Trying hard is a viable strategy
For eight years, not being a maggu — not being a tryhard — was part of my identity. Get the result, but don’t be seen to grind for it. Effort was something you hid, and needing it was a small admission that you weren’t smart enough to skip it. This is a common identity among people who found school easy, and it’s a bad one. It’s just clearly superior to try harder. Past a certain level of difficulty, not trying hard stops being a stylistic choice and becomes a non-viable strategy: the problems don’t yield to talent alone, so the only people still standing are the ones who put the work in.
The identity has a cultural source. At IIT the maggu is the one who grinds, and the compliment is to be the one who didn’t need to. But look at what the exam actually selected for: the trait IIT and Ivy League grads share is that they were willing to compete. Everyone who got in tried hard once. The identity is built on forgetting that, and on mistaking a single past sprint for a permanent property of the self.
The reason is mechanical, not moral. Once you’ve solved a problem a couple of times, it takes far less cognitive effort to solve it again. pd.reset_index() was once the kind of problem that consumed real attention; after enough repetitions it costs nothing. Having done more programming in general, getting familiar with a new library now takes about thirty minutes’ worth of effort where it would once have tired me out for a whole day. The task didn’t get easier. The price I pay for it dropped.
That price is set by your learning rate: how many minutes of effort a new thing costs you. Two people can face the same unfamiliar library and one pays half an hour while the other pays a day, and the gap isn’t intelligence so much as accumulated reps in adjacent territory. The rate is itself trainable: the third library in a language costs less than the second, the second language less than the first, because each rep leaves behind structure the next one can reuse. Which means the only way to get better at hard things — the difficult problems, the maths that doesn’t come from staring — is to practise more. There isn’t a trick. Recall and spaced repetition for the things you need to remember; deliberate practice for the things you need to be able to do. Both are just trying hard, organised.
Seen this way, the tryhard identity is expensive in exactly the wrong place. It saves face today and forfeits the compounding: every rep you skip to look effortless is a rep that would have made the next thing cheaper. The people who look effortless late are usually the ones who were visibly effortful early. It’s worth wanting the outcome enough to pay for it in public. And if you find you can’t make yourself, that’s worth examining too — procrastination is usually the mind’s verdict that the goal or the plan isn’t good enough, not a shortage of willpower.
Related: Wanting, Procrastination.
← Theses