CHAPTER 4
Don’t Come Home for Christmas and Other Lessons on Trying Harder and Making It Worse
WHAT IF YOU actually watched a pot? Would it ever boil? Of course it would. But there’s wisdom in the old saying anyway. Because no amount of watching, no sense of urgency, no investment of your time focused on the pot will have the slightest positive effect. Your effort contributes nothing. But watching the pot does make it seem to take longer to boil and keeps you from doing anything useful.
We understand that when it comes to pots and water, but we forget it when it comes to everything else. Think about what every coach you’ve ever had has told you: Try harder. What every teacher you have ever had has told you: Try harder. What your parents, your boss, and Dear Abby told you: Try harder. It is received wisdom that the difference between winning and losing is effort.
But effort and incentives focus our attention on the problem at hand. Focusing on the nonboiling pot doesn’t make it boil. And focusing on whatever problem we are having doesn’t fix the problem. In fact, high effort and high incentives make us more likely to get frustrated and less likely to persist.
Focusing on a problem is an unproductive habit. But it’s a habit that draws us in, because problems are compelling. Paying attention to problems makes us feel like we are repelling a significant threat and that we are of consequence. The power of problems over us is only compounded by the fact that our favorite remedies actually make our problems worse. We take our problems and douse them in Miracle-Gro until they are so big we can’t lift them.
First among those ill-chosen remedies is effort.
It’s not that people should give up, never try, never apply themselves. The point is simply this: Turning effort up to an 11 on a 10-point scale is inherently counterproductive—it makes our problems seem bigger and our abilities seem smaller.
* * *
BUD MEYER BELIEVED in effort with the fervor of a preacher. Hard work, he said, solves every problem.
Bud Meyer applied that philosophy to his work as a chemical engineer and to the upbringing of his children, including his son Urban.
When Urban Meyer disappointed his father by striking out in a high school baseball game, Bud told him that he was unwelcome in the family car. So Urban Meyer walked home. It was ten miles away.
Happily, Urban was a star shortstop for the team and didn’t strike out very often. And, by the end of his senior season scouts from major league teams were buzzing around him, thinking he might have the potential to be a major leaguer.
Days after high school graduation, the Atlanta Braves signed Urban to a contract and shipped him off to rookie ball, the lowest level of minor league baseball.
In rookie ball, Urban Meyer floundered. The Braves tried him at shortstop, second base, third, and even as a catcher, but no matter where they put him, he couldn’t hit at that level of competition and he couldn’t field. Urban—a seventeen-year-old playing minor league baseball 1,200 miles from home—called Bud every night with another unhappy recap of his game. Finally, Urban told Bud that he couldn’t hack it, and that it was time for him to give up the baseball dream.
Failure was a problem for Bud, of course. And that problem was to be met with pure effort, nothing less. So Bud told Urban that if he quit, Bud never wanted to see him again. Never. Urban would be permanently unwelcome in the Meyer family home. Urban could call his mother once a year on Christmas, but when he did Bud would not be coming to the phone.
Urban didn’t quit. Bud’s words echoed in his mind amid the sweat and the strikeouts and the long bus rides between road games. He played out his first and then second minor league seasons—both in rookie ball—and then the Braves unceremoniously released him from his contract. He was no longer a baseball player, but you could not say he hadn’t tried his hardest.
Ninety-nine percent of high school baseball players do not make it as far as Urban Meyer did in the game. But no amount of effort or shame was going to carry him any farther. He did not have the tools to progress up the minor league baseball ladder, much less to make major league baseball.
Urban, however, was not through with sports. After an unimpressive stint playing college football, he began a coaching career that would one day take him to the top of the college football profession, winning two national championships at the University of Florida.
After the first national championship, Bud was asked what he thought of his son’s coaching success. “I wouldn’t say I’m agog about it,” he replied. “He’s performed in a way that is expected.”
Far from being critical of his father’s zealous belief in total effort, Urban himself was quick to credit his father’s teachings for his professional success. He lived Bud’s lessons and he was still welcome in his father’s home. No one could outwork him.
However, it was Urban’s all-encompassing effort that nearly drove him from the game.
