Reminds me of this quote from Walter Murch, from In the Blink of an Eye I think:

"Most of us are searching-consciously or unconsciously- for a degree of internal balance and harmony between ourselves and the outside world, and if we happen to become aware-like Stravinsky- of a volcano within us, we will compensate by urging restraint. By that same token, someone who bore a glacier within them might urge passionate abandon. The danger is, as Bergman points out, that a glacial personality in need of passionate abandon may read Stravinsky and apply restraint instead."

Well said.

Reminds me of when I first tried to learn guitar. I tried doing fingering practices. It was so boring. I gave up after like a week.

I thought that playing music just wasn’t for me.

Many years later, I picked up a friend’s guitar next to me and just tried to play one of my favorite songs just by ear. I got enough right that it was fun and I got hooked.

I've noticed that for most hobbies, there comes a point where to improve you need to do the boring part. Yes, to a certain extent, practice can be play, but unless you're the one-in-a-million prodigy who's just obsessed day and night, it's not going to be much fun drilling scales, or practicing your serve, or crimping on a hangboard, or whatever.

Once you get to a certain level, you stop being able to just easily add new skills and capabilities and have to cycle between adding skills and polishing skills. And once you get far enough, adding skills becomes a much smaller portion of time you spend on the activity than polishing, until one day you've mostly added all the skills you're going to and the only thing left to do is polish them to perfection.

And that's why I don't strive for excellence in most any of my hobbies -- they stop being as fun when I'm no longer getting to do new things and only ever pushing against my limit to improve things I'm already doing.

Sounds like a "train the motivation" approach.

If a person wants to do a thing then they will engage with it on their terms. But getting that initial "hook" and then growing it is the trick.

I will never go to any physical training that involves a trainer shouting "pain is gain!". If it hurts, why would I do that? Why are we focusing on how much it hurts?!

Get me hooked on the Gain, let the pain happen naturally depending on how hard I want that Gain.

Well yeah, it helps to become a good (even world-class) swimmer if you actually like swimming and do a lot of it from an early age. Same as you are more likely to become a good developer if you actually enjoy programming rather than just thinking "I want to be a developer someday because I want to earn $$$".

But what OP is saying, and what I agree with, is that I don't think Katie Ledecky put in small levels of effort consistently over time.

I read the article before I commented, and I reread the definition just now, and I still think that effort/exertion/tension/whatever you want to call it, is a necessary stage along the journey to mastery. Maybe Mozart or whatever preternatural prodigy from birth managed to fit this stage into preconsciousness, but I can virtually guarantee that Katie Ledecky had to over-exert in order to build herself into the powerhouse she became. There is no way she expended "zero effort", either by normal use of the word "effort", or by the definition in the article.

The problem with this whole argument is that you can easily reframe the definition of the activity to suit any specific agenda.

Going with the swimming analogy: If you’re attempting to cross a pool, you can just dead man’s float and eventually you’ll get there. If you’re attempting to cross it using crawl stroke you can do slow slowly and lazily. If your goal is to build Olympic tier swimming fitness, well then you need to pull exactly as hard as you need to to optimally build muscle / neural pathways / whatever.

By the way, overgripping is proven to boost effective strength. Next time you’re struggling for a last rep, try squeezing the bar harder.

My point isn’t that we shouldn’t burn ourselves out, it’s just that it’s very hard to know what the amount of energy an activity actually “requires” is

This is a fallacious argument.

The contention of the article is premised on using a nonstandard definition.

And THAT is done to let them make a clickbait title.

One might say - by their definition? - that if you need to resort to a clickbait title to get engagement, you're putting in too much effort!