<body><div><ul><li>To make the right impression, students often speak of the need to excel without visible effort.</li><li>Since there is nothing easy about meeting the standards, the work must be denied or hidden.</li><li>But if the coveted qualities—smart, fit, accomplished, confident—seem effortless, it’s as if they’re natural. </li><li>Some people believe that an effortless performance proves their inherent specialness.</li></ul>In June, the tennis great Roger Federer gave the commencement address at Dartmouth College. His remarks were down to earth and witty, as well as thoughtful and substantive. He offered three “tennis lessons” on life. First, “‘effortless’… is a myth.” Second, in the face of the inevitable losses you suffer in life, “adapt and grow.” And third, use your gifts “to serve a mission that is larger than yourself.” Valid points, all, and not just for graduating students.The “effortless” lesson caught my eye. When speaking about how to present themselves, college students at schools like Dartmouth or the University of Virginia, where I teach, often use the term “effortless.”What do they mean?In his address, Federer said that spectators at his matches would often remark that his “play was effortless.” But it wasn’t. “The truth is,” he said, “I had to work very hard” and only then, and as a consequence, did it “look easy.”Of course, raw talent is important, he acknowledged, but “most of the time, it’s not about having a gift. It’s about having grit.” There is no substitute, Federer told his young audience, for work and discipline and patience.That’s certainly right. However, when students use the term “effortless,” they don’t really mean easy or without effort.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=22M1GU_0vlxuifY00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=22M1GU_0vlxuifY00" width="320" height="213" ></figure><h2>Appearing “Effortless”</h2>In a class I teach every year, I ask students to write an essay reflecting on their social world and the sort of person they are expected to be. I want them to adopt the stance of my co-researcher and tell me about the norms to which they are subject. What are the standards of social and institutional approval they live under? What is the yardstick by which they believe they and their peers are being measured and are measuring themselves?We then have a discussion. Always, there is remarkable overlap in the demands they feel weighting on them.A representative response comes from a student I’ll call Farah:<blockquote>"The expectations of what it is 'good' to be for a female college student include maintaining a specific level of health/fitness/thinness/beauty, getting good grades, maintaining an active social and romantic life, and excelling in hobbies/extracurricular activities; but most importantly, there is an expectation for all of this to appear effortless to others, as if it were completely natural."</blockquote>Here, “effortless” clearly refers to how one is to appear—and specifically whether one seems to be “completely natural” in being and achieving all these things.Note that Farah did not suggest that this ideal self-presentation was natural or came easy. The effort to meet the standards of beauty and health was, she admitted, “a full-time job in itself.” She had been off and on diets since she was 12 but hid this fact from others because she didn’t want anybody to know about “the obsessive eating and exercise habits truly required to sustain this performance.” That was what another student called the “dark side,” the desperately striving effort that “no one wants to show.”The norm Farah described comes through in the testimonies of students from other selective schools (and in many other non-college contexts as well). According to a 2003 report from a “Women’s Initiative” at Duke University: “Undergraduates described a social environment characterized by what one sophomore called ‘effortless perfection’: the expectation that one would be smart, accomplished, fit, beautiful, and popular and that all this would happen without visible effort.”At Yale, students speak of the pressure to appear “effortlessly excellent.” A University of Pennsylvania student wrote that the “microcosm of Penn … values effortlessness, or perhaps more accurately, the appearance of effortlessness.” The same phenomenon at Stanford and, students report, at nearby Palo Alto High School is called “Stanford Duck Syndrome”—seeming to glide effortlessly on the surface while paddling furiously below.<h2>As if Completely Natural</h2>A successful performance, Farah emphasized, should look to others as though it was “completely natural.” The reason why things need to appear easy, another student, Noah, observed, is that “we are supposed to just have this naturally,” as though being smart, attractive, confident, talented, and socially adept require no effort but merely reflect who “we just are.”Hard work is necessary to be sure. Even things done for fun, Farah explained, “you should do seriously enough for it to be your ‘side gig’ or to have a leadership position, otherwise you’re not really good at it or making good use of your time.” But by paddling under the surface, you create the impression of innate or natural excellence.For Angela, a student with a working-class background, “performative ease” was a source of frustration. She had to work at “almost everything,” she said, that other students from more privileged backgrounds took for granted. And she was still trying to catch up.Hiding her effort, however, and appearing nonchalant have been a struggle. This is a standard, she believed, that she has repeatedly failed to meet: “The truth is I care a lot, maybe more than I should.” The problem, Angela recognized, is that openly caring about her status undermines her achievement of it. Consider an analogy. In his 1922 essay “The Soteriology of the Underprivileged,” the great sociologist Max Weber argued that in history, the “privileged” and the “underprivileged” ground their social standing and sense of worth differently. Across societies, he writes,<blockquote>"The most highly privileged strata (other than the priesthood), and especially the nobility, base their sense of their own worth or dignity on their awareness of the 'perfection' of their mode of life as an expression of their qualitative 'being'—a 'being' which depends on them alone and does not point beyond them."</blockquote>In the case of the underprivileged, by contrast, “every feeling they have of their own worth is bound up with some ‘promise’ which has been made to them, and this promise is in turn bound up with a ‘function,’ ‘mission,’ or ‘calling’ which has been allotted to them.”1By the privileged strata, Weber has in mind social positions such as aristocracies with blood lineages. While the analogy is easily overdrawn, the impression that “effortless” is aimed to convey looks a lot like a distinctiveness based on a “special and intrinsic quality” of one’s own. In your “as if natural” performance, you show that you, in your qualitative being, have an inherent worth. Visible effort, by contrast, discredits a claim to be one of the privileged; it shows that you are seeking recognition for a value conferred by them.I am not suggesting that the students necessarily imagine themselves as some sort of Brahmins. In their essays, students who speak of the “effortless” expectation often do so critically, as hypocritical or a burden. But the norm itself speaks to the logic of meritocracy. Effortless is a subtle, hard-to-perform mode of conduct and display that serves to distinguish the special people and justify their status.Roger Federer was right: “‘Effortless’ is a myth.” Both in his sense and in the deceptive norm under which many young people are laboring.</div></body>

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Effortless Is a Myth

To make the right impression, students often speak of the need to excel without visible effort. Since there is nothing easy about meeting the standards, the work must be denied or hidden. But if the coveted qualities—smart, fit, accomplished, confident—seem effortless, it’s as if they’re natural.

Effortless Is a Myth

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