trying harder
on effort and rigor
The crowd was good that night. No incessant talking, no speaking louder and louder to compete with the sounds of the room, no one wandering back and forth more than necessary. At the jazz club, we were several minutes deep into a song when I noticed my neck and wrist cramping from moving to the rhythm; I looked around to see several other people in the audience jamming out similarly, each doing a slightly different dance to the same music.
Every time I see jazz live, I spend a few moments focusing on each instrumentalist, trying to figure out how much I like their style and tone. You have to observe them both during the main theme, as everyone plays together and during their individual solos, each part showing a different skillset. Once I land on my initial opinions, I pick a favorite, concentrate on the movement of their hands, pick their sounds out of the euphony. That night, the drummer, with his rapid movement and steady rhythm, glimmered with skill and energy.
Any jazz drummer manages to keep the rhythm going, but an excellent one brings a real texture and motion to that rhythm. In a given measure, a drummer could simply hit a cymbal to the beat, or they could bring in a varying combination of sounds to build momentum into the music and decorate the scaffolding that the rest of the musicians were building upon. The drummer for the evening did this easily, capturing my attention even during the solos of his peers, standing out even when he tried to simply raise up the sounds of the bass or the guitar.
In any good musician’s performance, it’s obvious that these skills were practiced, honed by hundreds of hours repeatedly performing, building to something that looks like mastery to the layman. From all my time watching live music and my many failed attempts at playing instruments well, I know that these skills don’t come easy. Even as their movements flow naturally, the deep concentration lines across the faces of each musician and the sweat on their brows betray the secret to the beautiful tone and electrifying groove: effort. Rigorous effort.
I am happy to see it. With gratitude, I pay money to receive the fruits of such rigor, something special wrought from hundreds, even thousands of hours of effort from each of these four musicians. Imagine watching a performance where the artist hardly seems to try, one who seems disinterested in making any effort to create something beautiful. Give me the horrible musician trying his hardest over the disinterested savant.
Think about gifts, how often we share the bromide, “it’s the thought that counts.” By my estimation, the thought only counts if it’s coupled with effort. I’m uninterested in receiving the first result of a Google search for “gift ideas for twenty somethings” and am completely enraptured by the thought of a handmade card with drawings cruder than that of a child. Thought alone feels thoughtless without the strength of effort to render it with meaning.
Since that night, I see the effort in everything: the design of everyday objects is illuminated with the intent of those who created them, the breakfast sandwich from the cafe shines with the expertise of the chef who concocted the sauce, every song seems so unobviously complex.
My feeds have caught on too, as they’ve begun to fill with woodworking and industrial design content. With intense precision, one creator focuses on perfect feats of joinery — finding ways to cut wood so perfectly that the pieces slide together seamlessly, stay connected with impressive strength. The effort and rigor here is incredible: each video shows every failed attempt to do the job before arriving at the best solution. As I watch these videos, mesmerized, I also feel a pinprick of shame. With the incredible work of this woodworker, with all the incredible work I see, I’m confronted with my lack of rigor.
How often have I shirked real effort over the last few years, letting tiredness or laziness take from me the possibilities that being more rigorous could bring me? As a designer and as a writer, I know that the best work comes from iteration and repetition, that the way to create something great requires pushing further than what seems necessary. And yet, how many times have I taken the easy path instead of the rigorous one?
It feels like it used to be easier to be effortful. I often think fondly about my younger self in high school. When studying for my calculus and physics exams, I would lose all track of time, completely possessed by the ink on the pages in front of me, disappear into the action of scribbling calculations and dozens of sheets of practice problems until they coated the entire dining table. At the end of these flow states, I was energized and exhausted, satisfied by my singular focus over the course of several hours. My effort was always rewarded by good grades, which only deepened my satisfaction.
Then there’s life after school, where the connection between effort and results thins. Some of my best-performing essays are the ones I spent the least time on, the ones I liked the least. Some of the designs I received the most praise for at work were the ones that I rushed through to meet a deadline, even if they didn’t meet my own personal standards. In some cases, more effort doesn’t feel worthwhile, but failing to offer the full effort feels erosive. The muscle of rigor atrophies from underuse.
It would be less frustrating if I were doing something with the energy that I saved by not putting in more effort. But instead, with my additional time, nothing of consequence happens — I let my time fade away scrolling or doing something else. I am left just as tired as I would be if I had expended more effort, without the satisfaction of having done something. It’s like how a day of being out and about feels just as tiring as a day parked in front of the TV for eight hours. How walking thirty minutes and driving thirty minutes are both tiring.
When I ask myself to put in more effort, I’m not attempting to drain an empty pitcher of energy, or to squeeze a lemon that’s already been emptied of all its juice. There is so much in me that isn’t being used in my current life of doing just enough. How do things change when time spent scrolling is replaced with reading and scribbling away in a notebook? When free time is used to work on crafts and side projects instead of melting into my couch after work every day?
Over the last few days, I’ve been trying. I’ve started and ended my days with reading, I’ve begun each morning writing something or another. My mind feels clearer, the world in finer resolution, but the real difference is a feeling in my chest. Do you wonder what the first man to intentionally start a fire felt? It must’ve been something like this — a spark suggesting that suddenly anything was possible.
💧 Drops of the Week 💧
ALBUM - Adventures in Foam by Cujo - great DnB / trip-hop record from 1996!
POEM - “Work” by Raymond Carver - Love of work. The blood singing / in that.
This is a lovely piece Nikhil! I think about effort a lot and have spent my fair share of agonizing over why the flow doesn’t come easier. But perhaps that is the whole point to why it feels so good once you get there! If I go even more invention-of-flame-meta-ness, I think about how much of what we have today ~is~ because someone cared (for better or worse lol).