I Kept Trying To Finish It… Until I Made It Worse
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Dear Readers,
I was trying to finish something late one afternoon when I noticed I'd corrected the same small section three times. Each version was slightly different. None was noticeably better.
So I kept going. That's usually my instinct when something isn't moving—give it another twenty minutes, concentrate harder, get through the resistance.
Except the harder I pushed, the sloppier everything became. Small things needed fixing. Simple choices felt unnecessarily complicated. Progress was technically happening, but mostly because I kept creating new work for myself.
That's when I realized effort and progress aren't always moving in the same direction. When your internal energy is low enough, adding force can actually increase the friction you're trying to overcome.
The difficult part is recognizing that before you've spent another hour proving it. When pushing harder keeps producing worse work, I think it's worth trying something different rather than turning the pressure up again.
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Occasionally you find something that doesn't ask you to believe it straight away. Instead, it simply invites you to look a little closer and decide for yourself. Those are usually the discoveries I enjoy sharing the most, and this was certainly one of them.
The best discoveries often leave us with better questions than answers.
I came back to the work later and finished it far more easily. Nothing about the task had changed.
The person trying to do it had.
— Alex
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