As a kid, society told me that hard work led to success.
They taught me that the difference between the haves and the have-nots depended on effort.
But as an adult, I learned that society doesn’t reward effort.
That’s a myth.
No instead, a just society rewards effectiveness.
It rewards those who can get from Point A to Point B—that’s it.
On July 11 of 2017, I published my best performing YouTube video: This is How Short Your Life
Is.
I had written the video in 2 days and didn’t expect it to perform any better than my other
videos.
But after four years, the video garnered close to 4 millions views.
On May 26 of 2020, I published one of my worst performing videos: How to Make Hard Decisions.
I had spent close to 2 months working on this video and expected it to be a smash hit.
But after a year, it maxed out around 50 000 views.
After gaining space from both videos, the discrepancy in results became easier to explain:
the world rewarded effectiveness, not effort.
This Is How Short Your Life Is was a simple but effective video.
It delivered on, and perhaps even exceeded, the expectations of the viewer.
How to Make Hard Decisions, on the other hand, was the exact opposite.
It meandered, overstayed its welcome, and perhaps worst of all, wasn’t effective in
the viewers eyes.
The world only cared about the effectiveness of my actions, not the effort, and why should
they?
I don’t care how long Apple takes, or how hard they work, to create a new phone.
I only care if it works.
If Apple creates their iPhones using a magical genie lamp, without using any effort at all,
I’d still pay the full price for it.
I’d still reward them.
But if Apple takes ten years to make a phone—expending lots of effort and working really hard—but
the phone doesn’t work, I won’t pay a dime for it.
In other words, I won’t reward them.
I reward people based on their effectiveness, not their effort.
So how can I be mad when the world does the same to me?
At times, it looks like the world rewards hard work, but that’s an illusion.
After she fails to ride a bike on her own, a father buys his daughter an ice cream cone.
It looks like he’s rewarding her for her effort, but he’s rewarding her for her effectiveness.
He knows it’s effective for her to get practice, fail, and courageously try again.
But what if the same father gives his daughter the task of cleaning up her room?
If she tries hard but fails to clean her room, he may reward her the first time because,
like before, her practice is effective.
But if she continues to try and fails to clean her room, he’ll stop rewarding her.
The world rewards effort that fails because it’s effective to gain practice and learn.
So it looks like the world rewards us for hard work, but it’s still only rewarding
us for effectiveness.
And sure, there are times when “work hard” seems to be good advice.
The first case is laziness.
If someone doesn’t work at all, if they sit on the couch all day, doing something
is better than doing nothing.
But that’s because doing something is often more effective than doing nothing.
The second instance where working hard seems to be good advice is in a predictable, slow-moving
society with several clearly laid out paths to success.
In a well-ordered society, “working hard” is effective because we can just take any
of the ready made paths to success.
And there’s a pattern here: “working hard” is only good advice when someone else has
made our work useful.
For example, someone stands in a factory pushing a button all day.
They work hard and make a lot of money.
But working hard only works as a strategy because someone else made pushing the button
effective.
Someone who learns to work effectively learns to be the captain of their ship.
They learn how to steer their life in any direction they choose.
They know how to row to their destinations and bring others along with them.
Someone who learns to work hard learns how to be a good crew member.
They only learn how to row the boat, so they’re always dependent on a captain to steer the
ship.
And without a captain to guide them to their destination, they’re lost.
And anyone can learn to become a captain, or learn to work effectively, through practice.
They must begin by deciding where they want to go.
What’s their destination?
Then they must come up with a theory for getting there.
What’s the path to the destination?
They must test this theory in action, by trying to get to the destination.
Then they must receive feedback and revise their theory.
They rinse and repeat this cycle—theory, action, feedback—until they arrive at their
destination.
And the best theory is the most effective one, the one that can get to the destination
the fastest while spending the least energy possible.
I have a theory for what leads to success on YouTube which I’m still trying to refine.
I apply it when I create new videos, and then I use the comments and analytics as feedback
to revise my theory.
Then I take action again on the new theory, receive feedback, and so on.
I continually repeat the cycle—theory, action, feedback—looking for a theory that’s effective.
But only a just society rewards effectiveness.
And all societies to date fall short of perfect justice.
Sometimes society doesn’t reward us when they should.
They don’t always see and reward the effectiveness of our actions.
And sometimes they reward the appearance of effectiveness instead of the real thing.
And just because I learn to steer my ship, it doesn’t mean all ports are open to me.
Society creates walls and barriers to my travel.
But these are all topics for another essay.
Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the greatest thinkers of the last few centuries, wrote this in his
masterpiece Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “I love him who does not want too many virtues.
One virtue is more virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for fate to cling to.”
And there’s an ancient proverb that says, “If you chase two rabbits, you will lose
them both.”
And so Wisdom holds that it’s better to aim at one thing than at two.
And when it comes to aiming between working hard and working effectively, I think it’s
always better to aim at effectiveness.