Very likely that I will make a follow-up to this because I feel like yet more needs to be explained here (also, I didn’t even get into the evolutionary biology of r-selected vs k-selected species!)
No Effort is Wasted: https://store.dftba.com/products/no-effort-is-wasted-shirt
Mola Cult: https://store.dftba.com/collections/hank-green
Humans: HumansWithHank.com
Edited by Aves: https://bsky.app/profile/avesmhl.com
Transcript
0:00 · I had a conversation recently that I have not been able to stop talking about. It was almost like the person I was talking to said something to me that I had been thinking in my head for years but had not been thinking with words.
0:09 · They were just thoughts bouncing around and I needed to hear them said. I am always wary of sharing things that I think are important when it comes to how one might live a life. There are many good ways to live lives and a very wide variety of circumstances, but I think there is something here. So, I want to share it. You could take it or leave it.
0:27 · though the way that I’m about to say it will not sound that way. So the conversation that I had was with Winnoo who makes the connections boards that I play sometimes on this channel at the end of the video. So basically I am a fan of her work. So we were not talking about connections. We were talking about her art which she does not like to call art which is interesting. I would call it art. So not connections boards but physical objects. And I don’t know why but it made a weird kind of sense to me that this kind of person who makes like crossword puzzles would also make art like hers.
0:53 · So there are kind of two ways to think about developing skills or developing really yourself, your abilities. And the first is where you imagine skills to be like a thing that you acquire in a linear progression. You study chemistry to become a chemist. You study music to become a musician. You study nursing to become a nurse. And there are certain jobs like nurse is a great example where this is a requirement and it should be. I don’t want a nurse who didn’t go through the linear progression of the acquisition of skills and knowledge that resulted in them being qualified to be my nurse. But that nurse is not only a nurse.
1:25 · Two nurses may have roughly the same experiences when it comes to nursing, but very different experiences when it comes to like knitting or playing guitar or public speaking or rock climbing.
1:38 · This of course seems pretty unrelated to the part of their job where they are nursing and it is. But because so much of our education system is focused on the acquisition of skills for work, we tend to think of ability as like a linear progression provided by schooling. But actually, every person I have ever met is not like that.
1:57 · Somewhere deep down, they’re a junk drawer. They’re just a bunch of things that you might need and you could use or not. At some point, you acquire a weird little tool and you forget about it. And that’s not going to be useful in nursing until it is. You learn a way of seeing things different. You learn a way of explaining things differently. You learn how to be like confused with yourself without immediately escaping into despair. You get all these things that like pile up in the junk drawer that is you.
2:26 · And then years later, some situation appears and one of those old things in the drawer says like, “Oh, hey, that’s what I’m for.” I have been well served by being a pretty deep junk drawer. Like I studied chemistry. I am not a chemist. I was a car blogger for a while. I have designed databases and raised money for nonprofits and I did standup comedy and I designed logos, but they were bad. I have started and grown companies. I have sold a company. I turned one company into a nonprofit.
2:54 · I’ve made podcasts. I wrote books. I sold another company that I shouldn’t forget. I once said to a person who acquired a company from me. Was that your first acquisition about a thing that wasn’t my company that he acquired from me? and he said, “No, Hank, you were our first acquisition. That’s the junk drawer, man. Many of the things that I have done, I no longer do. Like, I know what an Erlin Meyer flask is. You shouldn’t put me in a chemistry lab.
3:19 · Like, it’s been too long.” But a lot of that stuff is in me and I never know when it’s going to come up and be useful. And like, that’s just the things that I’m comfortable sharing. There are lots of failures in my life that I’m not telling you about. They’re boring. I promise. It’s not just that they’re embarrassing. And all that stuff, whether it was a failure or not, does stuff. They affect how I am in the world. They like I notice things that I wouldn’t otherwise notice. I love being a junk drawer.
3:45 · The stuff in there changes the kinds of problems I feel like I am allowed to encounter and manipulate. I think that this is very important. Your brain is going to say that the junk drawer is full of useless stuff and the useful things are all the linear paths that take you from one place to another. But that’s not what Winnaloo said to me. She said in kind of like this isn’t a big deal kind of way like she was just passing through to another thought. She said no efforts wasted.
