, who’s a runner? Perhaps a thoughtful gift would be better at facilitating that particular goal.

Teasing apart your real underlying interest from your position allows you to ask, “What is the simplest possible way I could get what I actually want?”

More than their penchant for hard work, it is this ruthless focus on achieving the real goal, as easily as possible, that distinguishes the high achievers I know. I think people who haven’t been around top performers in business sometimes imagine that they are busywork athletes who stare longer at spreadsheets and cram in more meetings than other people. High achievers, like everyone else, vary in how much they can grind — but what is almost invariable is a commitment to cutting to the nub without much wasted effort.

Some people hesitate to take shortcuts because they disdain the whole idea of taking the easy route. This position is something like: Life is about dealing with complex, thorny problems. If you take all the chores out of your life, all the strain and difficulty, some of the humanness goes out of your existence. We’re meant to weed the soil, to write the thank-you note, to have unnecessary conversations.

I absolutely agree with this. My vision of a good life isn’t one where I’m some sort of disembodied switchboard, just routing ideas and decisions around. However, I want to have a choice about the complexity I am spending time with. I want to use my brainpower to tackle the thorny problems that really inspire me, to play the role in the giant human ecosystem that I can play best while leaving others with their ideal labor.

Taking shortcuts is a way to skirt around problems, sure. You can also see it as a way to get to the problems you deserve faster.

This article Stop worshipping hard work — find smart shortcuts instead is featured on Big Think .