Effort, Seen on Two Axes: Vertical and Horizontal

Does effort ever betray you? Certification study, sports, dieting, reading, technical learning, side projects — my conclusion is that it depends entirely on how you frame effort itself.

The nagging doubt behind “effort never betrays you”

You study hard and still fail the exam. You practice and still lose the match. You write code every day and it never shows up in your review. Moments like these make it hard not to think “effort clearly can betray you.” I don’t think the problem is effort itself — I think the problem is that there’s more than one way to look at it.

The “life points” idea from a Japanese novel called Untenshu

Untenshu (『運転者』, roughly “The Driver”), a novel by Yasushi Kitagawa, describes life as something like a point card. You accumulate points through your daily conduct, and that accumulation eventually feeds your happiness.

Think of someone around you who seems to have “gotten lucky” lately. I suspect that person didn’t get lucky out of nowhere — they’re spending points they’d already banked. There’s a concept in Japanese, toku wo tsumu (“accumulating virtue”), that captures something close to the same idea. Banking life points, accumulating virtue, and putting in effort aren’t identical concepts, but I’ve come to see them as heavily overlapping.

On the vertical axis, effort can betray you

Picture effort on a vertical axis — like climbing a mountain, where you judge the outcome by whether you reached the summit. For a certification exam: summit = passing, passed = effort paid off, failed = effort didn’t pay off. Taken to its logical end, this frame lets you say that effort which doesn’t get you certified wasn’t really effort at all. It’s a harsh standard, but I think a lot of people — myself included, for a long time — judge effort mainly this way. It’s legible, because the outcome is clear. But that clarity comes at a cost: when the outcome doesn’t land, the vertical axis alone turns effort into something that betrayed you.

On the horizontal axis, effort doesn’t betray you

Now picture effort on a horizontal axis — measured by what impact your effort had on the people around you. Someone sees you studying and gets inspired to pick up a book themselves. A habit spreads. An atmosphere of trying new things takes root. Even if you personally never reach your goal, the effort hasn’t simply stopped — it ripples outward and shapes what other people do.

As I wrote in “No Effort Goes Unrewarded” — How the Concept of Accumulating Luck Changed My Work, I’ve actually had someone tell me, “Watching you, I started studying too.” That one sentence was the moment I first felt, concretely, that effort doesn’t stay contained inside the person making it. Effort I assumed hadn’t produced results yet had already moved someone else to act. That’s the horizontal axis showing up as banked life points, made visible.

Look horizontally, especially when motivation dips

Anyone who keeps putting in effort while working full-time hits stretches where results don’t come fast enough, growth doesn’t feel real, and the whole thing starts to feel pointless. The systems I wrote about in Don’t Bring Motivation to Work — Deliver Consistent Results Through Systems, Like Brushing Your Teeth help sustain vertical-axis effort, but even with a system in place, those rough patches still happen. If you’re only looking at the vertical axis in a stretch like that, everything can start to feel meaningless, because you don’t feel any closer to the summit. Look at the same effort horizontally, though, and the picture changes: what you’re building might be inspiring someone else right now, or the thing you shared might already be useful to someone. That reframing gives the current stretch of effort a different kind of meaning.

This lens changes how I think about the value of putting things in public, too. Writing down what you learned, sharing what you tried, putting even your failures out there — none of that is just record-keeping. It’s the horizontal expansion of effort. Effort that would otherwise stay contained inside you gets a chance to move someone else’s actions once you put it outside yourself. As I wrote in Autonomy support runs both ways: reading Why We Do What We Do, how you behave can shift, even slightly, the people around you. Effort works the same way — it spreads quietly to whoever is nearby.

Closing thoughts

Does effort betray you or not? My answer: it depends on how you frame it. Judged on the vertical axis of reaching a goal, effort that produces no result looks like a betrayal. Judged on the horizontal axis of impact on others, effort that never hits its target can still move someone — and in that sense, it never betrays you.

If the only lens you have when things get hard is vertical, sustaining effort becomes brutally difficult. That’s exactly why it’s worth keeping a horizontal lens available too — it’s what makes the effort sustainable. If you’re feeling right now like you’re working hard for nothing, the effort may simply not have reached its summit yet. It might already be lighting a fire under someone else.