4:13 · There may be no more important idea right now especially considering that we have been given tools that will absorb a lot of effort for you in which maybe you will accomplish a task but you will not accomplish the important task which is to put a new thing in your junk drawer. Or another way of saying it uh build yourself. you know, actually be more than you were before. Of course, I get it. Like, my brain wants to know which effort is going to pay off before I do all of the effort. It wants to conserve energy. It wants short paths.
4:43 · Of course, it does. It is a very energetically expensive, calorie- hungry, wet prediction machine. And they’re good at predicting that hard things are going to be hard. And so, they’re like, “Don’t do that. Find an easier way.” And we have many easier ways that have been provided for us by people who are themselves actually thinking quite hard and probably working very hard so that they can do that for us. I don’t think that we should always use their tools is all because as good as your brain is at predicting what is going to be hard and what’s going to be easy and how to have like the task get done with a low effort.
5:14 · What your brain can’t do is tell you which egg is going to become the fish. The ocean sunfish, the molola, can release hundreds of millions of eggs at once. Hundreds of millions. A whole civilization of possible fish launched cloakally into the ocean. Almost all of them do nothing for the continuation of the mola species. If you were to round to the nearest percent, 0% of them survive. And you could look at that and see it as a waste. Like obviously you are wasting almost every egg.
5:46 · Almost all of the energy that went into the make making of those eggs is wasted. Obviously that’s not true though because this is the only thing that makes it so that molamola continue to exist in the world. They would go extinct if they did not do this. The mulamola cannot know which of the five eggs are going to be the ones that survive. If they made five eggs they would not be the five that survive.
6:09 · They’d make five eggs and then the species would go extinct. The only way to make the five adults was to make all 200 million eggs. No effort is wasted.
6:19 · And yeah, I made it into a shirt.
6:21 · Somewhere a,000lb fish is basking in the sun with no memory of being one of the millions. No idea why it lived. It only knows it kept going. And that was enough because that was everything. No effort is wasted. Be enormous. Be eternal. Swim with your nature. Designed in Australia by Peppa Raccoon. Printed in Missoula, Montana with a combination of gold fleck and glow-in-the-dark inks. Available only for the next two weeks so we can print the exact number ordered. Tonight we feast on the labor of centuries.
6:54 · Moola cult. No effort is wasted. This is what baby ma look like. They look kind of like puffer fish cuz they’re related to puffer fish. Pepper did an amazing job with this. I love it so much. also simultaneously doing a bunch of other products based on our older designs, but only for two weeks. Pre-order means that we do not produce too many. We do not produce too few. We take the exact number that are ordered and then on the last day, we close it down and we order exactly that amount. We print them up and then we send them out to you, which saves everybody money and also prevents potential waste. Most of it goes into the junk drawer and never comes out.
7:25 · It doesn’t become a job. It doesn’t become a viral video. You don’t get to have the queen story where you’re like, “Yes, very strategically, I developed a relationship with a Kerbal Space Program streamer who I knew eventually would end up at a launch live streaming YouTube channel.” No, I didn’t know any of that.
7:44 · I just liked his live streams and I was like, I like your stuff and that’s it.
7:48 · That was it. And I thought that was it.
7:50 · I thought that was just junk, but now he works for one of these like launch live streaming YouTube channels and that’s great that like I know a guy there. I assumed that he was still doing what he was doing back then and had the same job, which was a cool job, but that’s not what he’s doing now. Thanks to the guys at NASA Spaceflight, you’re doing great work. Most effort just disappears into the ocean. But in general, if you can find the eggs to make, some of them will hatch, which is a gross metaphor that I don’t like, but I have finished writing the script and I have a terrible news for you. The eggs is the metaphor I went with.
8:22 · Finding the eggs can actually be hard. There’s a kind of advice that like kind of sounds like, “Oh, I know where the eggs are.” Which is like, “Do hard things because hard things are good. Be awake at 4:00 a.m., take a cold shower, eat boiled chicken out of a shoe. It has to be out of a shoe. You only need one chair.” That often to me seems more about like uh like showing the effort than the actual exerting the effort. It can also seem more about like suffering and gathering attention around yourself. I think suffering is bad. Like suffering can definitely be pointless.
