Effort Still Matters

“Ryan, I will never question your effort,” the strength coach for my college cross country team told me.

But he did say this while questioning my technique. The extreme effort I was giving to the exercises we were doing was not beneficial. For example, I could not do pull-ups without compensating more on one arm than the other. My lopsided pull-ups where I would rise higher on the right arm than the left arm became a source of laughter to my entire team and the strength coach. I recall there were basic squats I did wrong during my first lifts, too, and my attempts to max out deadlifts also was somewhat comical. But the message was pretty simple.

Effort was not enough. Infinite willpower was just holding me back if I could not get the technique right. In fact, I was probably trying too hard — the goal of these lifts wasn’t to get jacked or build upper body strength as long distance runners, but to increase flexibility and prevent injury.

I would be known for giving a lot effort as my reputation in all aspects of my life — as an athlete, as a student, and in my professional life as a teacher. But it would be too much effort, an extreme amount of effort, a detrimental amount of effort that sacrificed sleep, health, nutrition, and mental health at the expense of actual beneficial effort.

I used to work very hard as a runner and get discouraged when my friends and teammates who did not try and worked a lot less hard than I did ran a lot better. Sometimes, I seemed to only get worse or stagnant. This seemed to happen sometimes in my academics as well: the harder I tried, the worse I seemed to do. Of course, I thought the reason was my lack of talent. I used to think there was one way to get better: more effort.

However, it was late in college that I got the best advice tailored to me as a runner. My problem was never too little effort. It was that I was giving too much effort. Everyone could tell I was pushing myself really hard every time I ran, so I started to scale back on that effort to a point, and yes, I did get better. I ran more sustainably and consistently over long periods of time.

There is a point where there is too much effort. I have been there more times than I can count. I have given effort at the expense of my health. I have given it at the expense of my mental health. I have sacrificed sleep and relationships because I gave too much effort.

Now, I am a lot more strategic than I used to be. I sleep more and pay more attention to rest and recovery. In that process, however, I thought it had to be effortless. I fell into the trap of thinking that effort did not matter, that the teammates who did not try (or at least seemed not to) had a point. I started to think that less effort was the key, and I would think about teammates who got through workouts with no strain in their faces and think that was what I needed to look like, too. Less effort was also the easier path to go down, mostly because I could rely on my instincts to get me through a quite significant first of necessary difficult tasks in the day.

I started to apply this law of least effort to other parts of my life. I would skate by a lot of exams without really studying much at all, especially the ones that I needed to get my certification to become a teacher. For law school, I got a pretty good score on the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) without really studying that much. I went on forums, and people talked about how they studied eight hours a day for years and did nothing but study. I worked a full-time job while studying. I had to study maybe an hour a day, and some days I did not study at all.

For that test, I had a point that some people were going way too hard for no reason. But I look back and think if I studied a little more, I probably could have done better. The answer, like many things, was somewhere in the middle.

There was a certain truth to giving less effort, because I was giving too much. There is a point of diminishing returns to every big endeavor. In running, the general rule for doing an interval workout is that you want to stop before you feel like you can comfortably run one more rep. The rationale is that it’s not beneficial and will only put you in more of a hole with substantially less benefit to be going all out every workout, and it will also compromise recovery later in the week. This can be applied to other areas of life — in my case, sometimes I apply it to studying the day of or before the big exam, where there really not much that can be gained compared to the weeks of studying before. The best thing to do the day before the exam is to rest and sleep as much as possible to be mentally sharp the day of.

. . .

My relationship with effort has always been complicated. When I was in high school, one motto on my high school track team was “hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. “ It was an inspirational quote designed, obviously, to get us to work hard even though many of us seemed to lack talent. And I was known for hard work but not having talent — the talented guys could become sprinters and middle distance runners, and had speed. I had no speed at the shorter distances.

Over time, however, the talent started to get activated. In college, I realized I did have speed over shorter distances. After years of running, I was able to run some faster short distance runs on purely running a lot of miles and running workouts designed for long-distance runners. Fast twitch fibers seemed to come out of nowhere the older I got, and one drill we used to do called high knees became a testament to that. High knees are a dynamic warm-up where you lift your knees as much as possible, as fast as possible. Another spectacle was the strength with which I could do high knees, which meant I had all this untapped sprinting speed that went unrecognized over years, as well, that could serve well for finishing races.

Over the years, I did start to recognize that I was a talented runner. It felt liberating to rely on talent for once in various areas of my life rather than hard work. Well, as an Asian guy, based on societal stereotypes, I was historically recognized for being intelligent even in times I really wasn’t, while as an athlete, I wasn’t seen as that athletic. Those stereotypes made me work hard and grind in both areas: I wanted to do well in class and give effort to not be the “dumb Asian,” but I also wanted to put effort into my running so I could make people realize Asians could also be athletic and good at sports. Of course, I didn’t say this and didn’t really have the language for this at the time, but it is validating that no matter what people thought, I was going to do the best I could and try my best.

. . .

Sometimes, I think we live in a culture that glamorizes natural talent and giftedness. I know I do and I wish I was the type of person who could effortlessly just be great at everything I do, the student who cannot study and know all the answers to the test, the person who barely trains at all and is one of the best on race day, the player who doesn’t practice and is still the best on game day. Having to work hard for something isn’t very sexy in that framework, but the truth is often that the best athletes, like LeBron James, Tom Brady, and Michael Jordan, have a perfect mix of both effort and talent.

Like many, I do think there are times that hustle culture and hard work can go too far. I leaned towards self-care and wellness for a phase because I was going too hard all the time.

