There is no paradox as the article describes. Psychology already knows effort from initiative is the result of conscientiousness. They just don’t know how to measure it.

What they do know is that higher conscientiousness is inherently good up to a point. Extreme conscientiousness is associated OCD type anxiety disorders. Low conscientiousness is inherently bad, so much so that it’s the primary characteristic of any number of disorders such as ADHD and autism. Conscientiousness is also negatively correlated to intelligence at around -0.27.

That being said some people will always avoid effort no matter how immediately associated that effort connects to a goal while other people find joy in an effort merely for the sake of their own industriousness. Although psychology is greatly challenged to associate any form of metric to observable efforts necessary to measure it psychology can still readily identify it.

I can also prove and demonstrate how conscientiousness relates to programming. For example many JavaScript developers cannot write the instructions to navigate a tree model, such as file system or DOM. The effort is just too great and they cannot do it even with years of programming experience. I can take a much less intelligent military soldier with no prior programming experience and teach them to master this skill within four hours of education, and their corresponding output will be vastly superior to that of the experienced programmer who cannot perform that sort of navigational effort. There is no paradox to any of this.

Going to the gym is like that for me: I really hesitate and don't feel like it before going, but once I've done it, it feels much better than if I just sit at home doom scrolling or watching TV.

I always find the Fogg behavior model [0] helpful to analyze why I choose one behavior over the other.

  B = MAP

  Behavior = Motivation * Ability * Prompt

Whichever plot is closer to the top-right is the one you’ll choose.

Try this by comparing:

1. Wake up to your alarm on your phone (P=1), a bunch of Instagram/Youtube notifications (M=.97), and it’s so easy to scroll you can do it with one finger (A=.98). This is at the top-right of the graph.

2. Get out of bed, find your running shoes (P=0), go for a run (M=.6, A=.5). This is in the middle of the graph but also invisible (no prompt).

So you pick laying in bed scrolling over going for a run every time.

You can flip this by, say, getting an alarm clock that’s not your phone and putting your phone in another room, and placing your bright green running shoes next to your bed.

A key observation here is that P is the most powerful lever in this equation, where often things like social media or junk food are always going to be near the top-right of the graph, so the primary means of attacking those is removing the prompt.

The next most effective lever to adjust is A (ability), placing barriers in your way of the undesirable thing, and removing barriers from the desired behavior.

The least consistent lever is M (motivation). It’s sometimes possible to increase or decrease our motivation, perhaps by journaling on the benefits of exercise and the drawbacks of social media, but that can be inconsistent or be a long-term effort to adjust intrinsic motivation. Motivation is also less consistent, a powerful source when you have it but not always there reliably.

[0] https://behaviormodel.org/

Paper referred by the article:

The Effort Paradox: Effort Is Both Costly and Valued

Michael Inzlicht

Amitai Shenhav

Christopher Y. Olivola

PDF direct link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6172040/pdf/nih...

Page: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6172040/

edit: fixed link. Thank you gpvos!

I think you encounter this idea of effort adding value a lot in the arts. If a book (or film, album, etc.) is particularly long or "difficult", it can add something to the experience and achievement of reading it. And correspondingly there is an inherent suspicion of anything that is just too readable or popular, the feeling being that anything so easily consumed must be of little value.

I think the key here is finding "truly meaningful activities".

Many focus on making more money. If it isn't about money, it isn't really something meaningful...

From training to playing music, I usually find myself in "remote" conversations about consumption, money, politics. It is extremely rare I hear about truly meaningful subjects.

I'm sure someone else has a similar perspective?

Cant get past paywal, but my amateur view on this is something like this: You have a car trying to get up a hill. If it gets past the peak there is a huge downard road that it can just coast on endlessly. But if you'r engine is too weak that makes no difference whatsoever

I would suppose the same thing with the brain. You need enough neurotransmitters such as dopamine to fire and exert a behavior change. And then there is a reward that causes overall improvements in the body's functionality. Without enough neurotransmitters though, you just can't do it

I find that learning self compassion and letting go of stress has helped me to an extent. Beating yourself for procrastinating only adds internal tension

Just as we should strive to forgive others, and (if they seem well intentioned and not shamelessly deceitful) to be kind and patient with them, it is equally important to do the same with ourselves

Learning to not dwell on our imperfections is equally important as having the self awareness to recognize our flaws

And in doing so that helps streamline our thoughts to give us more motivation

For some people medication like adderall can also be really helpful

Isn't this just the same as loss avoidance? People will choose to avoid a certain loss over a possible gain. Expending effort is essentially a certain loss for gain that is not 100% certain.

I skimmed through the paper and skipped the article (paywalled) and I am absolutely no expert in the field.

I've found the premises of the paper very interesting and I think the so called effort paradox can be also framed in reverse: we make the effort when we think it will be rewarding hence we then appreciate what we obtained more.

One personal example for me is solving programming problems: I sit down for hours to solve them because solving the problem is my goal and looking up the solution in some LLM chat bot would not give me the same feeling but for someone whose goal is using the solution for their goals, relying on an LLM is avoiding a cost to focus their energies on what's really important to them.

I don't know if people really are lazy, I think most of them are smart enough to think through what to invest on and what not.

As someone else also said consistency is key, whatever it's easy for us today has been difficult at the beginning, the reward might come years later we started the journey.

I often say, "happiness is over a hill". :)

it’s pay-/ subwalled sadly, I tried archive.ph, 12ft, google cache (just found out google killed it :/) and the usual web archive.

All walled off

Hit the paywall, but while trying to circumvent it DuckAssist did give some interesting insight when searching on the article title:

> Many people avoid effort due to an instinctual desire to conserve energy, a trait that has evolved over time. This reluctance is often compounded by negative associations with effort, such as past experiences with exercise or a lack of confidence, leading to a preference for sedentary activities despite the long-term benefits of physical activity for well-being.

I will give a big eye roll from the CFS/Long Covid club.

And I wonder if CFS exists to some extent in everyone who isn't doing ultramarathons ... in other words the nervous system prevents the average person from running 100km a day (or being able to get to that point) BUT... doesn't stop them doing daily life stuff, or keeping basically fit.

I am not sure lazy is even a thing.

Someone having a non paywall link?

Paywallskip https://archive.md/8jieq

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