At the University of Florida, one of the most important and cherished rituals Urban initiated was called Victory Meal. After a win, and only after wins, the entire team gathered for a jubilant postgame dinner. Looming over the dinner table were giant televisions, each showing a replay of the game. The meal was a reward, a celebration, a chance to strengthen bonds across the team, and a means to show what they were all playing for—a team that was larger than each individual member but that thrived as one. No one would dare miss the meal—it was what they played for.
As the winning seasons piled up, Urban began skipping some Victory Meals so that he could get a few hours more work done preparing for the next game. As he sought a second national championship, he stopped going entirely.
A few years later he ducked his head into a Victory Meal on his way to his office to watch some game film. Opening the door, he was shocked by the quiet. As he stepped inside, he saw why it was so quiet. The room was nearly deserted. Most of the tables were entirely untouched. Just a handful of players and two assistant coaches were quietly eating dinner.
Where is everyone, he asked? Reluctantly, his conditioning coach revealed that when Urban stopped coming to Victory Meal, so did almost all the players.
Urban was pained that in the name of working hard to advance the team, he had undermined his own team-building effort. Suddenly it seemed that perhaps perfect effort was not the perfect plan, and that meeting every problem with more effort came at an unanticipated cost. He wondered for the first time since he’d been left to walk home from that baseball game: Was there maybe something other than a straight line between effort and victory?
Within a few weeks, philosophical concerns gave way to something far more alarming. Urban was lying in bed struggling to breathe. There was a pain in his chest. He rolled out of bed but couldn’t get himself off the floor. As his wife dialed 911, Urban Meyer thought he was having a heart attack.
While the episode was terribly frightening for the family, doctors said that he had not suffered a heart attack. Instead, the stress and unhealthy habits that accompany twenty-hour workdays had simply overwhelmed him.
Convinced now that being the hardest-working football coach in America was a threat rather than an accomplishment, Urban walked away from one of the biggest contracts in the game and declared himself retired at the age of 46.
With time to reflect about the way he pursued his work, Urban came to believe his all-out effort had hurt his team, himself, and most importantly his family. He ultimately agreed to come back to football—to head one of the most storied programs in the game, at Ohio State—but did so only after signing a contract with his family. He agreed to set maximum work hours and minimum family time in his weekly schedule. He agreed to follow various rules to protect his health and mental well-being. And he agreed that bottomless effort was not what was going to make his football team successful.
Urban now quotes a passage from a management handbook that asks, “Why do people persist in their self-destructive behavior, ignoring the blatant fact that what they’ve been doing for many years hasn’t solved their problems? They think that they need to do it even more fervently or frequently, as if they were doing the right thing but simply had to try even harder.”
As he quotes the book, and reimagines his approach to work, the echoes of Bud’s exhortations to “try harder or you won’t be welcome home” grow fainter. Urban saw that effort was the thing that cost him his job at Florida, and that effort nearly kept his family from wanting to come to Ohio State. Effort came at the cost of the Victory Meal and commitments that weren’t hard work but were just as important. Ultimately, he saw that the mentality that there can be no limit on effort imposes a limit on everything else.
If you were to look up the concept of self-defeating effort, “it should have my picture,” Urban tells people now. “Because that’s exactly what happened.”
* * *
THOUGH IT SAYS on her business card that she’s a writing coach, Sharon thinks of herself as part coach, part teacher, part psychologist, and part social worker. “I’m the person you call when it’s time to pick up the pieces because you’d rather do anything but write,” Sharon says.
Sharon’s clients tend to view writing as the hardest thing they have to do. “They look at the blank screen, or the blank piece of paper, and it just induces this sense of panic and despair,” she says. “And it is such a perfect catalyst for procrastination. What’s the harm if I just take a minute to look up that friend from the fourth grade I haven’t seen in thirty years, or check to see if the lint catcher in the dryer is empty, or call the people in human resources and see if my W-2 is up to date?”
When her clients are in the worst shape, they tend to see every word they have to write as being like lifting a heavy stone. “After they lift that stone, they’re not even sure it was the right one, or if it will stand,” she says. “And if just one topples, the whole thing comes down on them.”
Sharon works with many different kinds of writers—students writing essays for school, technical writers who have to master the language of an industry, and aspiring professional fiction and nonfiction writers. What her clients tend to have in common—whether they are writing their first 500-word essay or they write for a living—is what she calls unbalanced attention.
