You can just try harder
Charlie Morton, an MLB pitcher, just decided to throw the ball harder in 2016:
“I just went out there and tried to throw the ball hard one game. I wound up throwing it harder."
After a lifetime of training, coaching, and competitive pressure, all accounts suggest that Morton improved by simply showing up and trying harder.
This sort of improvement is available very often. You might think it will burn you out: sometimes it will, but sometimes the extra output will actually energize you, and even if it doesn't, you often do better overall by working harder and then recovering more efficiently.
We often think that you've already done what you can to maximize your output, but usually we haven't. If professional athletes can improve on their most quantifiable, obsessed-over metrics (e.g., fastball speed) by just trying a bit harder, we probably have similar gains available. Or, at least, I tend to find that I do, and I keep a Charlie Morton baseball card in my office for encouragement.
This might be the most dangerous instance of the "homo economicus" category of mistake: assuming that we ourselves cannot simply decide to improve, because we must be on the efficient frontier already. It's not always easy even to see the possibility of this free lunch: how many video games have a button that lets you improve your character immediately with no tradeoff?1
This is another reason to try the Cate Hall Machine.2
I actually don't know the answer to this question, because I don't play video games.↩
And the title of this post is a riff on a mantra of hers.↩