There are, at last count, nine different medals you can earn at the Comrades Marathon, a historic 55-mile race that runs between the South African cities of Durban and Pietermaritzburg. Gold medals are awarded to the top 10 men and women. The rest depend on hitting certain time standards. To earn a silver medal, for example, you have to finish the race in less than seven and a half hours. To earn a Robert Mtshali medal, named for the first Black runner to complete the race, you have to break 10 hours. And to receive a finisher’s medal and be listed in the official results, you have to break 12 hours. Run any slower than that, and you not only lose out on a medal: After half a day grinding yourself to exhaustion, you aren’t even allowed to finish the race.
As each time threshold approaches, the stadium announcer and spectators count the seconds down. For the final 12-hour deadline, a group of race marshals gathers in the finishing chute. When the countdown reaches zero, they lock arms to block the finish line. Either you make it or you don’t. When I reported on the race for Canadian Running in 2010, the final finisher, in 11:59:59, was a runner named Frikkie Botha, from nearby Mpumalanga. He placed 14,342nd. A stride behind was 48-year-old Dudley Mawona, from the inland town of Graaff-Reinet. The din of spectators’ vuvuzelas crescendoed as he lunged forward and caromed off the race marshals’ blockade.
The tableau at the Comrades finish line evokes the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch’s depictions of hell, with legions of scantily clad figures (in this case, wiry runners in tiny shorts) writhing in varying degrees of distress under the darkening sky. You can almost hear the moaning and wailing—except that the actual soundtrack is surprisingly cheerful. People are thrilled to have arrived, proud of the effort they’ve put in, and brimming with inexplicable enthusiasm even if they’re massaging inflamed hamstrings or lancing gruesome blisters. This includes a number of the runners who never make it past the race marshals’ impenetrable arms. Mawona accepted his fate with good grace. “I feel disappointed,” he told me for my 2010 story. “But I am glad I was almost there.” Both he and Botha resolved to return the following year.
To say that long-distance runners embrace difficulty is to say the obvious. When you watch many thousands of people happily push themselves through a race that they might not even be allowed to finish, though, you start to get the hint that something deeply human is going on. People like things that are really hard. In fact, the enormity of a task often is why people pursue it in the first place. This is a puzzling phenomenon, when you stop and think about it. It violates all sorts of assumptions about rational action and evolutionary selection and economic theory. Psychologists call it the Effort Paradox.
The term was introduced in 2018 by a University of Toronto social psychologist named Michael Inzlicht, along with colleagues at Brown and Carnegie Mellon. As Outside magazine’s endurance-sports columnist—not to mention a lifelong runner—I was immediately fascinated by the idea. As I wrote at the time, the usual assumption is that effort is a negative. “Toil and trouble,” as Adam Smith called it in The Wealth of Nations back in 1776, subtracts from the value you assign to things. When you buy a coffee table from IKEA, you have to wrestle with a bag of seemingly mismatched screws and some inscrutable pictographic instructions. If you can simply buy the same thing preassembled, Smith and his intellectual heirs predict that you’ll be willing to pay more to avoid the hassle. And it’s not just about money. The law of less work, as formulated by the American psychologist Clark Hull in the 1940s, dictates that given two choices with similar outcomes, any person—or any living organism, for that matter—will choose the option requiring the least effort.
Bizarrely, though, studies have found that we actually value the coffee table we’ve had to painstakingly construct more highly than the identical preassembled version, a phenomenon now known as the IKEA effect. As I wrote for Outside, something like this dynamic applies across all kinds of human behavior. The mountaineer George Mallory famously declared that he wanted to climb Mount Everest “because it’s there.” You can speculate about his other motivations: reaching the highest point in the world, eternal fame, and so on. But the fact remains that many of us head to the mountains with no expectation of celebrity, run marathons in the middle of the pack, and do Sudoku puzzles—all activities that, like purchasing Swedish furniture, involve considerable unnecessary effort. The first marathon you run may be motivated by a desire to improve your health or by a Mallory-esque desire to find out what’s on the other side. But the second one is likely fueled by something else.
Inzlicht and his colleagues posed the Effort Paradox to make sense of this odd tendency: Sometimes we value experiences and outcomes (and coffee tables) precisely because they require effort, not in spite of that fact. Inzlicht’s aim was not just to name the phenomenon, but to offer some explanations for why we find both physical and cognitive effort so satisfying.
Broadly, the possibilities he suggests fall into two different buckets: whether the satisfaction comes more from the rewards of hard effort or more from the hard effort itself. In the former camp, one explanation is that rewards obtained from difficult tasks seem extra sweet because of the sharp contrast between the unpleasantness of working hard and the joy of achievement. Another is, basically, self-delusion: If you do something hard without a commensurate payoff, you experience an unpleasant disconnect that you resolve by persuading yourself that the outcome was valuable after all. If I worked so hard to get this, I must really like it, you tell yourself. (Self-delusion might make sense in humans, but is less convincing in other species. Researchers have trained starlings to fly various distances to obtain identical color-coded treats, and found that the birds end up liking the color of treats they had to fly farthest for. A similar effect even shows up in locusts, which aren’t known for their powers of introspection.)
