Unreasonable Effort

Unreasonable effort is a concept popularised by Alex Hermonzi that was introduced to me by a colleague. It's had a profound impact on how I view my work. It also relates very strongly to a larger theme that I'm obsessed with, which inspired me to start a Substack titled "Prolificacy" (def: "the quality of being prolific or highly productive.")

I find that idea of prolificacy appealing because it centres the work, rather than the outcome. While I assume you'd prefer to create things of value, being prolific doesn't mandate the things you create to be valuable, just that they are created. In any case, quantity beats quality if quality is, in the end, what you're after. This insight - that quantity (with judicious refinement) is the route to quality - is itself a fairly good summary of the idea of "unreasonable effort".

As Alex appears to only reference this idea in Instagram reels, so I was keen to put it to words here, and to expand a little on how I've operationalised the technique in my own work.

Theory of Unreasonable Effort

Figure out what you want > ignore the opinions of others > and do so much volume that is would be unreasonable to fail.

A "unreasonable to fail" volume is the honest answer to the question "after how many repetitions would there be no way I could still suck".

Once that has been quantified, you're pre-committing to completing those repetitions. You can absolutely give up after that number; if you still suck, or you hate it, or it's no longer valuable. But, in that case, you'll quit without any doubt whether you could have given more.

But just grinding reps, with no concern for quality, is clearly foolish. There needs to be some gradient of quality to follow, some direction in which to improve. Thankfully, you're committed to an unreasonable number of repetitions, so you'll have plenty of scope to review and iterate. You should commit up-front to a cadence of review and refinement toward doing more of what worked.

So the key components:

  • Focus/prioritisation - eliminate distraction to focus on the A+ tasks with the highest potential impact
  • High volume - do so much of an activity that it's statistically unlikely you can fail
  • Ruthless refinement - analyse the results of your effort and focus on replicating what is successful
  • Outwork doubt - effort should outpace/overcome internal self-doubt. Success is a natural outcome of the sheer amount of work
  • Unreasonable sacrifice - to achieve unreasonable progress, you need to be wiling to make unreasonable sacrifices

A Habit of Unreasonable Effort

Nothing is sticky without a habit. You must have some ritual you can return to, day after day, to do anything that objectively. It's no different for unreasonable effort. It is and always will be a sacrifice.

It's also true that ambitious things are complex - it's not a single task that takes you from here to there, but a series of thousands of steps, mostly in the right direction. So your unreasonable efforts must be recursive:

  1. Identify the A+ task (the main thing) - e.g. Grow my Youtube following
  2. Quantify unreasonable - e.g. Produce and release 250 Youtube videos
  3. Quantify a refinement cadence (every Nth iteration) - e.g. every 10th video I'll look at what has performed and make more videos like those ones.
  4. Set habits and make them good ones1 - e.g "On Mondays, after my morning coffee, I will sit down for 90 minutes and write 2 video scripts for the week" and "On Wednesday afternoon at 4pm I will record 2 videos in 1 hour"
  5. Embrace the suck and don't give up short of unreasonable

Footnotes

  1. Good habits, in my experience, are extremely precise. They have a time, place and exact prescription of what you're doing. They frequently piggy back on another established habit. For a good treatment on habits read Atomic Habits. ↩