“Much of the teaching of writing is the imposition of standards,” she says. “We say, ‘This is what good writing looks like.’ Now, naturally, you hold that example in your head when you write or when you try to write.”
The process intimidates writers because the standards are all but impossible to meet. “Then, the more you care, the harder you work, the more frustrated you become,” she says, “because you’ve invested so much in what you’re doing, and you still don’t feel it’s equal to what good writing is supposed to be.”
As if we were all taught writing by Bud Meyer, Sharon says the typical response to this problem is to redouble your efforts. “Now you’ve worked even harder, and the problem is even worse.”
Sharon had a client say to her once that she knew so many rules of writing that she could not sit down and write a sentence anymore. “That’s the heart of it. We feel like the harder we work at something, the more natural it will feel to us,” she says. “But you can work harder and harder on writing only to have it feel more foreign because you accumulate all these rules and standards and now every single word seems out of place.”
Sharon keeps a journal that she fills with great writing advice. One page she’s highlighted and underlined and put stars next to contains a quote from Slaughterhouse-Five author Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut warned: “Good Taste will put you out of business.”
Sharon knows that Vonnegut went on to advise prospective writers to drop out of school before they could be filled with all that good taste and taught conclusively that they were incapable of demonstrating it. Vonnegut himself considered it a stroke of luck that he studied science and anthropology in college—since he hadn’t studied writing, no one had a chance to teach him that he wasn’t capable of doing it.
Sharon can’t erase all the lessons her clients have already absorbed, of course. What she does, however, is try to get her clients to play with writing instead of work at it.
“I will sit down with clients and hand them a piece of paper and a pencil and say write something about this pencil, or about this room, or about your hand, or about the weather. It is always something very accessible and immediate,” Sharon explained. “And I will say, ‘There are no rules. No standards. And whatever you write, I’m going to crumple it up and throw it out.’”
There’s really only one thing Sharon is looking for in this exercise—and she almost always gets it. “I’m looking for a smile. I’m looking for a break in the dam that’s been holding them up from writing freely, from enjoying writing,” she says. “There’s something in the absurdity of the topic, in something silly they’ve written, and it just opens up the process for them.”
She continues a series of exercises emphasizing that it’s not how hard you try and it’s not how many rules you know. “Writing, like anything else vital in life, is better when it’s natural,” Sharon said. Much like Urban Meyer’s journey to a new perspective on good work habits, Sharon tries to get her clients to a point where their efforts are natural and human instead of obsessive and robotic.
There’s an old gimmick in golf if you really want to befuddle another player. Just before they hit the ball, ask them if they inhale or exhale when they take their backswing. They’ll say they don’t know. And then, instead of swinging naturally, they’ll be thinking about how to properly breathe. “That’s the essence of good writing,” Sharon says. “If you’re thinking about the specifics, then you’re not doing it. If you are thinking about writing, you’re not writing. If I can get you to just do it, so to speak, then I’ve made you a better writer, a person capable of creating something you will love.”
* * *
WHEN YOU COME into the office for the study, you find a table, bare of anything except what appears to be some kind of puzzle made out of wooden blocks, a set of diagrams, and some magazines.
You are told that you will be asked to fit the puzzle pieces together and configure them into various shapes. Diagrams of those shapes are laid out in front of you. After a practice run, the researcher tells you that he will be watching from behind a two-way mirror and measuring how long it takes you to construct each shape.
It takes you a while, but you figure out how to build the first shape. And then the second, third, and fourth. After you finish building four different designs, the researcher comes out and says you are almost finished. He just needs to retrieve a form for you to fill out, and then you will be done.
With the researcher heading out the door and down the hall, what do you do? You have the blocks. You have several diagrams you haven’t used yet. You could try to figure out some more shapes. You could just sit there, or you could peruse one of the magazines—Time, The New Yorker, and Playboy are sitting right next to you.
You didn’t know it, but there was a second researcher, behind the glass, watching what you did in this moment. In fact, the entire point of the experiment was this moment. Did you want to make more puzzle shapes, or did you abandon all that now in favor of current events, witty cartoons, or pictures of naked women?