I am still trying to find a lot of the answers myself, the balance between where hard work and talent can optimize, where I can work efficiently, smarter, and more strategically while giving as much time to other parts of my life is not an easy balance to figure out. Earlier in my life, all I knew was hard work. For another period, all I knew was relying on talent. Now, I’m trying to find the mix of both.

. . .

In law school, I can’t count how many times a professor will ask a question to the class and no one answers. Having a disengaged class is probably the worst thing a professor can have. Although some classes use the “Socratic” method where the professor doesn’t take volunteers at all and just calls on people to put them on the spot, in classes beyond the first year (known as 1L), fewer professors do this.

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Often, even if I am uncertain about the answer, in circumstances where no one says anything, I volunteer to answer a question. I would say that around 15% of the time, it is the wrong answer. The professor tries to say I’m wrong as nicely as possible, usually with a “well, actually…” and then a segue into the correct answer. They might take another volunteer who could answer the question correctly. But every professor I’ve had has always appreciated the person willing to be wrong and still answer, the student willing to make an effort when the rest of the room is silent. It was initially embarrassing, and it still sometimes is embarrassing to be flat-out wrong in a room of peers.

However, for me, I am more proud any day I am wrong, embarrassed, and make mistakes and put my foot forward rather than a day I sat on the sidelines and did not put myself in the arena at all. I know not everyone thinks that way, and people don’t participate in class for all sorts of reasons, like anxiety, not liking the attention on them, or having a lot going on outside of that classroom. I only know I started enjoying law school a lot more when I got that direct feedback and correction any time I was wrong, which made me the best student I could be.

And I’m a teacher as well who knows the feeling of a disengaged class, wondering what you did wrong to not make the class engaging enough. I know that as teachers, we always say we never grade effort, but mastery. But there’s always a portion of the grade that is influenced by effort. It is the student’s participation and classwork grades. I have been guilty of doing this in the past, but often I will tell kids I perceive to be under performing that they’re very smart and they just need to apply themselves. The rationale behind me saying this to a student is so they believe more in their abilities. I’m sure other teachers have said the same thing to those students, but very often, this messaging doesn’t seem to get the desired result. Sometimes, as a society, we can see what we perceive as someone not making enough effort as a personal failing rather than a systemic one.

And I have been guilty of this — I never quite thought a student was lazy, but I did think they could try harder or come to class more, like any teacher would. I would sometimes question the student on why they disappeared from school for two weeks. But then I would call the parent and learn of a circumstance that was holding the student back, including working to support the family materially, a death in the family, homelessness, mental health, etc., which obviously made me feel like a pretty bad person for not being understanding enough. I would then try to strike a more careful balance with that student and, over the year, learn more about grace rather than tough love. Like any coach or teacher can tell you, this approach depends on the student or person, but at the end of the day, I still had to ask and sometimes beg students to try despite these circumstances because I wanted to see them succeed. I and all the student’s teachers still had to have standards despite whatever the student was going through.

Education researcher and psychologist Carol Dweck also affirms that we should praise children for effort rather than intelligence. Praising people for their intelligence often leads them to embrace self-defeating efforts like worrying about failure and risks, according to Dweck, while praising students for their hard work led kids to not take it as personally when they had lower scores and to be more adaptable and resilient in the face of failure.

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By contrast, I have usually seen students who have given significant effort despite a low baseline in skills make the most substantive growth. I have seen students with a five or six-year gap in reading between grade level and functional level improve by multiple years through their sheer consistent effort, coming to school every day and doing their best. I would love to say that I was just a great teacher, but if that were true, why couldn’t all of my students make that same jump? Again, every student is different, and different things work for different people. But it was the student’s determination and effort that got them as far as they got, and their effort mattered a lot more than their baseline abilities when they came to my class.

Effort still matters. I think this is pretty obvious for most people, but I have bought into self-care, which isn’t necessarily anti-effort but just focuses on prioritizing well-being and recognizing the importance of being your best self to be the most effective and meaningful in effort. There is also widespread recognition that work-life balance is important because health, family and relationships matter more than achievement. I think there is also the widespread recognition of systemic injustices and that some people are just dealt a pretty bad hand in life, that a lot of people have to work twice as hard to get half as much.

We are a very results-oriented society, and I am a very results and outcome-driven person. I am happy when I run a great race and run a great time even though I did not train much and had bad strategy. I am happy when I score very high on a test even though I didn’t take it seriously and didn’t study. Am I as happy when the outcome is bad but I gave a lot of effort? Absolutely not.

My issue with my previous perception of effort is that I saw it as a means to an end. I worked very hard to get good results, like advancements in my career as a teacher, better grades in school, and better times in marathons or track races. After all, who doesn’t? It is just human to care about results more than the process, after all.

But gradually, I am trying to make a shift. I am trying to be happy when I give effort and to give a more sustainable and consistent amount of effort every day that also takes into account factors like rest, health, my social life, and things in life that matter more than outcomes, like my marriage, relationships, and faith. Every day, I am trying but failing to internalize the message that the effort matters more than the result, and it is ultimately the sustainable and balanced effort over a long period of time that matters more than giving it my absolute all every day.

And I am coming around to it more and more — other people recognize that even if I can’t achieve the outcome we want, even if I did not will a student who was struggling to bring up their grade or come to school when they had an attendance issue, I still tried and gave a lot of effort. And so it is time to recognize, myself, that success is a day I tried and did my best and adhered to my faith and values in doing so.

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This post was previously published on Ryan Fan‘s blog.

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