The Difference Between Work and Effort
Work has several definitions, but the most useful one for this discussion is “to perform or carry through a task requiring sustained effort or continuous repeated operations” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/work)
Effort also has several definitions, but the most useful one for this discussion is “a serious attempt”(https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/effort) [A thorough reader may look at my sources and conclude that if had simply used different definitions, then the differences which I am about to point would not be so clear or would even be false. True, but the above definitions are most consistent with the way they are used in conversation, and the whole point of this enterprise to elucidate the differences between these two terms in most of our uses so that we do not abuse them in the remaining uses]
The biggest difference is thus; work is economic while effort is psychological. There is no way to measure effort from the outside looking in; there is no way to measure work from the inside looking out. Most importantly, someone exerting a lot of effort can do very little work, and vice versa. These insights have deeply important consequences, because confusing the two leads us to believe that one is, or (even worse) should be, sufficient for the other, usually in the direction of effort to work.
There are two essential reasons why this is not the case; first, we confuse the absolute case with the marginal case; because some effort is needed to work, it does not necessarily follow that more effort will produce more work (whatever that might mean in a specific context). As with everything, there are regions of increasing, constant, and diminishing marginal returns, and we do not necessarily know a priori which region we are in.
Suppose there are two employees at a company, Bob and Joe. Bob and Joe have identical experience and identical job descriptions with identical pay. However, Bob works 80 hours a week and Joe only works 40 hours a week. Bob is surely putting more effort in, but nothing about the descriptions indicates his relative effectiveness to Joe. We can imagine a scenario in which Bob is putting in a lot of hours because he doesn’t want to get fired for his lack of production
Second, effort is often outcompeted by other inputs to work, such as talent, skills, experience, networks, feedback loops, and so on. Effort is limited by human anatomical and neurophysiological capacity; one can only push so hard before one is at the edge of one’s possible exertion. However, there doesn’t seem to be a particularly hard limit on how skilled one can be, or how much talent one can have, or how many assistive tools that one can have on hand. A good example of this is in the world of personal fitness; applying a lot of effort in the gym may be a noble thing to do, but it can be useless and even dangerous if it is not paired with the correct diet, training, and strategy. A person who runs 50 miles before he passes out, takes two weeks to recover, and then does it all over again is far less healthy than the person who runs 50 miles 5 days a week over those two weeks. But let us not lose the fact that is also easier to do what the second person has done; it is orders of magnitude less difficult to run 5 miles than it is to run 50 miles, and because the person who ran 50 miles doesn’t get conditioning from previous activity during the week, it doesn’t get any easier for him to do his 50 mile runs. Conversely, the 5 mile runs are not only easier than the 50 mile runs, a 5 mile run by an experienced runner is easier than a 5 mile run by a novice. This is not a coincidence; the experience that the experienced runner has makes his body more accustomed to the activity of running distances of intermediate length, while the novice’s body has not yet fully made that adjustment. In fact, we can say that the experienced runner is better runner, not because he is putting in more effort, but because he is putting in less.
This is what we truly mean when we say someone is “better” at something than someone else; it takes less out of him to get more from him as compared to the other person. One may object by saying that we are ignoring the previous investment of time that the experience runner has made in running; surely that should count as effort. But it clearly doesn’t, not in any way we actually use the word. The experienced clearly isn’t trying harder in the moment, and, critically, we cannot say for sure that he exerted more effort in the past than the novice runner. Let us take an extreme example; suppose the experienced runner is a healthy, 25 year old who has had no major injuries in his life who has run marathons for charity since he was 19. Meanwhile, suppose the novice runner was formerly paralyzed in a car accident. He took great pains just to learn to walk again, going to therapy and having setbacks. Slowly and agonizing, he learns to walk with support, then walk on his own, then jog for a few minutes, then run a mile, then run regularly. The second person has put in more effort over the previous time period, but the first person is still clearly the better runner. What I seek to highlight in this example is that we simply do not know how much effort was put into accumulating previous experience.
The above arguments illustrate the following; no one puts substantially more effort into anything than anyone else does, and that most, if not all of the inequalities between performance with a given domain can be explained by factors other than one person or group of people trying a lot harder than their competitors. In general, everything that seems like vastly more effort is being put in through the strong-willed actions of the person, is, upon closer examination, the result of carefully crafted processes, not necessarily by the individual, that allows them to either produce more per unit of time, get more units of time, or both.
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman argues that more intelligent people have to put less effort into solving problems as indicated by a smaller change in pupil size (less extreme dialation) and less mental activity for the same task as someone who is less intelligent