Do You Put in the Minimal Effort? Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Read Moby Dick
Now With Rockwell Kent Woodcuts
This is part of my general series about effort including What does it mean to try? and my Gauging the Hardnesses of Things PDF.
I had recently started reading Moby Dick with full energy, after starting and stopping two years ago. The process of restarting made me think about the concept of “putting in the minimal effort” outlined in the five questions below.
Do you want to do it?
Did you put in the effort to go over internal conflicts?
Did I actually want to go on an epic adventure out at sea?
I had noticed that I stopped in the book the first time right before they all set off on the ship into the open water. Insofar as novels are transporting, did I want to be transported out to sea?
After thinking about this for half a day, I realized I did not. The ocean is scary and full of terrors. It would be cold and damp and I would probably hate it!
I spent a few weeks thinking about what would be exciting about an adventure out at sea, grappled with my conflicts and then finally decided that yes I would like to go on this great adventure right now.
Do you have what you need to do it?
Did you put in the effort to get what you need?
The first time around, I didn’t really have the book. I kept pulling up the free Gutenberg version online. This second time I actually got the kindle version and changed the font and settings to be what made sense to me.
Are you monitoring your experience?
Do you put in the effort to notice what is happening to you?
I had noticed in this second iteration that I really wanted an audiobook — and not just any audiobook. The famous first line of the book is “Call me Ishmael” — I wanted it to feel like Ishmael was talking to me — that a brooding, sea-wrecked man at a tavern really was telling me his adventure at sea that changed his life.
Are you using previously solved problems as your starting point?
Do you put in the effort to adjust given the existing stack of problems already solved?
The first audiobook was not at all what I wanted. Neither was the second, or the third, or the fourth.
I was getting discouraged, and then I started thinking that given the demographic of book fans and audiobook fans, there had to be at least a hundred slightly older gentlemen who felt like they were born to read Moby Dick, who would have been happy to sign a contract to be paid money to do so.
There are some kinds of people that are rare (a professional butterfly expert who also passes NASA’s space travel requirements), but given how many people love Moby Dick, and given the landscape in anything literary and the incentives of the publishing industry, it seemed to me that if I kept looking I would find the version of Moby Dick that I was looking for.
Are you accepting discomfort?
Did you put in the effort for it to feel like effort?
Minimal effort, despite its minimalness, is still effort. This means that like all effort, it might feel uncomfortable or even hurt a little (or a lot!).
I did not find the audiobook on attempt 5 or 6. I was getting nervous! I thought that maybe I was not correct in my hunch. Maybe I was incorrect in thinking that my dream audiobook could exist.
But then I found it! Behold, this one is everything I had wanted! Thank you Frank Muller!
