The “Effort Effect” refers to what is also known as the “persistence phenomenon” or the “perseverance payoff”. In simplest terms, those who try harder, try longer, try more often
…surprise, surprise… succeed more often!
BUT to be motivated to try more often, longer, and harder you have to BELIEVE that all that effort will make a difference, that it will not be for naught, that putting your nose to the grind stone will result in more than a flat nose. Why do some give up in the face of difficult challenge or failure and others are motivated to even greater effort by the same stimuli? It’s basically a mind set: To what do you choose to attribute that outcome known as failure? Those who persist in the face of failure attribute the present lack of desired results (aka failure) as a malleable outcome that can be successful revised by increasing one’s skill and effort, by learning and growing I.e. That “practice makes perfect” and ability, like a muscle, grows stronger through effort. In essence they had a fundamental belief in a “growth mindset”.
Those that gave up, that wilted, that demonstrated “learned helplessness” evidenced a “fixed mindset”; the belief that ability was a fixed given, that you either could or you couldn’t, that you were who you were and that was that.
Furthermore instead of merely seeing failure as an event and a temporary one at that or even as just an interpretation of an outcome, failure huggers tended to personalize failure, to internalize it as an identity or an attribute of who they were, defining the limits of their ability.
As the saying goes, think you can, think you can’t, you are right. The benefits of the “Effort Effect” are yours to create in your life, all it takes is… effort!
As always, I share what I most want/need to learn. – Nathan S. Collier
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