If you want to achieve a goal, you usually need to do many things. Some of them are unpleasant. Avoiding unpleasant parts means you will get the work half-done, and then give up.
Even if you do the right thing, being too comfortable probably means you are not doing as much as you could have.
This would suggest that the right way involves a lot of pain: you do the unpleasant thing, and you do a lot of it. So people will interpret your lack of pain as a signal of failure (either to do the right thing, or to do enough).
Unfortunately, per Goodhart’s Law, you cannot find the right way by simply trying to maximize pain. Some useless or harmful things are painful, too. Also, after a difficult exercise, muscles need some rest to recover.
Unfortunately again, from outside “understanding that you cannot find the right way simply by increasing pain” seems very similar to “avoiding the unpleasant parts, and rationalizing it”. If your reward depends on other people’s judgment, you better include some useless pain, too.
Personal experience:
I used to be good at math. But I never studied hard. I mean, I was reading math books in my free time, I thought about math a lot, and I participated in many math competitions. But I never did this: “take a book with hundreds of exercises, sit down and solve the exercises one after another, then report to some adult that you did this”. As a result, even after winning a few math olympiads, my teachers believed that I mostly got lucky, and I didn’t get some rewards the school gave to classmates who had comparable results but “actually deserved them”.
If you want to achieve a goal, you usually need to do many things. Some of them are unpleasant. Avoiding unpleasant parts means you will get the work half-done, and then give up.
Even if you do the right thing, being too comfortable probably means you are not doing as much as you could have.
This would suggest that the right way involves a lot of pain: you do the unpleasant thing, and you do a lot of it. So people will interpret your lack of pain as a signal of failure (either to do the right thing, or to do enough).
Unfortunately, per Goodhart’s Law, you cannot find the right way by simply trying to maximize pain. Some useless or harmful things are painful, too. Also, after a difficult exercise, muscles need some rest to recover.
Unfortunately again, from outside “understanding that you cannot find the right way simply by increasing pain” seems very similar to “avoiding the unpleasant parts, and rationalizing it”. If your reward depends on other people’s judgment, you better include some useless pain, too.
Personal experience:
I used to be good at math. But I never studied hard. I mean, I was reading math books in my free time, I thought about math a lot, and I participated in many math competitions. But I never did this: “take a book with hundreds of exercises, sit down and solve the exercises one after another, then report to some adult that you did this”. As a result, even after winning a few math olympiads, my teachers believed that I mostly got lucky, and I didn’t get some rewards the school gave to classmates who had comparable results but “actually deserved them”.