Someone tells you they’re stuck. Their progress has stalled. They’ve been practicing consistently, putting in the hours, doing the work. Nothing is moving. They come to you for advice.
And you say: “Just work harder.”
I’ve heard this advice given hundreds of times, in magic forums, in consulting meetings, in gym conversations, in creative communities. It arrives dressed up in various costumes — “you need to grind through it,” “just put in more reps,” “the answer is always more work,” “you haven’t earned it yet” — but the underlying message is always the same. The solution to stalled progress is more effort. If what you’re doing isn’t working, do more of it.
This is, without qualification, the worst practice advice ever given. And the reason it persists is that it sounds so reasonable, so virtuous, so impossibly difficult to argue against. Who argues against hard work? What kind of person says effort doesn’t matter?
I’m going to be that person. Not because effort doesn’t matter — it does — but because “just work harder” as a response to stalled progress is like telling someone who’s lost to “just drive faster.” Speed isn’t the problem when you’re headed in the wrong direction. And effort isn’t the problem when your practice approach is wrong.
The Consulting Parallel That Made This Click
I spent over a decade as a strategy and innovation consultant before I ever picked up a deck of cards. And one of the most common patterns I saw in struggling organizations was exactly this: the reflexive escalation of effort when results declined.
A product isn’t selling. The response: push the sales team harder. More calls, more meetings, more pitches, more hours. Revenue continues to drop. The response: push even harder. Fire the bottom performers and replace them with hungrier ones. Run promotions, offer discounts, burn through marketing budget. Revenue keeps declining.
The problem was never effort. The salespeople were working their tails off. The problem was the product. Or the market had shifted. Or the positioning was wrong. Or the pricing model was broken. Effort was being applied with enormous intensity to the wrong strategic lever, and the harder people worked, the more efficiently they failed.
I saw this pattern in company after company. And every time, the hardest part of the conversation was convincing the leadership team that working harder was actually accelerating their decline. Because they’d been taught, from school onward, that hard work solves problems. That the virtuous path is always to push through. That struggle is proof of commitment and the antidote to failure.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to recognize the same pattern in my own practice.
My Three-Month Experiment in Productive Failure
There was a period in late 2017 — I was splitting time between hotels in Linz and Vienna — where I decided to break through a plateau by sheer force. I was stuck on a particular set of techniques that required a level of precision I hadn’t yet achieved. My success rate had stalled around sixty-five percent and refused to budge.
My response was textbook “work harder.” I doubled my practice time. I went from forty-five minutes a day to ninety minutes. I added weekend sessions. I tracked hours with the same intensity I’d once tracked client billable time. I was going to brute-force my way through this plateau.
Three months later, my success rate was at sixty-seven percent. Two percentage points. In three months. With double the practice time.
The math was devastating. I’d roughly tripled my total practice investment during that period, and the return was nearly zero. If this had been a client engagement and someone showed me those numbers, I’d have immediately called for a strategic review. What are we doing wrong? Why isn’t the investment producing returns? What assumption are we operating on that’s incorrect?
But because it was my own practice, I’d done what humans always do: I’d doubled down on effort instead of questioning strategy. The identity I’d built around being a hard worker made it nearly impossible to entertain the possibility that the problem was approach, not intensity.
The fix, when it came, was almost anticlimactic. I isolated the specific micro-movement within the techniques where the breakdown was occurring. I practiced just that component, at a slightly higher difficulty than what I’d been attempting, for about fifteen minutes a day. Within three weeks, the success rate jumped from sixty-seven to eighty-five percent. Three weeks. Fifteen minutes a day. After three months of ninety-minute sessions had produced nothing.
Strategy beats effort. Every single time.
Why This Advice Persists
If “just work harder” is so destructive, why is it the default advice in virtually every skill community? I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think there are four reasons.
First, it’s culturally sanctioned. We live in societies that valorize effort. The narrative of the person who worked harder than everyone else is deeply embedded in how we tell stories about success. We admire grit, perseverance, tenacity. We’re suspicious of shortcuts, efficiency hacks, “working smarter.” There’s a Puritan strain in the culture that equates suffering with virtue and ease with moral weakness. Within this framework, “work harder” isn’t just advice — it’s a moral imperative.
Second, it’s visible. Effort is the one variable in skill development that you can see and measure. You can count hours. You can observe someone sweating. You can verify that they showed up. Strategy, by contrast, is invisible. A practice session that looks exactly the same on the outside can be completely different on the inside, depending on what the practitioner is focusing on, at what difficulty level, with what measurement system. You can’t see strategy. You can see effort. And we have a deep bias toward things we can see.
