Effort and Success, a Case Study

When we face a hard problem, should we look for help or work through it ourselves?

In [[kiki’s delivery service]], Kiki becomes unable to fly. At a certain time in the story. She spends a night trying her hardest to fly, but she ends up just hurting herself greatly and breaking her broomstick in half.

However, Kiki’s friend that she met painting in a forest comes to visit her, and invites her to her cabin. Her friend as a painter tells Kiki that she once had a period where she could not draw no matter what she did. But she ended up getting out of it by not painting, taking a break, and going for a walk.

Kiki kind of half takes this advice. She cheers up after hearing her friend give her this advice, and the mere fact that she is in a cabin in the woods in the middle of nowhere shows that she’s acting out her friend’s advice.

The director of [[kiki’s delivery service]], believes that the artist does not find inspiration by pounding their head against the work, and that it should be instead awaited for.

Near the end of the movie, the boy who nags Kiki all day ends up in a very precarious situation hanging off the edge of a blimp that lost its anchor. Kiki ends up rising to the occasion and willing herself to fly with a different broom in front of hundreds, possibly thousands of spectators.

But doesn’t this act of Kiki rising to the occasion prove the girl in the painter’s point wrong? Kiki regaining her inspiration wasn’t so much completely giving up or completely relying on her own spirit to confront these issues, but it was instead a combination of both.

Externally, the world demanded someone to save the boy, and Kiki squared up and decided that she would need to, and would, succeed in flying again to save the boy from falling to his death.

In [[outliers]] by Malcom Gladwell, the author compares the differences in behaviors between people of many different cultures in many different environements and speculates on why each individual ends up with certain values at the end of the day.

Gladwell gives the example of rice farmers in eastern parts of the world versus farmers in western countries. When a man plants and takes care of his rice crops, it turns out that the amount that he reaps is very highly causally connected to the effort he puts into maintaining his crops. Rice crops need a high level of water to grow, so they must be kept in a special clay enclosure (remniscent of a pan) that keeps the water in. The water levels in the pan also need to be tightly controlled, not too much and not too little. When planting the rice, keeping the rice evenly spaced could have a huge effect on yields. The high water levels make it so that planting rice on top of rice is good because the rice field becomes more and more fertile with silt deposits. The amount of land allocated to a rice farmer as well is a lot smaller than farm sizes in western countries, so to min-max and micromanage every aspect of the rice farming process is the premier way to increase yields. Thus success becomes a function of the amount of effort put into the farm.

Whereas, in western countries, farming is largely different. There aren’t rice crops, which take in a huge amount of water. Some crops suck up too many nutrients from the ground and thus the field must be left fallow for a while. Machinery makes it so that planting more with less effort is the way to make more profit. Thus it doesn’t actually make sense for farmers in western cultures to work the entire day, and it becomes a sort of value to take a break after working for a while. Success isn’t a direct function of effort put in, instead, it’s a lot more muted.

Malcolm Gladwell believes firmly in the former value. He believes that one should hold the trust that success is a function of effort put in, and working long hours is the true way to be successful.

But doesn’t this clash with the ideas of [[Hayao Miyazaki]], the director of Kiki’s delivery service? When Kiki had witch powers block, she made no progress by trying night after night to fly her broom. Actually, she made backwards progress because she got hurt and broke her broom. Instead, she took time off and waited for her inspiration to come.

Maybe they’re different issues altogether. Facing a hard programming or math problem, and waiting for inspiration there, is different from facing writer’s block, and wating for inspiration.

It makes sense to me that one should try to work hard persistently even when they are faced with difficulty, but at the same time, we’re all standing on the shoulders of giants. By that, I mean that most problem-solving techniques we use we’ve learned from others. Solving math equations, algebra, and calculus, for example. Or the technology of computers and phones. If we were born into a vacuum with nothing, then we would not be who we were today, not by any stretch of the imagination.

So, inspiration is really important. But so is working hard.

I still don’t understand this dilemma…