Alternatively, a third theory assumes that people learn over time that working hard leads to desirable outcomes, and so—like Pavlov’s dogs drooling at the sound of his bell—you eventually begin to value effort itself. Beyond the explanations in Inzlicht’s paper, there are other reasons that effort might function as its own reward. For example, an emerging cognitive theory called predictive processing suggests that doing hard things gives us access to new information about both ourselves and the world, an experience that our brains are wired to find pleasurable. The theory remains speculative and its implications are still being debated, but one takeaway when it comes to effort is that if you buy a coffee table, you’ve got a coffee table; if you assemble one, you also gain knowledge not only about how coffee tables are put together, but about your own capabilities.
Whatever the mechanism, studies of children at play suggest that the Effort Paradox isn’t limited to a subset of masochistic grinders. One preprint study that hasn’t been published yet in a scientific journal has found that, to maximize their fun, kids will opt for harder challenges even if it means they’ll fail more, living up to the philosopher Bernard Suits’s famous definition of games as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” The play literature offers numerous overlapping reasons that kids and adults alike might prefer hard mode, according to Harvard’s Elizabeth Bonawitz: exploration, mastery, autonomy, social connection, aesthetic experience—and even meaning, famously tricky though it is to define.
Inzlicht’s latest experiments support this idea that exerting effort increases feelings of meaning and purpose—a finding that undoubtedly rings true to the non-finishers at Comrades. Fortunately, a precise articulation of the meaning of life isn’t required to explore whether effort contributes to it. “If you ask people whether something is meaningful, they can answer,” Inzlicht says, “but they use their own internal rubric to figure out what that means.” As I’ve reported in The New York Times, Inzlicht and two of his colleagues, Aidan Campbell and Joanne Chung, developed a 10-item Meaningfulness-of-Effort scale that asks people how strongly they agree with statements such as “When I push myself, what I’m doing feels important” and “Doing my best gives me a clear purpose in life.” The scale, which the researchers introduced in a preprint study in 2022, captures differences not in whether people exert effort, but in how they view that effort. “You can imagine that some people are willing to work hard, but go about it from a sense of duty and responsibility,” Inzlicht told me for my Times story. “But other people—call them ‘joyful workers’—this is what they live for. This is what gives them purpose. This is what makes them feel important. This is what helps them make the world make sense.”
The existence of “joyful workers” suggests that, even if the Effort Paradox applies to everyone, it doesn’t apply equally. Where you sit on the Meaningfulness-of-Effort scale probably reflects a changeable mix of nature and nurture. Some people will naturally be drawn to hard effort more than others, the research implies, but people also seemingly can learn to value effort more. Inzlicht and his colleagues found that people who score highly tend to report greater levels of job and life satisfaction; they make more money and have higher-status jobs; they’re happier (or in more technical terms, have greater subjective well-being). Those findings remain true even when you control for other constructs, such as conscientiousness, which is one of the “Big Five” personality traits that psychologists use to classify people. There has been lots of debate in recent years over whether popular concepts such as “grit” are just new names for old ideas. Meaningfulness of effort is a subcomponent of conscientiousness, Inzlicht says, but it has distinct explanatory power. Willingness to exert effort is important, but how you feel about that effort also seems to matter.
The magazine story I was reporting at the Comrades Marathon was about the ultimate limits of endurance, and what struck me then was how finishing runners, no matter how tired they seemed, would accelerate as soon as the crowd began counting down—evidence, I figured, of the mind’s role in determining physical limits. But my other lasting impression was of the stark delineation between success and failure, and the importance that runners and spectators alike attached to it. The woman next to me turned away rather than watch the final countdown. “I cried last year,” she explained. “It’s just too much to watch.” When you line up at the start of Comrades, you know there’s a very real chance that you won’t finish, despite the months or years of training that you’ve put in. On that day in 2010, as is the case pretty much every year, more than 1,000 runners who started the race didn’t make it to the finish within 12 hours.
It’s not that people love failure. But without the possibility of failing, success is stripped of its meaning and sweetness. The pioneering 19th-century German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt posited an “upside-down U” relationship between stimulus and subjective response: the more intense a stimulus, the more you like it … until, beyond a certain point, you start liking it less. This Wundt curve is invoked to explain why we like art and music that’s complex but not too complex, why video games are most engaging if they deliver an “optimal challenge” that’s neither too easy nor too hard, and why flow states require a task that’s just within your capabilities. The most satisfying challenge, in other words, is neither the hardest nor the easiest.
That’s why Comrades has so many different medals, each with its own time threshold: Everyone needs a goal that’s attainable but not a slam dunk. The Effort Paradox and the allure of optimal challenge don’t mean that you need to turn life into a constant and never-ending struggle, dialing up the difficulty every time you’re in danger of mastering something. But neither should you shy away from toil and trouble, Adam Smith’s reservations notwithstanding. As Inzlicht told me previously, exerting effort “seems to be the key route, maybe the only route, by which you can fulfill certain needs, like the needs for competence and mastery and maybe even self-understanding. You can’t get those without pushing yourself.”
This article has been adapted from Alex Hutchinson’s forthcoming book, The Explorer’s Gene.
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