The Difference Between Effort and Work

I’M ON A high-speed train to Berlin. I’m headed there to give a TED talk about the downsides of routines and the problems with self-optimization culture.

This TED talk is a great opportunity to get the word out about my book, which will be published this February. It may also be the most intimidating thing I’ve ever done.

I’ve given a few university lectures and wedding speeches in my life, but I’ve never addressed an audience of this scale, or with so much at stake. If I nail this, a few hundred thousand people—or even a few million—might watch it and consider buying my book. If I bomb, it will be a monumental waste of an opportunity.

I’ve spent most of the past month memorizing and rehearsing—and rehearsing, and rehearsing—my talk, to the point where I could probably recite it while doing long division. Still, when I walk out on that stage in front of a few hundred pairs of eyes, it feels like all bets are off.

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What you don’t realize about these sorts of talks (or at least, I didn’t realize it) is that writing and memorizing the speech is only half the battle. You need to be able to perform it in a way that looks natural and not too slick—polished, but still authentic.

The TEDx Berlin folks were kind enough to provide me and the other presenters with a speaking coach (his name is Niki Skene, and I couldn’t recommend him highly enough), and my sessions with Niki have focused less on what I’m going to say than on how I’ll say it. How should I arrange my facial expressions as I give the talk? What should I do with my hands? What sort of voice inflections should I incorporate, and how much or little should I emote? All this is new to me and fascinating to learn about, and also pretty terrifying because I’ve never done it before, and so may suck at it.

However my talk goes, this past month of preparation has probably required more concentrated effort than I’ve put into anything in years. And yet I’ve put in far fewer hours these past few weeks than I would normally spend on my job.

You can only recite the same talk so many times before you’re just wearing yourself out, and potentially building in some bad habits. You need to step away and take breaks in order to consolidate what you’ve learned into durable memory, and also—in ways that are similar to weight training—to give yourself enough rest to put your full strength into your next set of repetitions. And so I’ve spent a lot of my time going for walks, meeting friends for coffee, cooking elaborate dinners, and generally just killing time in between rehearsal sessions so that I was fresh enough to make the most of them.

Put another way, while the amount of effort I’ve expended this past month has been high, my workload—measured in hours and minutes—has been relatively low. And that’s probably why I woke up this morning thinking about the difference between work and effort, and why this distinction matters.

On a normal work day, the bulk of my tasks—brainstorming and writing articles, mostly, but also reading and responding to emails—requires a lot of time but, at this point in my career, not a lot of effort. That’s not because my job is easy, but because my fluency and experience with these tasks has reduced the amount of effort I have to put into them.

This is true for all of us. Whatever it is that you do, the longer you do it, the less effortful it becomes.

That’s not to say it becomes easier, or less fatiguing. In fact, I think the opposite is often true; in my experience, it’s the tedious, low-effort tasks—hacking through my inbox backlog, for example, or writing something that doesn’t require much deep thought or imagination—that leave me feeling the most worn out, and at the same time the most unfulfilled. It’s the lack of true effort that creates a wearying, unsatisfying sense of tedium; when you take out the effort, what you’re left with is drudgery.

Of course, some drudgery is unavoidable; we all have to put up with a measure of it. But in our modern, efficiency-obsessed world—a world that so often rewards quantity over quality, and sure things over risky experiments—it seems to me we’ve been encouraged to avoid effort in favor of productive drudgery, to our detriment.

We’re all pushed to put in more hours, to complete more tasks, and to endure more routine in order to get more done. And a consequence of this push is an aversion to true effort. That’s because the presence of effort, in most cases, is a marker of inefficiency. Effort tends to be a byproduct of experimentation and discomfort and growth, all of which are likely to slow us down and impede our productivity. On the other hand, we are all at our most brutally efficient when we’ve done something countless times before, and so the amount of effort involved in doing it again is very low.

During the weeks of preparation I put into this TED talk, I could have written ten to fifteen articles and banked a not-insignificant amount of cash. This TED talk could pay off in a way that might eventually make up for that lost revenue, and then some. But there’s also a real possibility I might bomb, and so all the effort I put into this talk might, in terms of lost revenue and measurable short-term productivity, turn out to have been a waste.

But however this talk ends up going for me and for my book sales, I can say right now, when the outcome remains uncertain, that this past month has been a lot of fun for me. I’ve enjoyed learning a new skill and pushing myself in new ways. There’s been some stress involved, but it feels like the good kind of stress—the kind that makes us feel alert and challenged and engaged.

If my talk flops, I’ll be bummed, but I’ll still feel proud of myself for taking this on and giving it my best shot. When I look back at this experience and all the effort I put into it, I know it will hold more value for me—more life lessons, stronger memories, a greater sense of gratification—than if I’d spent the month on the lower-effort, work-intensive tasks that normally occupy my days.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about this topic.

Six years ago, I wrote an essay about how we need to put effort into things—real effort, not just work—in order to derive meaning and satisfaction from our pursuits.

For that essay, I spoke with the noted psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, whose influential “broaden-and-build theory” holds that the purpose of pleasure, satisfaction, and other positive emotions is to push us to enrich our lives and relationships in fruitful ways.

Fredrickson told me that pleasure can be broken down into two overlapping categories of experience, which she and others in her field sometimes term “hedonia” and “eudaimonia.” Hedonia refers to things that provide enjoyable sensory experiences or emotions. Eudaimonia refers to experiences that transcend happy feelings and provide people with a sense of purpose, contribution, and interconnectedness.

In Fredrickson’s telling, there used to be a lot of overlap between these two categories of pleasure. The activities that provided hedonia—sex, laughter, eating—tended to go hand in hand with activities that provided eudaimonia, such as raising children, cultivating friendships, and securing food. “The hedonic piece was the springboard to the eudaimonic piece,” she explained.

But these days, hedonia and eudaimonia are often disconnected, she said. The stuff that provides an instant, effortless hit of pleasure — food, entertainment, drugs, material purchases — is no longer coupled to those grander wellsprings of eudaimonic well-being.

“Not every pleasure has to come with meaning or purpose,” she told me. “But in growth and health and thriving, the eudaimonic piece is more important.”

I think a lot of her insights and lessons could also be applied to the ways we think about work and effort. Answering emails and ripping through another day of productive, AI-supported work may provide a fleeting, hedonic hit of pleasure—a sense of being busy, and of getting a lot done—but without true effort, the eudaimonic piece—that feeling of meaning and purpose and gratification—is often absent.

I’m going to end this by paraphrasing a line from my own TED talk—a line that, hopefully, I won’t butcher: We’re built for lifelong learning and exploration, ideally alongside other people. Those are the things that make our lives worth living, and those require effort.

The Escape with Markham Heid is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.