"Let me share my slightly unusual definition of “effort”: it’s the felt experience of expending energy beyond what an activity requires, like tensing your brow when you try to understand something, or the excess tension in your hand when you hold your phone...Using this definition, it’s clear that the appropriate amount of effort for any activity is zero."

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jfreds a day ago | parent | next [-]

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

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ytoawwhra92 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

This is a fallacious argument.

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didibus a day ago | parent [-]

What is fallacious about it?

The claim seems to be that we often try even harder than is required to succeed. By trying too hard, we wear ourselves down, and might even cause us to fail in the process.

Therefore, putting effort beyond what is needed, by their definition, is excess and should be avoided.

Now I don't know if sometimes going a bit above what is needed can help in some ways, so I'm not saying it's true, but I don't see what is fallacious about it? The rationale seems to hold.

	▲	ytoawwhra92 a day ago \| parent [-]
		That's not the lexical definition of effort. It's a stipulative definition that allows the author to reach a conclusion that's inherently provocative when read by people who are using the lexical definition. > Therefore, putting effort beyond what is needed, by their definition, is excess and should be avoided. By qualifying with "beyond what is needed" you've made it clear that you're using the lexical definition of "effort". I think that should drive home how absurd the author's definition of "effort" is. They've been careful not to make it a clearly circular definition (effort = effort beyond what is required) but they are awfully close.