Effortless Effort

The theme of some of my recent blogs has been effort, meeting my goals and focus. In blogs like My Mom Thinks I’m Lazy and A Slob with OCD I’ve talked about how I seem to be distracted easily and not able to stay on task. I set goals and deadlines and they slip through my fingers like water. One response to this could be to try harder. That doesn’t work for me and as a general rule I don’t think it works for most people.

I think deep ingrained patterns like I’m talking about can’t be changed by direct effort. You will succeed for awhile but eventually you will go back to your default setting. You have to change your habits by incremental steps so really you are trying without trying. If you want to be more patient you cannot will yourself to be patient. True fundamental change comes deeper down.

I picked up the idea of trying without trying in my Buddhist phase, but I’ve seen it in other places too. Randy Pausch in The Last Lecture talked about teaching people things they didn’t realize they were learning until well into the process. He called it head fake teaching. I think Christianity addresses this fundamental part of human nature. The ultimate try harder is to follow the Law of Moses, but human perfection is impossible. So God knowing this fact created another way to live life.

As I wrote this blog I decided the line between effortless effort, habit modification and pure effort is rather blurry. It takes pure effort to accomplish things like keeping the house clean; getting the garage organized and becoming an Architect. Pure effort and some habit modification. I think effortless effort applies to something like being a good husband and father. By talking about this I think the line is becoming just a little bit more distinct – at least for me.