Perfection is in human effort

The devil is in the details, and perfection is in effort.

I think there's nothing more beautiful than human effort, and I've come to realise that a lot of what I admire about accomplished people would still be admirable if they hadn't succeeded.

This can be difficult to establish, of course, because success, by its nature, changes how we understand everything that preceded it. We think of the founder who couldn't stop talking about an idea as a visionary. Had the company failed, we might remember him as someone who needed to get a job. But he could have said exactly the same things in both versions of the story.

The point of this article is to get you interested in what we should love about him before we know which version of his story we would get.

Relationships are a useful place to begin, because we have more opportunities to see effort before it has become accomplishment (although I'll warrant we rarely notice this kind of effort, not even after our obliviousness directly or indirectly contributes to the failure of the relationship). A good example is knowing how a person – your partner or boss or colleague or sibling, whomever – would usually respond to a situation, and noticing when they check themselves, backtrack, and respond differently. All for you. If you're paying attention, you'll recognise this as them trying to understand you because they truly value the relationship.

I've recently begun to look out for these signs and they now mean more to me than instantly receiving the "right" response from someone to whom it came easily.

I don't mean that relationships need to be difficult to matter; I mean that effort tells you something about people you couldn't otherwise know. If someone naturally communicates exactly as you do, you may never discover how willing they are to learn another way to make things work. But when you are both different, and sometimes even inconveniently different, that willingness should become both visible and valuable to you.

Say you're the kind of person who needs to talk when you are upset, while your partner needs to be left alone. Each of you might find the other's preference untenable; because talking feels to you like the obvious way to resolve something, while being pressed to talk when they cannot think feels like being denied the opportunity to resolve it.

You might spend a long time explaining this to each other without either perspective actually landing. And then a micro-split happens, you both attempt repair (again, in your different ways), resentment builds up, eventually the relationship ends permanently.

A better way, I have recently learned, is accepting that you're both different. This must happen first. Understanding won't come without acceptance. Accept that you both have a need the other doesn't share, and it becomes easier to understand how to learn to meet that need for the other person. That's effort and it's so beautiful to see.

Building a business or a product makes effort visible in a different way. An idea can be exciting enough that everyone enjoys discussing it, but eventually someone has to spend a considerable amount of time on the parts that are difficult and rather less enjoyable to discuss. Maybe it's regulatory or operational hurdles, or an unknown, daunting market. When I read about successful businesses, I find the decision to continue at this point far more interesting than the original excitement; because it means that someone, having learned enough to become discouraged, still found something in the hard work compelling enough to push through disillusionment.

It's been so good to see the products I've seen spring up this year. I've seen things we only used to see in sci-fi films and books become reality and I've loved every bit of it! Take the Tesla demo from last week, for example. While not being exactly a flying car, that demo showed us something closer than we'd ever seen as a species. It was incredible! And the sheer amount of effort that must have gone into bringing it to life must have been humongous! That's exactly why I loved that demo.

Studying businesses and learning from mine has taught me that people can be dissatisfied with the limits of what is currently possible and begin making arrangements to change them. Then we'll realise just how much work needs to be done to make it happen. And then, even if you get the thing to work, you have to persuade people to actually use it. This is why you get so many "why don't you do X instead?"s from people you talk to about your ideas. It's the kind of effort that looks absurd to people, particularly when you are going against a deeply-entrenched, well-funded incumbent. They have distribution, a literal war chest of funding, customers who already know and trust them, and 100-person teams solely assigned to problems you haven't even had time to think about yet.

Honestly, I have worried about this in my own work, and I still do. I frequently find myself believing I can build a better product and wondering how I will compete with a company that can put an entire team on something I'm doing alone.

The usual encouragement is that today's enormous companies also started small. That's true, but so did an enormous number of companies that stayed small or simply disappeared. Knowing that someone else succeeded doesn't remove much of the uncertainty from your own attempt, which makes me think we should be able to admire an attempt without trying to predict whether it will succeed.

We see effort in the dyslexic kid who eventually becomes a professor, and in the Olympic gymnast who has risked life and limb nearly everyday for three-fourths of their life. I don't watch football but I admire Lionel Messi greatly, precisely because of effort: he's a 5 foot 7 inch global superstar in a sport where the global male average is around 6 feet. He must have had a lot of chances to become disillusioned and pick another career path.

Thankfully, I've seen this in my career as a software engineer too. Sometimes I speak with people and realise that they think my trajectory was easy, although I know (having lived through years and years of caffeinated, sleepless nights learning and doing and working) that my growth required considerable effort. I used to take on gigs that I'd code on my mobile phone! Many times, I had my laptop shut down right in the middle of an interview because my battery was only as good as a doorstop. This even happened in a Google interview back in 2020 or 2021. I've had to support my family while actively job-hunting, and even while schooling. I've probably applied to at least 500 job listings in the last 5 years alone. I value that effort far more than my "successes", not just because I like what my willingness to put in the work even in the long, dark months says about who I am as a person, but also because of how effort has shaped me.

Effort both reveals and shapes you.

This doesn't mean effort makes every pursuit sensible, though. In Project Solar, for instance, there are real questions about unit economics that I've had to accept my enthusiasm simply cannot answer. Caring about affordable electricity just doesn't make a subscription model financially viable. I need to figure that out first. In fact, part of effort is being willing to discover that an answer you liked just doesn't work, and allowing that discovery to change what you do next.

As Ambrose Redmoon says, "Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important."

Mary Anne Radmacher puts it more eloquently: "Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, 'I will try again tomorrow.'"

Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, 'I will try again tomorrow.'

– Mary Anne Radmacher, author and artist

This is exactly what I admire most about people (and humans, in general). Someone who is courageous enough to face the difficulty, knowing they may fail, but hoping they will succeed. Someone who wants to understand their partner, including the parts that muddy their individual perspective of the relationship. Someone who wants a product to live, to move from the abstractness of an idea to becoming real and tangible. Someone who wants a life they haven't been particularly well-positioned to dream about, and doing the hard work to figure out what it would take.

There is so much of a person available to see in effort. More than what's visible in success or failure, at least. The finished accomplishment may impress me, especially if it's in business or sports; but when I find myself fond of someone, it's often because I have seen them trying to do something difficult, something that doesn't come easily. I know how easy it would be for them to remain as they are.

I hope you'll make the choice today to do the hard things.