8:52 · That’s not what I’m saying when I’m talking about exerting effort. Sometimes things are hard because nobody cares enough to make them humane. And that’s a problem that maybe you can apply yourself to. Some hard things are definitely garbage. Don’t get me wrong, but other hard things are reps. Like just they get easier with time and practice. And that’s definitely an egg.
9:09 · And who knows what that egg will become.
9:12 · There are tons of things that have this friction inside of it that have the effort. Learning is definitely one of them. Making something from scratch is definitely one of them. and becoming a person who can even like take those first steps, it often requires the experience of having not been able to do something yet and then gotten good at it. And that’s not always a great experience. Like, it’s definitely not available at no cost. I wouldn’t call it suffering, though. But it is effort. You don’t get good at stuff without the discomfort of an experience progressing into experience.
9:42 · There’s this phrase in learning science that I like that’s called the desirable difficulties. So there’s undesirable difficulties, but there are desirable difficulties. A kind of a messy idea, but somewhat useful.
9:54 · Some kinds of learning feel worse in the moment and then they work better later.
9:58 · And that’s too bad, but it seems to be how a lot of things work. Like the struggle itself makes it more memorable.
10:04 · It forces the brain to like build structure around it. The difficulty actually is in service of something.
10:09 · It’s an egg. You don’t know. It’s probably never going to become anything, but it’s an egg. Why are you teaching me this thing in school? Ah, when am I ever going to use this in the future? I don’t know. It’s an egg. Most things don’t become useful in the future. Now, I do think that there are some things where this is easier and some things where this is harder. And I’m going to give you two examples. The first one is guitar, which I think is a more kind uh learning process. And the second one is like making a YouTube video, which is less kind. And you will see that like not all eggs grow themselves equally.
10:39 · So, guitar sometimes is terrible. Let’s be honest with ourselves. Often enough though, especially, you know, in your first year or two of learning, you can hear yourself getting better day after day. Sometimes in a single practice session, you will have a skill at the end that you did not have at the beginning. Things like exercise can also be the same. Like you know when you’re lifting more than you were before, you know when you’re running longer and faster than you were before. These are things that like you feel the effort, but you also get the feedback and the reward and that makes it so that you want to put in more effort.
11:11 · And I like I like this. I like things like this. I wish more things were like this. Writing doesn’t feel like this. Like I know that I have become a better writer after having written a lot. But I never at the beginning of writing one essay by the end I’m like, “Oh, I figured out how to write better.” No, like it’s always bad.
11:30 · It’s always feels miserable. And always a little bit your taste is outpacing your ability. Which is also true of music. So that’s not really juaposed. I know that I’ve gotten better at writing, but I never feel like I’m getting better at writing. I can’t go back to read stuff that I wrote a long time ago and be like, “Oh, that’s bad.” But only a long time ago, like it has to be years.
11:50 · Has to be years before I I notice an improvement in the skill. And even when I do, I I have a hard time articulating what the improvement is in a way that is very easy with music. And that goes double when it comes to writing and then producing and then releasing a YouTube video. the reward of it being a good piece of content actually isn’t what gets shouted to me. So if I play a chord and it sounds like correct, I know that.
12:15 · Whereas if I make a good YouTube video, but the thumbnail is bad or like I didn’t write it for the right audience or like the algorithm hasn’t identified even the audience does exist, the algorithm doesn’t know how to find it.
12:26 · And opposite, you can absolutely have a YouTube video that’s bad, that’s like bad for the world, but extremely clickable, like this cursed object that does damage that nonetheless the machine will shove into people’s faces. And that will feel like success, even if the product itself isn’t very good. I give you those two examples just to know like some things are good at providing you with like pure and true feedback about how you are progressing and those are like easier ways to build the egg and some are like sometimes give you no feedback.
12:56 · You don’t know whether you’re getting better or even they can give you like the wrong feedback and it’s very confusing. So that’s harder. I don’t have advice about it. I was like be aware. Sometimes you make and you make and you read and you learn and you build and it feels like nothing has happened.
