Effort
Friday January 31, 2025
I’ve struggled with effort my whole life. I’ve always been just smart and talented enough to get by with minimal effort. Douchey, but true. I’ve had next to no ability to learn new things for which I didn’t have a natural aptitude because of a learned aversion to productive struggle.
At an early age, I found that I was good at reading and arithmetic, I could run fast and hand-eye coordinate, but man, I fucking sucked at the violin. I started and quit the violin, the guitar, the trombone, and the banjo, turning an obvious interest in music into a graveyard of wasted privilege. When pre-calc came along, I stopped trying in math, too.
Rather than study and think to get A’s, I got high, drunk, and played video games and wall ball with my friends to get B’s. The things I was naturally good at — writing and growing facial hair (I wrote my college essay on being an early bloomer) — got me into a pretty good school with a declining reputation, where I continued to play the clown and pursue virtually no new interests. I read my Fanon, Wimsatt and Beardsley, Zinn, and Foner, learned prescient words like “harlequin” (and “prescient”), and met my academic requirements with a B-average.
I did a little creative writing, authored a column in an alt paper for a couple years, but never explored any inklings beyond what was in front of my nose or thought about what came next.
I’ve written about this before. I don’t regret shamelessly trading a potentially more successful future to maximize the happiness of my youth. My relationships are the most important thing to me. It’s only in retrospect that I can appreciate how much I needed to do that for my own well-being, given how thorough certain thought exercises got for a bit after college.
Today, I have a much more complicated relationship with effort. I respect the hell out of people who throw themselves wholeheartedly into passions and pursuits. But I also pity them. But I also envy them. But I also just don’t… get it? I mean, what does this dude get from shitting himself in front of hundreds of people?
So it goes.
I started freelancing because I (correctly, as it turns out) believed it would allow me to milk the most value out of the least amount of labor. Marxism made me a great Capitalist. Yes, sometimes I have to hustle to meet deadlines or generate new business, but generally, I don’t work very hard or very much. I’m perpetually astounded by how quickly those extra hours get soaked up by walking the dog, taking care of the house, cooking, exercising, and writing this thing. I don’t understand how people who make life about work do it. I think I get the “why” for most people, but the cost-benefit analysis just doesn’t compute for me.
I’ve been thinking about effort recently because, for the first time in my life, I’ve decided I’m going to try. At least professionally. Right out the year’s gate, I’ve dedicated about 10 hours/week to outreach and job hunting. I’ve interviewed for two full-time jobs, met with five potential new clients, and feel pretty good that two of those clients will work out. That’s like six months’ worth of activity in a normal year. I’m curious to see what trying might get me.
Many of you give max effort in all parts of your lives, and I hope you know I respect you for it. Not that that matters for shit, but compliments are nice. In my opinion, what’s really respectable is putting more effort into your friendships, your care for your children and loved ones, your self-care, your creativity, your values, nurturing the neglected pieces of yourself, and being decent to others. Y’all know how I feel about work, even though I’m playing at giving a shit.
It’s gonna really suck if all this effort amounts to nothing.
One Two Book: The Wager by David Grann / Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
Dammit, I couldn’t decide. I didn’t realize it, but by the looks of my Goodreads, I’ve been on a bit of a survival kick recently. Both of these books may be better defined by the word “struggle” than “effort,” but similar concepts, so whatever.
The Wager is a shipwreck survival tale, Into Thin Air is about summiting Everest. Both are true, intense depictions of human efforts to fend off imminent death.
One Song: “Pictures of Success” by Rilo Kiley
Rilo Kiley gets this spot in honor of their just-announced reunion performance at Just Like Heaven this May. Lindsay and I will be in California twice this May but will still miss this, which is a huge bummer.
Rilo Kiley is my favorite band ever but they stopped playing shows in 2008 before I ever saw them. I’ve seen frontwoman Jenny Lewis solo and with The Postal Service, but I had given up on thinking I’d ever see Rilo Kiley. Hopefully this show is just the runway for a tour announcement.
“Pictures of Success” has made me cry more than once. It’s a song about Jenny/the band’s constant struggle to find anything resembling purpose in life. (A frequent theme in their early work; one that still resonates with me deeply.) Takeoffs and Landings is really a great album for the “Effort” theme, actually, because the entire thing is about how damn hard it is to figure shit out.
One Quote: “Teaching is hard. I don’t want to effort no more.” - Lindsay Perry
What could I add to such sage wisdom?
One Hollywood: Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
This 1991 documentary chronicles the insane production of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Made primarily with behind-the-scenes footage shot by Coppola’s daughter, Eleanor, Hearts of Darkness shows a profound example of life imitating art, as illness, terrible weather, and Coppola’s own Kurtz-like madness plagued the production and nearly got the movie scrapped entirely. Still, they persisted, and made a Best Picture nominee that endures as an all-time great war movie.
If you don’t have time for the documentary, this Collider article is a good alternative.
One Person: Kim Allan
Do you know what the record is for continuous running? It’s 310 miles, covered in 86 hours. More than 3 and a half straight days of running. That is profane effort.
New Zealander Kim Allan set the record in 2013 at age 47, after picking up running as a hobby in 2010. After three years of being a runner she went ahead and made it so much her identity that she did literally nothing else for days at a time. This is why people think runners are psychopaths. Something is the matter with you.
Breaking the record isn’t even the most impressive thing about her feat. What’s more impressive is the figurative mountain she climbed on the way.
Kim was trampled by a horse in 2003. The accident ended her career as a jockey, but she regained most of her mobility. Unwilling to take her miraculous recovery for granted, she became obsessed with pushing her mental and physical endurance, eventually realizing running was the ultimate way to do so. She fell short on her first attempt at the record after losing all of her toenails and suffering from hallucinations. Less than one year later, she beat the record by eight miles.
I don’t know how much Kim Allan trained to make these runs, but considering those two attempts covered seven full days’ worth of time on their own, I don’t think it’s unrealistic to think she was actively running for more than a month that year. Sometimes, effort looks indistinguishable from mental illness.
One Recipe: Broccoli Shells n’ Cheese
Macaroni and cheese is a famously low effort dish. But if you put just a little bit of effort into it, it reaches another level. This recipe is a pseudo-gourmand’s mac n’ cheese. You gotta make a roux, you gotta make a cheese sauce, and you gotta bring it all together real nice.
It’s really not that complicated, but it’s well worth the touch of extra effort to feel like you accomplished something better than mac’ n cheese that’s… well, literally just mac n’ cheese.