In Defense of Trying Hard
Being a try-hard is good, actually
In high school and college, participating in class, doing all of the readings, and putting real work into assignments and projects will earn you the label of try-hard.
In the outdoor communities I participate in—skiing, climbing, and running—investing effort beyond a casual level, training hard, and caring about your performance will earn you the title, often hurled like a slur: “what a hardo.”
Even just being good at online video games, or using the meta, will have other players yelling through their mics or furiously typing up messages calling you a “sweaty try-hard.”
Last week, I wrote the following in regards to an “alignment graph” along the dimensions of hardo-normie humble-elitist:
The Hardo-Normie Alignment Graph
A critical point we stumbled upon almost immediately is that none of these four quadrants contained any inherent value judgements. It was not good or bad to be an elitist hardo or a humble normie: any personal reaction we had to a given quadrant was simply a reflection of our own egos.
Many of my friends could be described as “extreme” relative to what might be considered normal (whatever that is), and so we as a group agreed that “humble hardo” was the aspirational quadrant, even if we didn’t always manage to achieve our place in it.
After more reflection, I’ve decided I was too forgiving with my relativism. I’d like to make a value judgement: I believe that being a hardo, or a try-hard, or a sweat, is good, actually.
The differentiating factor in people’s success that I see most is the amount of effort that an individual is willing to put into whatever endeavor they are pursuing.
Natural talent matters a lot, yes. I’m pretty sharp, but I’m confident I’m never going to make any novel contributions to the field of physics. Likewise, I’m in decent shape but I’m not going to win any marathons. Those upper echelons of achievement do require a degree of innate ability. But whether you’re looking at professional accolades, athletic achievements, creative output, interpersonal relationships—really, in anything that matters at all—effort dominates the outcomes of those around me. Determination and grit are two of the most powerful virtues you can develop because they’re purely a function of how much you’re willing to keep trying hard.
The ubiquity of the disparagement of effort across all of these domains points to effort’s efficacy. Trying hard works. It isn’t easy to try hard, but anyone can do it. That’s why people demean it: they’re trying to handle the dissonance of why they aren’t putting in the effort they could be.
Now, of course, I will hedge a bit. People have different priorities and are doing activities for different reasons. You can, and should, do things casually. The effort dial doesn’t need to to be turned to 11 all of the time. But just as that’s true, it’s not right to demean people for caring about things and investing commensurate effort into the things they care about.
For that reason, the next time I walk into the office on a Monday and my coworkers call me a hardo after seeing my weekend—or morning, for that matter—Strava posts, I will wear that label like a badge of honor. And for my part, I will do my best to stop calling skimo racers hardos (like the slur).
I haven’t seen this idea anywhere else, possibly because the demographics which think about such things are natural hardos, but actually there is a game-theoretic reason behind these attitudes, which typically start to manifest in school classrooms. When you are competing internally rather than globally, within a small environment such that your attitudes can affect the entire group, conspicuous non-effort is both an attempt to form a collective agreement to reduce the level of competition, and a type of stotting if you can perform well despite “not trying”. Another way that the formal education system maladapts you for real life.
Knowing what I know now, if I were given the choice at birth between getting talent or determination, I’d choose determination every time.
I am such a try-hard. It’s the only thing that ever worked for me. You might like Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. He says he’d never have become a great novelist if running had’t taught him that he can accomplish great goals in life with mediocre talent.