13:11 · It doesn’t even feel like anything went into your junk drawer. It’s just it’s hopeless and it’s frustrating. And those are the moments in which I wish I had no effort is wasted tattooed on my brain.
13:21 · Just a thing that I could always believe no matter what. And I don’t know if I can always believe it because so much does feel like waste sometimes. But even though I can’t always believe it, I’ve thought about this for a long time. I think it’s true anyway. And remember, most of the eggs make fish that die.
13:39 · This is not a conclusion that I have reached because I think everything always works out like if you do something you will get a benefit someday. It’s a conclusion I reached because the whole thing you are building is you and you start with basically nothing and then you are building yourself your whole life. You don’t stop after you learn to walk, right? You you are building yourself on your last day.
13:59 · Think about that actually that like that your last day hopefully you’ll get like time to think about it. It might be an especially important day for building yourself. And I think that when I am dying, hopefully I will have time to reflect. And if I do, I think I will be glad for the insight that that process provides. And that’s wild because that’s the one time where it definitely will not be valuable to my future. And yet I cannot imagine believing that that effort would be wasted.
14:26 · So like even if it can’t come in handy, I think it’s still worth it. You know how video games are just like amazing at helping you actually feel the progress? Like even if there’s no score, you can see, you know, in a city builder, you can see your city getting bigger. There’s just built-in rewards otherwise the games don’t succeed. Whereas often times our lives don’t have that or at least anywhere near as clearly as a video game would.
14:51 · So we have to listen to whatever signals real life is giving us. But even more than that, like you got to believe the true thing that effort is doing work even when it’s hard to see. I think that I’ve given you a pretty good idea of what counts as the effort. Like what is the egg that may someday become a fish?
15:05 · But I’m going to try to sketch that a little more clearly. So, this is like very easy with guitar. You aren’t doing it if you aren’t doing it right. Like, you’re not getting better at guitar if you’re not playing guitar. But also, you’re not really learning if you’re playing the same song you’ve played a million times. Like, if you’re not like stretching a little bit, you’re not doing it like you’re not learning if you’re not really exerting the effort.
15:24 · So, what you’re looking for is the stretching. And I think some people just like have this more than others or they’ve strengthened the muscle more than others where they feel the stretching as rewarding. Like the brain is convinced and I think there is actual reward that comes along with it. Like just the act not any like later thing that happens just the act of stretching itself feels rewarding. And very obviously like putting a prompt into a chat box and calling the work done is not stretching. That is doing nothing for you. You are not adding anything to your junk drawer. There is no new egg that may someday become a fish.
15:54 · It used to be that effort was kind of the only way that things got made. That’s not so much the case anymore. But also, I don’t pretend to believe that building the same spreadsheet over and over again or like doing the same form of math problem over and over again or or even playing the same song over and over again is really the effort. But the thing you need to look for and feel rewarded by if you could trick your brain into this is the effort. We all have to figure out what the stretch feels like and then be like, “Yeah, I’m doing it.”
16:25 · And that in itself is good. And so there’s like this thing in the middle and on one side you have like doing something that you’re not actually putting any effort to whether that’s playing the same song over and over again or typing something into a chat box and calling the task done. And then on the other side you have almost like the performative stretch the thing that is like just like doing something that is unpleasant without like a good reason.
16:48 · And honestly, I think the main reason you hear about stuff like this is because like watching a person, you know, live only on cod or dropping themselves into a water trough full of ice, that’s going to get views. Like it’s kind of shocking and so you you see it because it gets seen. But now you like don’t see it anymore because it’s not shocking anymore. Like the only reason cold plunging is kind of gone away as a fat is because it’s not salient. Like it doesn’t make you pay attention to it the way that it used to.
17:14 · And maybe like waking up and taking a cold shower, that’s a thing where you’re like, I’m doing a hard thing and I like the feeling of doing a hard thing. I’m convincing myself of that. That’s not how I act. Maybe that’s valuable to some people though. But I do feel like there’s a way to feel as if you’re exerting effort to have the stretch but to have it not be like really building much. It’s just sort of a performance of it rather than the actual process of trying something that’s not totally comfortable for you yet, but that could like provide value. It’s like just doing the discomfort without any of the value.
