5.d 强调努力是可笑的

Make Time Your Friend 5.d: Stressing Hard Work Is Laughable

> By Li Xiaolai · 2008-05-19 · [Original (web archive)](https://web.archive.org/web/20111113132853/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/443.html) (Chinese)
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

"Success studies" repeatedly stresses "effort" and "struggle," which seems somewhat laughable—as if we could do without effort or struggle; as if we were unwilling to make an effort or to struggle. In fact, whether it's stressed or not, we must all make an effort and must all struggle. Effort is what we ought to make; struggle is what we should do.

Even those "high above" need to make an effort and struggle. As the saying goes, "as long as life goes on, the tossing and turning never stops." On the surface, if a person is at the top of the normal distribution curve of resource distribution, he belongs to the group that makes up less than 1% of this world; then so-called effort and struggle seem unnecessary. He needs no effort, because he was born with a golden key in his mouth; he needs no struggle, because he already has everything; he needs no striving, because the limitations he faces are the mildest of all. However, even they often have to make an effort, and redouble it; have to struggle, and redouble it. At the very least, for these people at the top, protecting the resources that belong to them is in itself already extremely arduous; moreover, the more resources, the more arduous the task; when resources reach a certain level, the task of protecting them may be a matter of life and death—it has been so since ancient times. In addition, they need mental maturity all the more, which is also one of the inevitable results of material abundance. So in real life, children of rich families are often not as useless as others imagine, because all their real conditions force them to make more effort; it's just that the way they make an effort may be different.

Frank H. Knight (富兰克•H•奈特) ([Frank H.Knight](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Knight)[[1](#footnote_0_443 "Knight is the economist who, as early as 1923, pointed out that so-called "market efficiency" is a useless, fabricated concept. "… ownership of personal or material productive capacity is based upon a complex mixture of inheritance, luck and effort, probably in that order of relative importance" (Knight, 1923).")]), regarded as one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century, has a famous view: "There are three conditions that determine whether a person is rich: first, birth; second, luck; third, effort; and of these three, effort is the most insignificant." This is a serious and important principle that takes a great deal of time and energy, through careful thought, to understand and accept: no matter how hard you work, you may very well have no chance at all of becoming rich and well-off—do you have the courage to accept such a reality?

However, accepting such a reality doesn't mean we no longer need to make an effort from now on. Actually, everyone needs to make an effort. It's just that stressing effort and struggle is rather laughable. Everyone faces certain limitations of his own, and the reality is that "resources are not only scarce but very unevenly distributed," so everyone must make an effort, struggle, strive, whoever he is, whatever he was like to begin with. Accepting reality is really too hard, because each time you accept a hard-to-accept reality, you always have to face another reality that may be even harder to accept. So there's nothing in this world harder than accepting reality. Another trouble comes from this fact: although "effort" is necessary and proper, unfortunately it isn't innate. What everyone has innately is a habit opposed to "effort"—"laziness."

Besides the resistance of "innate laziness," there's another thing most people don't realize: just how difficult the "final difficulty" will be. People often sigh at the cruelty of sports competitions. In the 100-meter dash, the difference between first and second is just a few hundredths of a second; in diving, the difference between gold and silver is just a few hundredths of a point; in the long jump, the difference between champion and runner-up is just a distance of less than a centimeter…… That tiny difference actually brings the athletes a difference as great as heaven and earth—too cruel.

But if we analyze from another angle, we'll know just how astonishing that so-called "tiny" difference is. To put it more vividly, in any learning process, if the degree of progress is projected on the Y axis and the time and energy that learning requires is projected on the X axis, the result is often very similar to a "logarithmic curve":

［Image］

Through this curve we can easily understand: in the initial state, a person needs to spend only a little time and energy to make great progress; however, as the degree of progress increases, making a little more progress often requires investing relatively enormous time and energy. So the differences between those champions and runners-up (the difference on the Y axis) are actually not as small as they look, because, looked at from the X axis, there has to be a very large difference on the X axis to produce an obvious yet very small difference on the Y axis.

So we shouldn't make an effort only when someone encourages us. Effort is what we ought to make. Whether or not anyone encourages us, whatever the final result, we should make an effort—of course, before any effort we should first determine whether the goal is realistic. Some people are different from the crowd: they not only make an effort consistently, but the reason they make an extra effort comes from their careful observation and clear thinking: the final difficulty is far more difficult than imagined.

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Footnotes:

1. Knight is the economist who, as early as 1923, pointed out that so-called "market efficiency" is a useless, fabricated concept. "… ownership of personal or material productive capacity is based upon a complex mixture of inheritance, luck and effort, probably in that order of relative importance" (Knight, 1923). [[↩](#identifier_0_443)]

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