Trying Too Hard
“The player of the inner game comes to value the art of relaxed concentration above all other skills; he discovers a true basis for self-confidence; and he learns that the secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard.”
- W. Timothy Gallwey[1]
Conventional wisdom suggests more effort will lead to a better result but is it possible to try too hard ? Author and entrepreneur Derek Sivers describes[2] regularly completing a fifteen mile bike ride. Pushing as hard as he could the whole way to beat his best time of 43 minutes. One day after “dialing it back to about 50 per cent” and enjoying the ride Sivers realised that his time was only 2 minutes less than his fastest time. Sivers came to learn “all of that exhausting, red-faced, full-on push-push-push I had been doing had given me only a 4 percent boost. I could just take it easy and get 96 percent of the results. And what a difference in experience! To go the same distance, in about the same time, but one way leaves me exhausted, and the other way, rejuvenated.”
Hugh Jackman describes[3] how athletes coached to run at 85% of their capacity “will run faster than if you tell them to run 100 because it’s more about relaxation and form and optimizing the muscles in the right way”. Studying Carl Lewis who was always at the back of the field early in the race but would go on to win, Jackman says the difference was “his breathing and form was exactly the same”the whole race whilst “Other runners would try to push harder, clenching their fists, scrunching their faces. But Carl Lewis stayed exactly the same . . . and go on to breeze past the others.”
It seems this doesn’t just apply to exercise, it has also been described in creative endeavours. John Cleese tells the story[4] of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s co-writers “pressing” too hard. “When we came up against a block and our discussions became very heated and intense, Hitchcock would suddenly stop and tell a story that had nothing to do with the work at hand.”, Cleese recounts, “At first, I was almost outraged, and then I discovered that he did this intentionally. He mistrusted working under pressure. He would say “We’re pressing, we’re pressing, we’re working too hard. Relax, it will come.” And, says the writer, of course it finally always did.” Actor Bill Murray believes this is one of life’s secrets. “I think the only reason I’ve had the career life that I’ve had”, Murray says “is that someone told me some secrets early on about living. You can do the very best you can when you’re very, very relaxed, no matter what it is or what your job is, the more relaxed you are the better you are. That’s sort of why I got into acting. I realized the more fun I had, the better I did it. And I thought, that’s a job I could be proud of. It’s changed my life learning that, and it’s made me better at what I do.”
Holocaust survivor and psychologist Viktor Frankl describes[5] the concept of hyper intention, the idea that someone is unable to forcibly achieve a particular outcome. Frankl advises “Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it … in the long-run — in the long-run, I say! — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”.
The distinction, Sivers realised, is that when trying too hard the extra effort is not translated to results, that “half of my effortwasn’t effort at all, but just unnecessary stress that made me feel like I was doing my best.”
[1] The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance, W. Timothy Gallwey 1974
[2] Hell Yeah or No, What’s Worth Doing, Derek Sivers 2020
[3] The Tim Ferris Show, June 2020
[4] Creativity in Management, John Cleese, lecture at Grosvenor Hotel London 23rd January 1991
[5] Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl 1946