It turns out that there was one big difference between the people who picked up the magazines and the people who kept building puzzles. If the researcher said that he was paying you for successfully completing the puzzles, you were twice as likely to put the puzzle down immediately after the researcher left. If there had been no money offered for your puzzle skills, you were more likely to keep working on the puzzle even when you thought you were alone and the puzzle-building task was over.1
The same pattern emerged in the punishment version of the experiment. Here, people who failed to finish a puzzle within the time available were subjected to an air horn that was jarringly loud and unpleasant. Working against this negative inducement, you put the puzzle down and reached for a magazine the moment the task was finished. If there was no threat of punishment, Time, Playboy, and The New Yorker were happily left to the side while you tried to figure out the other puzzle designs.
Why did clear, concrete incentives fail to make you more committed to and interested in successfully completing the puzzles? Edward Deci, the researcher who dreamed up these experiments, concluded that there is an intrinsic interest, a sort of gut-level interest, that ultimately guides our attentions. And when we try to alter that gut-level response with inducements, we have the opposite of the intended effect. Instead of making something more interesting, more vital, more alive, we transform it into a bloodless transaction that we wish to rid ourselves of at the first opportunity.
Deci repeated the basic experiment in many ways, always coming to the same conclusion. Curious whether this same pattern was visible outside the context of puzzles and laboratories, he ran a version of the experiment at a college newspaper.
Without anyone other than the editor knowing what was going on, Deci’s researcher was introduced to the staff as a new assistant editor. Among other tasks, the researcher was in charge of the team of students who wrote headlines.
Here, Deci took advantage of the fact that the newspaper was published twice a week and had two different teams of headline writers. He decided to pay Team 1 based on its productivity, while Team 2 received no bonus for extra work.
Just as in the puzzle experiment, the college newspaper staff was repulsed by the incentives. In return for its productivity bonus, Team 1 was less productive per hour worked and missed more days of work.2
Deci concluded that there is a giant hole in the equation Incentive + Harder Work = Better Outcome. That is, incentives don’t produce harder work, and harder work doesn’t produce better outcomes. An engaged mind beats the best incentive and the hardest worker every time. Engagement is sustaining, he said, while incentives and pure effort are limiting.
“Never underestimate the power of a person intrigued by a task, and never overestimate the value of a person with a task incentive,” Deci said. “Whether leading a group or motivating yourself—make it a puzzle you want to solve and you can do more than you ever set out to accomplish. Work hard to come up with a system of rewards and punishments and as fast as you go you will never take a step beyond the finish line.”
* * *
FOR MICHELE AND Erik, it started small—as these things do. Almost imperceptibly, their fifteen-year-old son Brandon became gradually less reliable. Instead of mowing the lawn like he was supposed to, you had to ask him a second, third, and fourth time. The trigonometry homework that he said was finished yesterday afternoon is suddenly not finished at breakfast the next morning, and now he’s racing to make sense of cosines and tangents while spilling Honey Nut Cheerios on his papers.
It was hardly the end of the world, but Michele and Erik were concerned. If this carelessness became a way of life, what would that mean for getting into college? For getting through it? For jobs and life and everything. “You don’t want to overreact,” Michele said, “but it’s hard not to worry that if he stops doing easy things, what’s going to happen when life demands hard things from him?”
So Michele and Erik set up a chart with categories, including doing his regular chores, finishing his homework and keeping up his grades, and being on time for dinner. They built in some small inducements for meeting all the standards each week, like a gift card for downloading music.
While they had meant for the chart to be a means of encouraging good behavior, it rapidly turned into something of a scorecard, a running ledger of what went right and what didn’t. With the chart in hand they could easily compare one week to the next. Unaware that Edward Deci’s research suggests their efforts to make things better would likely make things worse, they were stunned when they looked at the numbers and saw that their new tracking and incentive system had exactly the opposite of the intended effect.
“You could just count the check marks each week, and they didn’t go straight down, but close to it,” Erik said. “It would have seemed like a great success if the goal was to get him to stop doing his homework and always be late.”
“What’s he thinking in there?” Erik wondered. “It’s really hard to know. You ask him if he’s going to do something, he always says yes. You ask him if he understands what we expect of him, he always says yes. But then he doesn’t do it.”
More troubling to Michele and Erik, Brandon started to act like there were no rules. “He came home one Saturday night four hours past the time we told him to be in by. That’s not going to fly,” Michele said.
