In my first week of year 8, there was a standardised mathematics test that all incoming students needed to do. The point was to sort us into groups: the highest scorers would be placed in a class with higher scoring students and the lower scorers would be placed together. Thinking back, it was a ridiculous system, but being a competitive person at the time, knowledge of this test consumed all my attention, and I studied nonstop for it, which I found out was essentially the year 7 maths curriculum. I wanted to do well.

When the results came out, I had scored 98%, which put me in the top class. I was thrilled for a moment, but only a brief moment, because when I began speaking to friends who had also made it in, I realised most of them barely studied. There were even a handful of students who said that their teachers didn’t even tell them about the test until the day as a means to avoid preparation. Two of them scored 100%.

That day, I began to realise that there was a disconnect between effort and reward. Where I thought the game looked like this:

The game in reality looked like this:

This is when I first realised two things. The first is the law of diminishing returns: the idea that beyond a certain point, the benefits gained from something decrease for the same amount of effort. The students that studied just a little bit for the exam did well enough to beat most other people, and studying an extra 10 hours didn’t make a difference. Once you studied enough to get to the top, you were in.

The second is that some people do very well at exams with seemingly minimal effort. This is where terms like “genius” come from; the people that seem to understand concepts immediately and soak up knowledge.

As a result, I began hanging out with these people; the ones that studied just to get by and had time to do other things. Efficiency was everything: getting enough for the A on the report card, and maybe higher if you were lucky. To give your all into studying, to ask excessive questions in class, was considered cringe. Passing effortlessly, and treating it as not a big deal, was being cool.

But upon reflection, I’ve found that there is more to this mindset than simply being “cool”; there is an emotion tied to it: fear. After my embarrassment from the year 8 sorting exam, I vowed never to be seen as a tryhard again. I feared the social judgement of giving it my all and potentially the same, or worse, than a person that studied less.

When your goal is just to get by, you have an excuse for not doing as well as you could have. You never really tried.

And crucially, this led to me developing a toxic mindset when it came to achievement. If I didn’t succeed, it wasn’t because I was less smart, it was because I didn’t work so hard. Being lazy gave me an excuse to underperform. It made me think, “It doesn’t matter if she or he did better than me. It’s because they work so hard and have no life.” My knowledge of diminishing returns made me apathetic of the few that worked extra hard to be the best student they could be.

But since befriending top achievers in multiple domains, and seeing how their mind works, I’ve realised I was wrong. There is an intrinsic vulnerability in giving it your all – what if it isn’t enough? what if you fail? But the thing is, it doesn’t matter. The point is that giving it your all is rewarding in itself.

I will leave this piece with an excerpt from a speech by Richard Hamming, a mathematician whose work has had tremendous effects on computer science. There is more I wish to explore on this topic, but they will be saved for another day.

“Well I now come down to the topic, “Is the effort to be a great scientist worth it?” To answer this, you must ask people. When you get beyond their modesty, most people will say, “Yes, doing really first-class work, and knowing it, is as good as wine, women and song put together,” or if it’s a woman she says, “It is as good as wine, men and song put together.” And if you look at the bosses, they tend to come back or ask for reports, trying to participate in those moments of discovery. They’re always in the way. So evidently those who have done it, want to do it again. But it is a limited survey. I have never dared to go out and ask those who didn’t do great work how they felt about the matter. It’s a biased sample, but I still think it is worth the struggle. I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion.”