Can you handle the Effort Shock?

Recently I wrote about what it means to be a hero. Something I did not touch on is just how hard it is to create a life that is different and resonant; just how much effort goes into creating a meaningful and fulfilling life. My sense is that my last article could have perhaps left you confused. I shared that heroes are not special in some way. They are not extraordinary. They don’t have special powers. They are simply ordinary people doing extraordinary things. If this is true, then why do so few of us take up the challenge? Why are we not all the heroes of our own story?

The answer is Effort Shock. Let me explain…

In 2010, Jason Pargin (known by his pen name, David Wong) wrote an article called How The Karate Kid ruined the modern world where he explains the phenomenon of effort shock. Pargin shares that The Karate Kid and all other movies like it (including the Rocky sequels) have ruined things for us. Here is what he says: “…the main character is very bad at something, then there is a sequence in the middle of the film set to upbeat music that shows him practicing. When it’s done, he’s an expert.”

What we take from movies like these is that if we want to get good at something, all that is required is a little bit of training, and then we become experts or masters of our craft. However, if you have ever set out to become masterful at something or to become the expert in your field, you know that it doesn’t just take a little bit of training. It takes A LOT of work and training. Far more than the average person can or will tolerate.

Becoming a tenured professor at a university for example, takes years and years of study, research, and work. It requires completing not only one university degree, but several, with increasingly more difficulty and complexity. It requires intense academic research – that often takes years – and several peer-reviewed research publications of a certain tier, several hours of tutoring, and teaching, and so much more… Most academics spend a lifetime working towards tenure and the prestigious titles that go along with it, and that let the world know that they are the experts in their field.

And even WITH a doctorate in your field, you know you don’t know everything there is to know in your field. That is why so many people in PhD and doctorate programs experience intense Imposter Syndrome and live in constant fear that it will be discovered that they don’t know everything, and they are not the experts. The truth is none of us can ever know everything. It would take you over 400 years to learn all the information that is currently available in the world. None of us have that much time or that much energy. And when you have earned a doctorate, all you can say is that you know a lot more than the average person about a very small sliver of knowledge at the exclusion of everything else you could possibly have learnt or studied.

Earning a doctorate is a humbling experience in many ways, if you don’t let your ego get in the way. What it says about you if you have earned a doctorate, is that you are hardworking, committed, persistent, and dedicated. It says you can do the hard things, and you can follow through on your commitments, and you can persist at something hard and see it through to the end. It means that you are so passionate about something that you would spend years of your life working on it at the exclusion of everything else.

What you also discover through the process, is that you will never know everything there is to know, and the more you discover, the more questions you have. What you also discover is that even after earning the impressive title, you are no different as a human being. You are still the same person. You just now also have the ability to bore people to death with all the things you learnt in your research and that no-one in your social circle cares about.

Pargin shares that he has noticed a phenomenon that is somehow both obvious and not. He says, “Every adult I know – or at least the ones who are depressed – continually suffers from something like sticker shock (that is, when you go shopping for something for the first time and are shocked to find it costs way, way more than you thought). Only it’s with effort. It’s Effort Shock.”

What Pargin explains is we have a vague idea in our head of the “price” of certain accomplishments, how difficult it should be to get a degree, or succeed at a job, or stay in shape, or raise a kid, or build a house. And that vague idea is almost always catastrophically wrong.

Accomplishing worthwhile things isn’t just a little harder than people think; it’s 10 or 20 times harder. You decide you want to release weight. So, you starve yourself for six months. You spend all your time restricting your calory intake and feeling miserable and then discover that you’ve only lost a few pounds. Worse even, you over-eat at a party or buffet, and regain all the weight you released.

You decide that you want to earn an MBA or a doctorate. You start out all sparkly eyed and bushy tailed only to drop out halfway through, because it required more hours of study and work than you had anticipated. It required more intense focus and critical feedback than you could actually stomach, and your self-esteem and your marriage are both hanging on by a thread.

You decide to get married, and you believe your marriage will be different. You are going to be happy and in love forever. And a few years in, you hardly recognise yourself or your partner, and you wish someone had told you how hard it is to share your life with another person.

You conceive and take awesome pregnancy photos. You judge all the other mothers out there, and you promise yourself you are going to be the best mom ever. And then baby comes, and you find yourself sleep deprived, exhausted like you have never been in your entire life, overwhelmed, and at the brink of wanting to leave your baby and just run, because no-one told you it would be this hard – and you are only six weeks into parenthood and there is a lifetime of this still ahead of you…

What all of us inevitably discover when we take on new and difficult things, is that it takes far more effort to be good or successful at it than we thought it would take. And often the shock of just how much effort is required, has us tumbling into a pit of despair and discouragement.

In my article called The secret behind greatness, I shared that we tend to overemphasise talent at the expense of other factors that lead to success and then we perpetuate the myth that excellence or greatness is mystical somehow, and that only a special few can achieve greatness. However, everyone is capable of excellence. The secret behind greatness is not mysterious at all. It is both simple and hard at the same time.

Achieving greatness is simple in the sense that greatness is not hidden in innate talent alone but is often the result of trying at something for long and hard enough to get really good at it. Yet at the same time, that is what makes achieving greatness hard, because greatness doesn’t come without effort. It requires commitment, determination, will and perseverance. It requires consistency.

In my post-graduate studies, I’ve seen it many times. The smartest and brightest in the class – i.e., the people we think will succeed, because the have the innate talent to succeed – end up quitting. They give up, when they realise that talent will only take them so far. Far more is required for success. Beyond raw talent, what is required is an openness to feedback, a willingness to be wrong and to learn from mistakes, and a level of commitment and dedication that has you choosing to persevere even in the face of challenge and difficulty. There is a requirement that you show up consistently regardless of your mood or your motivation, because let’s face it, some days you will feel motivated, and other days you will not. It should not stop you from showing up.

And I see the same thing in the work I do. The bar for entry into the coaching profession is low. Anyone can become a coach. However, to become a truly great coach, to achieve mastery, to build a business from coaching, requires a level of effort, discomfort, hard work, commitment, and persistence that few people are willing to put in.

Most new coaches think that they will simply share on social media that they are a coach, and clients will naturally flock to them and want to be coached. This is very far from reality. Building a business from coaching requires cultivating the skills of connection, invitation, relationship building, and service. It requires consistently learning and growing yourself. It requires experimentation, and making a lot of mistakes, and sometimes it requires tremendous tolerance of the discomfort of planting invisible seeds and having the patience to stay on the court no matter what. Most people quit before they’ve really started, because it’s much harder than they thought it was going to be.

This week on social media, Devon Bandison shared these two quotes: “Greatness isn’t for a chosen few. It’s for the few that choose” and “Everyone wants to be great until it’s time to do what greatness requires.” The first quote confirms that it is simply a myth that only some of us can be great. It’s not life that decides whether you do great things or not. It’s YOU. You either choose to commit yourself or you don’t. And the second quote confirms the phenomenon of effort shock. When we start and we then realise just how much it will take for us to be truly great; that’s when most of us choose to quit. And some of us have the courage to forge ahead, because our commitment to greatness far outweighs our shock of the effort that it will require.