Just as Sharon’s students did, just as Bud Meyer taught, Michele and Erik decided that when at first you don’t succeed, try harder. They took the failure of their plan as evidence that they needed to do more. So they upped the rewards and added a punishment category. They expanded the list of expected behaviors and lengthened the timeline. Miss a standard and you’re staying home Saturday night, or any one of various pieces of electronics are going away, or a summer of extra SAT tutoring awaits. Hit enough standards over a long enough period of time and there’s an iPad coming, or a used car when Brandon turns sixteen.
Much to their surprise, the new system produced no more desired results than the old one. “We tried to pile on everything we thought was important—good or bad—to him, and it was as if we hadn’t done anything at all,” Erik said.
“It doesn’t seem rational,” Erik said. “The way I see things, you want something, you have to do A, B, and C for it, then you do A, B, and C.”
In talking to friends who had teenagers, Michele and Erik found out that they were hardly alone in coming up with ineffective ways to encourage good behavior.
“It could be girls, or grades, or games,” Michele said, “the problems or combinations of problems can be different, but the result is almost always the same. You set up some kind of rules about what’s acceptable, you establish some kind of inducement toward what you want to have happen, and then you see all that ignored.”
Michele came to realize the futility of their efforts when she and Brandon happened to see a television ad for one of those magic slicer-dicers. “The kind where you somehow can peel things in one stroke, and it comes out perfect,” Michele explained. “And he said, ‘We should get that.’ And I said, ‘It’s overpriced junk.’ And he said, ‘We should get that.’ I thought to myself, ‘We’re really not seeing the same world out there.’”
From that Michele began to consider what she decided might be the fundamental problem with their charts and incentives. “We were basically pretending that Brandon is making a decision like a banker or something, thinking about the value of what we were offering,” she said. “But you can’t sell long-term thinking to teenagers, who are pretty much the definition of people who think for the short term.
“We came to conclude that no amount of pushing was going to solve this problem,” she added.
The charts came down, the iPad offer expired, and Michele and Erik took a new approach. They didn’t try as hard to get what they wanted, and they were rewarded for it.
“We sat down with Brandon and said we need to be able to count on you,” Michele said. “So we told him the things we needed him to never falter on, and we said there were some things where we could cut him some slack. And things started to get a little better from there.”
* * *
IN THE 1940S, the smoke jumpers of the U.S. Forest Service were an elite team of professional adventurers ready to do battle with fire—not with water but with only their wits and the most rudimentary tools. They stood ready at a moment’s notice to jump on a plane and, more to the point, to jump off it and into harm’s way.
Their job was to get there early, block the fire’s path, and keep small fires from becoming big fires. That was their plan when a lightning strike started a fire near Mann Gulch, deep in the Montana wilderness.
Though they lost their ability to communicate with their command center when they threw the radio out of the plane and its parachute failed to open, the team took that as a minor setback. They thought this one had all the appearances of what they called a “10 o’clock fire,” the kind that they would have completely under control by the next morning. In fact, the first thing they did when they landed was open up their sacks and sit down for lunch.
After the meal, their assumptions quickly melted away. Landing on what they thought was the safe side of Mann Gulch, they came to realize that the fire had jumped the gulch.
A plan for fighting the fire quickly gave way as foreman Wag Dodge called for a full retreat.
But the grass was tall. Men move slowly when they are carrying their gear, moving in grass that is two or three feet tall, and heading up a hill. Fire moves faster.
Dodge realized that they would not win the race carrying their equipment, so he ordered everyone to drop their tools. But his men wouldn’t do it. It cut against their creed. The tools were a part of them, who they are, why they were there. With the tools, they were smoke jumpers; without tools, they were just another group of helpless sightseers out where they shouldn’t be.
Like boys who wouldn’t be welcome home for Christmas if they didn’t try, these men simply worked harder, racing against the fire, seeking a point where they could make their stand against it. The fire was a problem, and you meet a problem with maximum effort. That was the only way to fight a fire, they well knew. There was no room for weakness out there.
Desperate to keep his stubborn men from running a race they could not win, Dodge issued a new order. They would build their own fire. They would burn out a small area—creating a space where the fire would find no fuel—and then they would crouch down in that space and hope the real fire would pass over them. It was, at minimum, a chance to decide when the fire would reach them, instead of almost certainly being overtaken at a moment of the fire’s choosing.
