When Effort Stops Working

Effort got me a long way in life. This is the story of the day it stopped working, and what I had to build instead.

There are two things I have been obsessed with my whole life: flying, and pushing the edges of what I can do. So even as a kid I climbed the tallest trees, experiencing joy in the balance and precision required to sit waving gently with the wind in amongst the canopy. I recall a project 'Dreamboat', when I was about 12, where I lashed 44-gallon drums together with twine, and powered my raft with a shower curtain sail down the Kalgan River. My dad drove the car down the shoreline, and I realise in retrospect, how challenging it may have been at times for my parents to give me this gift of self-determining adventure.

What the military taught me about effort

Later, I joined the military to fly, because I thought it would be hard, and exciting and I wasn't afraid to work hard. I wanted to discover what I was capable of. And so, as a result of the training I was put through and the effort I applied, I became very competent. Not just at flying, but at learning fast, because the military pilot course is less about the flying skills and more about the rapid application of competence to new situations.

Our instructors said, and in turn we repeated to our own students: we could teach a monkey to fly with unlimited time and resources, but you have a limited number of sorties, and if you fall off the learning curve, it's over.

I worked hard. I was disciplined, even then, and I learned how to learn. I don't believe it was skills or aptitude that separated me from others who did not stay on the learning curve; I believe it was almost entirely the effort.

I had always been aware that people considered me 'high-performing', the proof being that I had achieved nearly everything I set my mind to from a young age. I won scholarships to learn to fly, took out the state ladies championship sailing dinghies as a teenager, and duxed year 12.

I was not the smartest, or the fittest, ever. But I do believe I was the hardest working. Effort got me a long way in life, and nothing that follows is an argument against that. But one day, it stopped working.

The virus that effort couldn't fix

I had recently graduated with my wings, and was converting onto P3s, the maritime patrol aircraft. I was revelling in the freedom of no longer being on a military course 24/7, and I was beginning to discover who I was outside of only thinking about flying. In gaps between training, I travelled. Soon after I had been to Thailand, I came down with a fever.

As I lay in my bed, it felt like my bones were melting, and even after the acute fever passed, it took me a long time to recover. Dengue fever can have a long tail. Weeks became months, and this flu-like feeling became semi-permanent. I still had to catch my breath at the top of a flight of stairs, and I slept whenever I rested my eyes.

But time does not wait, and the military was not kind to those appearing weak, so I pressed forward. I thought, I can fix this with my mind, I can push through. So I put in effort. And more effort. And for the first time in my life, effort didn't work. In fact, it made me sicker.

I had all this motivation, determination, this single-minded focus that had delivered the competence to take me all the way to wings just a few short months ago. But I had no capacity. And without capacity, I couldn't deliver the capability the P3 training squadron required of me. Within days, I failed a flight, and within weeks, I was suspended.

I think my heart nearly broke.

What I didn't ask my body

I questioned my competence, and I questioned my mental strength. And for a while I redoubled my efforts to prove my worth. I didn't question what my body was trying to tell me, or what pathology may have passed through and left a wreck.

Placed on medical leave and sent home, alone, it wasn't long before I could barely function. Some days I didn't eat much because it took too much effort to get up and assemble the food. I recognised symptoms of depression.

I'll press pause on the story here, because this is not the message I want to share today. It's enough to say that I fell further and to a darker place than I could have imagined. But that darkness shaped me in a way that leaves only gratitude behind.

Building capacity, not proving worth

And I had this realisation: high performance is not just competence in one area of achievement. It's building the capacity that enables competence to be delivered everywhere that matters. And that means building the conditions that enable performance to flourish.

And for a long time, I had forgotten to build the conditions that could sustain my efforts. And now, I couldn't deliver capability 'on time on target'. And that really matters in our industry.

So I realised I would have to build my capacity back, otherwise the 'tick in the wings box', the momentary measure of competence, would mean nothing. And because my body was still weak from the virus, for the first time in my life, I couldn't default to effort as the core pillar of my strategy.

So I did it. I built back my capacity. New knowledge. New skills. New habits, and I recovered from the chronic fatigue while putting my flying career back on track.

High performance is not just competence in one area of achievement. It's building the capacity that enables competence to be delivered everywhere that matters.

Watching it happen to everyone else

But in the following decades of military flying, there were many times I saw people break, reach this place of no capacity, and not be able to deliver results anymore, and they were quietly sidelined and the world moved on. But I felt a sense of responsibility, and I began to speak up about the difference between effort-based performance and this sustainable, capacity-based performance. But it didn't land. And I couldn't figure out why.

Why the truth didn't land

But when I eventually found the answer, it wasn't in logic, it was in human behaviour.

We have this thing called 'tangibility bias'. We can't prioritise the intangible, and capacity is intangible. But results are visible, we can prioritise a result. And so results continue to be achieved… with effort as the main driver.

And that effort continues to extract a cost. And we're seeing that play out now, with increasing demands on employees and global burnout rates nearing 50%. Loads of competence… limited capacity.

The Take

• Competence is what you can deliver once. Capacity is what lets you deliver it on time, on target, again and again.

• We can't prioritise the intangible, and capacity is intangible, until the day it's gone.

• Loads of competence. Limited capacity. That's the gap the effort was always trying, and failing, to close.

The solution, then, is to make performance capacity visible, measurable and trainable. And when we can train people to have both capacity and competence, we build a sustainable capability. And so I've become obsessed with making these performance skills tangible and measurable. Knowledge, skill, habit.

Where is effort still standing in for a capacity you haven't built?

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Continue reading: Optimisation Is Fragile. Readiness Is a Responsibility, the framework this story sits inside. Or explore the Core Power approach to see how Energy, Execution and Scale build capacity that holds under pressure.