17:42 · I don’t know, maybe there’s like brown fat. I haven’t done the research on cold lunges. I apologize if I’m belittling an important part of your routine, but I don’t think that the stretch I’m talking about is just like making yourself suffer. I think there is a reward pathway there. Like there is a part of your brain that wants it and you just have to like find it and you have to strengthen that part. It it wants it more if you do it more. And I even like checked in on myself as I was writing the script and I was like, am I feeling stretched? And I was in part because the script kind of got away from me. It doesn’t have the structure that I would like for it to have.
18:12 · And so I found that a little bit frustrating and I wasn’t sure if I had found the right path through and I’m like do I go with this egg metaphor? It’s kind of gross. There are also parts that I was like ah what if I did this and I turned out oh I did like that quite a lot and I think that there are like clever moments and it felt good to write and this is often the case when I’m writing. It doesn’t feel good to write just in the same way as playing a song that I know really well.
18:34 · It feels good to write as if I am learning a new song. Writing is crazy like that. Like there’s this sort of well-known phenomenon among authors if you like you finish a book and you’re like ah I now I understand how to write a novel and it’s like no you understand how to write that novel. The next one will be just as hard for some reason.
18:50 · Now at the same time I did not write this script by hand. I did not do it in like the hardest way possible. Like I don’t think that that would have helped me with the stretching. I think that that would have just been grinding. But maybe it would have. I don’t know.
19:02 · That’s just like not something that I could do. I had to use tools to help me do the thing. And I think that you can use whatever tools you want to use to stretch. Do not use the tools to avoid stretching. That produces zero eggs.
19:16 · Your life is not about getting some task done. It is about building a you. Now, of course, this is difficult in our massive and ruthless world. Of course, outcomes matter a great deal. Of course, there are structures that you exist inside of and that you are forced to interact with. Often times some efforts do not provide any clear signal that you’re getting much done or much value.
19:40 · And remember, you might get nothing out of stuff. It’s just that you don’t know what you get and one of the things might be nothing. There’s that old apherism in in newspapers, only 5% of your advertising is working. You just don’t know which 5%. What I want to do, what I am at my best, what I am doing is convincing myself that the effort is the outcome. That no effort is wasted. that if I am mentally exhausted after writing something or my wrists are killing me after I spent time getting absolutely nowhere with a riff on my drum kit that I still did it.
20:11 · Maybe I don’t know what I did or maybe I do. Maybe I did it.
20:15 · That was the thing. I did it. The effort was the point and it feels good just to have done it. The outcome can’t be the only thing that counts because if it is, I would have abandoned so many of the skills I have developed before I developed them. Sometimes this makes me feel like we like need some kind of skill escalator. Like obviously some instruments are more rewarding. I just wish we had like easy rewarding effort loops for everything, but we just don’t.
20:40 · And maybe if it were easy and rewarding, it wouldn’t be doing all the same work.
20:43 · Like sometimes it has to be really hard cuz otherwise everyone would do it.
20:47 · Sometimes it has to be hard because you just learn more. I don’t know. My point is you do not know which egg becomes the fish. You do not know which thing you just put in your drunk drawer might come in handy 20 years down the line. It’s almost the end of the video. So, of course, I have to tell you that this drop is 2 weeks only and includes some pretty amazing stuff. But we make the exact number ordered. Not one more.
21:11 · Actually, a few more because of course sometimes things get stuck in the mail and we have to send out replacements.
21:15 · But you get what I mean. Be grateful the ocean wants nothing from you because what it has to give is uncountable.
21:23 · Moola cult. No effort is wasted. Also, the conversation that I had with WA just went live on my new podcast. It’s called Humans. Here is the part that inspired this whole messy video.
21:34 · Another one. These are like little pullies.
21:35 · Oh my god, that’s cool.
21:37 · But you can just like kind of Yeah.
21:40 · What you have just convinced me, and this is going to be a wild sentence to say, but by showing me your art, I am now convinced that I cannot make a connection.