Smoke jumpers set fires all the time. One of their tactics in fighting fires was to set a back fire to control the direction of the wildfire. But in this case, there was no time to do any of that—all Dodge’s plan would do was clear a small escape hatch within the flames.
To that, his men objected. Setting a fire was a tactic for stopping a fire, nothing else, they believed. And thus with the most severe incentive imaginable, the men were uselessly obsessed with trying harder. Instead of seeing Dodge’s order as an act of creative genius, they thought he was weak or they thought he was nuts. Either way, he could no longer think straight and was therefore no longer to be obeyed.
While Dodge carried out his plan, setting his fire and clearing a space to hide in, his men clutched their equipment and kept running.
Dodge’s plan worked. After the fire had passed over him, Dodge stood on ground on which there was nothing left to burn. He was now safe, but where were his men? He began a search. Out of his team of fifteen men, two had survived.
There are few more poignant examples of the true value of effort. Pure effort, by itself, can be useless. Indeed, it can be harmful. Dodge lay down in the soot and the ash and the dirt. He hid from an unstoppable enemy, and lived to fight it another day. His colleagues saw the fire as a problem to be met with maximum effort, so they expended every ounce of energy they had moving as fast as they could carrying heavy tools to the very end. They worked as hard as they could until they destroyed themselves with their effort.
The smoke jumpers died carrying their tools up a hill, when their tools were beyond useless to them. They died because they didn’t want to fail at fighting the fire, but survival was the only way they could ever succeed. They clung to their understanding of the problem instead of trying a solution that fit the situation they were in—and the decision killed them. If that level of incentive and effort doesn’t inspire a clear look at things, then no amount of incentive and effort ever will.
THE TAKEAWAY
It’s so obvious we would never stop to even question it. What should we do if we are struggling with a problem? Try harder. What should we do if we absolutely need to come out on top? Raise the stakes, create incentives, and put our total focus on the issue. And when we do all that, it has one clear effect: It makes our problems worse.
With the smoke jumpers’ lives on the line, with Urban Meyer’s career on the line, total, all-out effort was a threat and a hindrance. Effort ties Sharon’s writing students in knots and left Michele and Erik wondering how they had worked so hard to come up with a system that only made their teenager less reliable. What they all had in common was belief in the very alluring notion that all-out effort is the purest pursuit of success. But as Edward Deci’s experiments showed, forced effort fails against natural curiosity every time. We are twice as likely to stick to a challenge without an incentive.
Maximizing effort is a fool’s comfort. We burn out, we make illogical decisions, we don’t build engagement with the task. It’s a comforting response, but it’s a wrong one.
We’ve all seen this firsthand. There’s a tiny stain on your shirt—so small you can barely see it. It’s annoying, though. Probably best to leave it alone. But. If you could just get it off, that would be better. You try to flick it off with a fingernail. Doesn’t work. You go at it with a napkin and some water. Now the stain is bigger. It’s ground in. There’s no getting it out. And instead of something tiny and obscure, you’ve created this massive dark spot on your shirt that people can see from across the room. You gave it your all, and you made it worse.
There’s a reason we go at those stains and make the problem worse. We have to try harder. It’s what we’ve been taught. It’s what we believe. But it just doesn’t work.
TWO FOR THE ROAD: HOW TO PUT OUTCOMES OVER EFFORT
Skip practice. When something is important, we want to prepare more thoroughly. But going over and over something in advance tends to lock us into one way of seeing and doing, while simultaneously stamping out spontaneity and possibility. That is why Bruce Springsteen likes to record his songs before his band fully knows the music. “If people learn their parts too well,” he said, “they consciously perform rather than flat-out play.” When he hears his band come alive in the studio, even if it’s a bit rough around the edges, he holds up his hands and says, “That’s good. If it gets any better than that, it’ll be worse.”
Slow down. People think the only way to exercise properly is to go at it full tilt. In fact, researchers have found that we vastly overestimate the number of calories burned from running fast—and underestimate the number of calories burned from running slowly.3 Unfortunately, many people give up on exercise because they can’t run fast and don’t realize they would do themselves more good running slowly anyway. The same logic applies to whatever you are doing. We overvalue speed in almost everything we are doing—because we associate speed with effort. But hurrying wears us down and closes out possibilities. Slow down in something you do today and see how much more you can get out of it.