Effort shock: how the Karate Kid ruined the modern world

Right theory, wrong cause.

Our whole society has moved towards a philosophy that children are not allowed to fail. As a result we give people easy "successes" at every opportunity, and don't let people experience the fact that they can fail. The result is people whose self-image is like a balloon - really puffed up but likely to deflate suddenly on facing a real challenge.

Obviously the opposite extreme of beating kids down is not good either. But we need a balance. And we need to drive the message home that some things take work.

The point of concern for me in modern mythology is not the unrealistic amount of effort required to succeed, but the portrayal of risk. If the main character is likeable, good-hearted, and he gives it his all, he never fails. Things just work out for him.

Winston Churchill said, "It is no use saying 'we are doing our best'. You have got to succeed at doing what is necessary." And at the time he said it, it was an unremarkable sentiment echoed in literature. The modern rule seems to be more along the lines of, "If you're nice and put in a decent effort, things will work out."

Some examples: Modern little orphan Annie is met with success after success and kindness after kindness in response to her charm and ingenuity, encountering only minor setbacks; her counterpart in Dickens' Oliver Twist meets nothing but disappointment and injustice for a very long time. The slight justices in the story are only those which are achieved by the characters with a lot of work and risk -- and even they, they often fail. Titanic's Rose drifts into and out of a beautiful adventure, but Gone With The Wind's Scarlet toils and schemes endlessly to gain what she has, even after losing everything through no fault of her own. The central romance of Casablanca does not simply work out as a modern audience would be accustomed to expect; the characters focus on doing what is necessary to achieve their aims.

The older stories have it right. In order to achieve something, one must assess the cost. You can't just do your best and hope. Rather--in the mode of Churchill--you must do what is necessary. And failure is familiar even to those who do that and proceed with best effort and intentions. A generation raised on Disney happy endings is learning the wrong lessons about the necessity of planning and perseverence.

From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1112881

What's usually the biggest mental hurdle for hackers to transition into entrepreneurs?

pg: Coming to terms with the effort required.

Still, it's important to remember that some people work two full-time jobs and barely make ends meet, while others work roughly the same hours and make millions. Working smart is just as important as working hard. I suppose that's a goal of YC's -- to help us work smart while we work hard.

I don't think the article is worth reading.

According to the author, "Effort Shock" is the phenomenon of realizing something is a lot harder than you thought it was. Then you get depressed about it and give up. This explains failed blogs, failed diets, failed restaurants, etc.

The Karate Kid and other Rocky-esque movies ruined the world because the training montages make it seem like you can go from beginner to expert in a single Survivor song.

I was hoping the author would dig deeper into the subject, but he just repeated the same thing again and again and ended with a plug for his book.

I was in China teaching English when the movie "Kung-Fu Panda" came out. I was surprised at the comments. Most people said something like "I liked the movie but it was unrealistic how easily Panda became a Kung-Fu master." I can't see people in North America coming to the same conclusion.

I think people in the "East" tend to know better than people in the "West" at just how much effort is required to become a master at something.

From my perspective, the training montage in Karate Kid demonstrated that it took a LOT of effort, not the little bit this article criticizes it for. Two months of hard work, from sunrise to sunset, to develop muscle memory? It's not the 10,000 hours required to become a world-class expert, but 600+ hours of intensive training is enough to see some pretty decent results. The other movie he criticizes by name, Rocky, was similar. Rocky had 2 months to train for his first fight, and he wasn't starting from scratch.

It's hard to become a world-class expert at anything. You need some combination of latent talent and many thousands of hours of training, hopefully with someone who really understands how to train you effectively. But I don't think either Rocky or the Karate Kid greatly misrepresent the amount of effort it would take for an exceptionally talented individual, with a great trainer, to make the leaps they did.

My father (Moshe Yudkowsky, author: The Pebble and the Avalanche) has a similar thesis about how Star Trek caused the downfall of American engineering:

"Well, Captain, you crashed into that planet there and sheared one warp nacelle completely off. It'll take two months in dock to repair."

"Dammit, Scotty, I need it in five minutes!"

"Okay."

I didn't really like the article. It's just summing up what we've known for a good time: success requires effort. I don't buy movies being the cause of it. I did find the choice of Rocky somewhat amusing though, especially when the author mentioned his book taking 8 years (albeit doing other things).

Sylvester Stallone: [Explaining to 'The New York Times' on how he wrote the script for Rocky in three days]: "I'm astounded by people who take 18 years to write something. That's how long it took that guy [Gustave Flaubert] to write 'Madame Bovary.' And was that ever on the best-seller list? No. It was a lousy book and it made a lousy movie."

Effort alone doesn't make one successful, either, and in my opinion telling people it's going to take them years to succeed is just as bad as telling them they can succeed in 21 days.