21:47 · No, no, no, no, no. That was not That’s not the takeaway. That’s not the takeaway. I just like I I would never have made anything like bo like one that cool, two that aesthetically pleasing on top of being cool.
21:59 · And that makes me think that like what you are doing inside of connections is actually more complicated than I think it is and I’ve thought a lot about it.
22:07 · I I really I and this is something that I I feel like I see in your work too which is just like I I identify as an enthusiast. you just you like stuff and then you want to like learn about stuff and I feel like the magnet stuff just in terms of like I I sort of believe that like in like the number of hours you spend doing something or thinking about something it’s like that like no effort’s wasted and so you just like
22:30 · I like being interested in things and like learning about how to like make stuff and like so I feel like I’m really into like fabrication processes and like learning it’s like I got really into like machining and just it’s just like fun to work with materials and just like you know metal and just cutting and just learning how tools work because it just makes me feel really connected to the thing that you’re making and like understanding that it’s just it’s so satisfying which is why I think it’s like sort of different the thing I get out of it than like art, you know.
22:56 · It does not now surprise me that you ended up in in a job that like you didn’t like go to school for or uh that makes perfect sense. Um also you said uh and that that this hit me really hard. No effort is wasted.
23:15 · Uh, wow. You just said that.
23:19 · Maybe it’s something I tell myself for all the hours I’ve sort of spent like pursuing like fribery or whatever. Um, but but yeah, but why why do you think why do you think that is?
23:29 · I think it’s like if it’s something you really enjoy, like it’ll come out somewhere, you know? It’s like all this stuff the stuff that you actually spend your time doing and maybe it’s like different like sometimes I’m just like watching horror movies all day and like I you know, whatever. is just like very passive and like I maybe I don’t feel amazing but like if I’m doing something engaging that I’m like interested in it sort of doesn’t matter if it ever becomes anything.
23:50 · It’s and maybe it’s only one of those things that kind of makes sense like in the like when you take a step back after like many years and it’s like how did I get here and you’re like oh I did all this stuff and nothing really like built you know connect like there’s no like straight line but like no one’s surprised you know when you’re like oh I did this this and now I’m here it’s like yeah that makes sense right like you probably wouldn’t have ended up there if you didn’t do this that and that.
24:15 · So that’s kind of maybe my my new working theory that like you know this stuff it goes somewhere like it means something it goes somewhere.
24:23 · Do do you have any sense of why you felt safe doing that? Why you felt like uh it it wasn’t important for you to always be doing something that was working toward a goal?
24:33 · In some ways it’s because I like I’m very close to my parents. I love my mom.
24:40 · We’re very she’s the most wonderful person. Um, but she’s also very pragmatic and was always like, you know, I’ve always like loved doing like little art stuff for whatever. She’s just like, you can’t be, you know, it’s like being an art like, you know, you need a job, right? Like it’s not. Um, and I think that like that makes a lot of sense. But I think that I compartmentalized the idea of like making stuff or whatever, like as just like a a me thing, you know, that’s something that I could do. Um, and it is always like something that’s like stayed with me.
25:09 · Um, and so I think that maybe that’s how like I I never tried to like make it a job, a career, you know, I never tried to like be an artist. I just always like was able to maybe like make stuff. I don’t know if that makes sense at all.
25:26 · It does. I don’t know that it I don’t know that it answers it completely, but maybe maybe it’s not maybe it’s not a thing that happened to you. Maybe it’s just a way that you are. I I think that I’m I’m somewhat the same.
25:37 · I don’t know. I I may I may not be. I I think that I’m often I remember this was like this like one of the saddest moments of my mom’s life. We were like walking together in Yellowstone National Park and she was like, “Why don’t you ever draw anymore?” And I said, “It’s just really hard to monetize and like completely honestly and openly.” I was just like like that’s, you know, and at that point in my life I was How old were you?
26:03 · I was probably in my late 20s and um and like that was really was like very important at that moment because like I had been scraping by for a long time and I you know felt some amount of guilt about if you want to keep listening and also hear the all the stuff that came before that it’s available wherever you get your podcasts.