Third, it requires no expertise. Telling someone to work harder requires zero understanding of their specific problem, their practice structure, their skill level, or the mechanisms of skill development. It’s universally applicable, instantly deliverable, and impossible to falsify in the moment. The person giving the advice feels helpful. The person receiving it feels motivated — temporarily. And when it doesn’t work, the advice-giver can always say: “You didn’t work hard enough.”
Fourth, it sometimes works — at the beginning. In the early stages of skill development, effort really does correlate with progress. The first few months of learning anything reward sheer repetition because you’re building the most basic neural pathways and any practice is better than no practice. This early correlation creates a powerful expectation: more effort equals more progress. It’s only later, when the relationship between effort and progress breaks down, that the advice becomes destructive. But by then, the belief is entrenched.
What to Say Instead
If someone comes to you stuck, struggling, hitting a wall — and “work harder” is the wrong answer — what’s the right one?
I’ve come to believe there are exactly three productive questions to ask, in order.
First: Are you working on the right thing? Not more. The right thing. Is the material you’re practicing at the appropriate difficulty level? Are you focused on the specific point of breakdown rather than running through the whole technique hoping it magically improves? Are you sure the problem is where you think it is? Most of the time, a plateau isn’t caused by insufficient effort. It’s caused by effort applied to the wrong target. Identify the right target, and the plateau dissolves.
Second: Are you working at the right difficulty? The “Art of Practice” framework established that the optimal difficulty for skill development is roughly ten percent above your current maximum. Below that, you’re maintaining, not growing. Above that, you’re flailing, not adapting. Most people practice at the wrong difficulty level — usually too easy, in the comfort zone — and no amount of additional effort at the wrong difficulty will produce adaptation.
Third: Are you measuring the right things? If you’re tracking hours, you have no idea whether your practice is working. If you’re tracking success rates on specific techniques, you know immediately when something isn’t working and you have the data to make a strategic adjustment. Measurement creates a feedback loop. Without it, you’re practicing blind, and working harder while blind just means you run into walls faster.
Notice what’s absent from these three questions: any suggestion to increase volume. The answer to stalled progress is almost never “more.” It’s “different.” Different target. Different difficulty. Different measurement. Same hours. Same effort. Radically different results.
The Harder Truth Beneath the Hard Work Myth
There’s something uncomfortable lurking under all of this, and I want to name it directly.
“Just work harder” persists not only because it sounds virtuous but because it protects us from a harder truth: the possibility that our approach is wrong. If the problem is insufficient effort, the solution is simple — do more of the same. The approach remains unquestioned. The identity stays intact. You’re not wrong; you just haven’t tried hard enough yet.
But if the problem is strategy, then everything is on the table. Maybe the way you’ve been practicing for months or years has been suboptimal. Maybe the hours you logged were less productive than you believed. Maybe the framework you’ve been operating under needs to be dismantled and rebuilt. That’s a much harder pill to swallow than “try harder.”
In consulting, we call this the sunk cost trap. The more you’ve invested in an approach, the harder it is to abandon it. The three months I spent grinding through that plateau at double intensity made it harder, not easier, to acknowledge that the approach was wrong — because abandoning the approach meant acknowledging that three months of extra work had been largely wasted. I didn’t want that to be true. So I kept working harder.
The real discipline isn’t in the grinding. The real discipline is in the willingness to stop, step back, and honestly evaluate whether what you’re doing is working. That takes more courage than another hour of repetition. It requires confronting the possibility of waste. It demands humility.
And it’s the only thing that actually produces results when you’re stuck.
The One Sentence I Wish Someone Had Said to Me
If I could go back to that hotel room in Linz in late 2017, to the version of me who was dutifully logging ninety-minute sessions and watching his success rate flatline, I’d say this:
“The problem isn’t that you’re not working hard enough. The problem is that you’re working hard at the wrong thing. Spend fifteen minutes figuring out what the right thing is, and then work at that instead.”
That’s it. That’s the entire practice revolution in one sentence. Not more effort. Better-directed effort. Not harder. Smarter. Not additional hours. The right fifteen minutes.
Everything in this series — the sixty-two posts before this one — has been an extended exploration of that single idea. The mechanisms of adaptation, the science of difficulty levels, the measurement of results, the survey findings, the strategic frameworks — they’re all elaborations on the same core principle: how you practice matters infinitely more than how much you practice.
“Just work harder” is the worst practice advice ever given because it inverts this truth. It tells you that volume is the answer when direction is the question. It rewards the visible while ignoring the essential. It feels like help while it accelerates failure.
The next time someone tells you to just work harder, ask yourself: At what? On what? Toward what? If you can’t answer those questions precisely, then working harder will only get you to the wrong destination more quickly.
And there is no amount of effort that compensates for heading the wrong way.