The ROI of difficulty

While some people run from challenges, some of us will deliberately seek out the hardest tasks at work — volunteering for the projects everyone else sidesteps, tackling complex problems with enthusiasm rather than dread. But the motivation behind this gusto isn’t the paycheck, writes the Atlantic, it’s something hardwired into our brains.

(Tap or click the headline above to read this story with all of the links to external sources.)

Case in point: In the final stretch of South Africa’s blistering Comrades Marathon, the 12-hour mark signifies a cut-off that doesn’t just mean the loss of a medal, but being stricken from the participation record of the 88 km race entirely. And yet every year, almost 20k runners, 4k of which did not finish, flock to participate. This is just one example of what psychologist Michael Inzlicht calls the Effort Paradox — a seemingly irrational tendency to value experiences precisely because they require an almost impossible amount of effort, not despite it.

The economics of effort: Traditional economic models have long positioned excessive effort as an unambiguous negative. From Adam Smith’s belief that “toil and trouble” subtracted from the value we might derive from the outcome in 1776 to Clark Hull’s “law of less work” almost a century later, proposing minimal effort as a kind of universal biological imperative, the common sentiment was that given the same outcome, people — and animals — would invariably choose the path of least resistance.

But our actual behavior tells a different story. In a well-documented phenomenon named the IKEA effect, we have observed that people value identical furniture more highly when they’ve struggled through the assembly process themselves. But this pattern extends beyond Swedish furniture — we hike up mountains when we could take the cable car, struggle through video game puzzles when the answers are a Google search away, and run marathons when we can just… not.

Why? Inzlicht’s research points the finger at several interlocking psychological mechanisms, the first of which is the experiential gap between discomfort of exertion and the pleasure of achievement. The harder something was to do, the more pride you feel having done it. Another — slightly disconcerting — theory is that we’ve conditioned ourselves to enjoy the suffering of hard work by anticipating the subsequent high of completing the task.

Organizational leaders should take note. While these strategies may seem counterintuitive, the Effort Paradox could be applied to how we manage our teams. How? Don’t reflexively eliminate difficulty — properly calibrated challenges can be seen as value added rather than a friction point. Sometimes overcoming the obstacle, not eliminating it, is the point. Reframe how we talk about difficult tasks — rather than apologizing for naturally occurring challenges, highlight to your team how it contributes to their skill growth to cultivate a growth mindset that views difficulty not as evidence of inadequacy, but an essential mechanism of development.