I don't entirely agree with the author. It all depends on how you interpret the films. For me, the karate kid did not make expertise in karate look easy, but simply possible. It is important for people to realize that, given the appropriate training system, they can achieve anything, and that no domain is the exclusive preserve of the very gifted.

In my case, the film motivated me to put in the necessary hours, and to pass my black belt in shotokan karate in my early thirties, after eight years of almost daily training, the equivalent of about 5000 hours at that stage.

I don't think I was ever under the impression it was going to be easy; but I always did hold on to the belief that it was possible. So all in all, these films were a positive influence.

This is a fine example of mediocrity, making things sound a hundred times more difficult than they really are for the sake of making a point.

The blog post is so badly riddled with fallacies that it becomes hard to figure out what the author tries to convey. An example: the author mentions that you can diet for months, with incredible effort, and still not lose weight. He's basically appealing to the reader's emotions, making you remember that last failed diet in which you ended up gaining weight. But guess what? You DIDN'T work hard enough! That's all there's to it. You just have the impression that you did. I can say this from experince, after failing many times and finally realizing what it takes.

Articles like this support the invisible walls we create for ourselves, for work, for our diets, for our addictions.

The concepts of the article are pretty foreign to me, so much so that it sounds to me like and individual who is blaming society for their ills.

My life experience has been completely the opposite of this summation. When I was a kid I was mediocre at everything, it was not until my adult life that I became exceptional, now things come easy to me. People look at me as kind of a daVinci (not claiming I have had anywhere near the impact as him) but the point is, a jack of all trades and a good enough master of them as well. I am never the best, but I am above average on almost anything I take interest in.

Anyway, wrapping this up into a point, with the ability to master anything, I stopped looking at failure as failure and looked at it as a proven iteration that does not work. I know it is cliche to say, but perception is reality and if you have a negative perception that will manifest itself in ones actions.

One of the big issues is that the human mind, unless trained, is bound to a simple understanding of time. Within that simple understanding is an internal pressure to race the clock. When one looks at time is a more spatial manner then they start to see failure as less about being set back x amount of time and rather that though the distance traveled will require some adjustment one has still traveled a distance and made progress.

I cannot stress enough that attaining the right perception can be the difference between success and resignation to defeat. The greatest key to attaining that perception, above all else is creativity.

There's a clip from southpark that has to do with this topic. Hope you guys don't mind. http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/185666/

That's called a montage! http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/185666

I like this article; the message really resonates with me. For instance, I write music. But a good three minute song could take me days to write (and most musical artists usually take way longer than that). I like to animate, but a minute of animation could take even longer than a minute of song. Similarly, writing a trivial game or a simple app just takes way longer than it should.

But I don't think that this sort of complete inability to gauge how long something should take to do has anything to do with the Karate Kid. Instead, I think the ubiquity of complex works makes the effort required non obvious, and even difficult, to see.

Right now, I'm hearing music on the radio, typing on Hacker News, running Google Chrome on Ubuntu, with a book next to me. Incredible amounts of work went into each of these things. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for me to fathom the amount of hours put into Ubuntu, for instance. It feels sort of like our inability to comprehend huge numbers, or the Universe - and I kind of feel like there might even be a tie in to that old Wired article about the 'Monkeysphere' somewhere. The omnipresence of complex creative works makes for two related effects: we only use those works for relatively short periods of time, and we come to take them for granted.

Surely before we were totally immersed in a world full of the products of work, we took more time to appreciate the details around us. But now we are essentially incapable of doing that. I wouldn't say that that is a bad thing; it's just a change. But it does lead to problems like the article mentioned where we can't properly understand how much work some things take.

The other issue I mentioned is that we only use these things for short periods of time. No matter how familiar we become with a game or web app, we can not fathom the amount of detail put in to that app by the creator. I'll use the example of a game: every time we play through, we will only see one path through the game. But the game creator had to account for every path (just like the creators of Ubuntu had to account for someone doing any possible action within the OS). So there are several orders of magnitude more depth in the game (or OS) then I could ever truly appreciate just by playing it.

I think that this sort of analysis can be extrapolated to all sorts of other creative mediums as well. We read a book in an hour, where the author probably labored an hour just choosing the right words for a sentence. There would be no way to appreciate that kind of work unless we spent ridiculous amounts of time reading, but we don't - like I said, we only use things for (relatively) short periods of time.

You probably read this comment in a minute or two, or maybe didn't even read it at all and just went down to the end to find the tl;dr. But it took me maybe 30 minutes to write. So there isn't one. Go read it.

This guy is the editor of cracked.com!

...actually I don't know whether to be impressed or horrified.

We need to talk about something more important here:

How they ruined the franchise:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY8amUImEu0&feature=pyv&#...

What if the main character was some karate-prodigy that didn't know it until he found his master?

This is not completely unheard of.