In 1879, James Murray signed a contract with Oxford University Press to edit a new English-language dictionary. He estimated the work to take ten years.
After five years, the first installment of Murray’s work appeared. It covered A to Ant.
Murray worked in a corrugated-iron shed in his garden in Oxford. He called it the Scriptorium. His job involved sorting paper slips mailed in by volunteer readers. These slips contained sentences copied out from the books the volunteers were reading. Murray sorted the thousands of slips into pigeonholes every day. When he found time, he wrote definitions before moving on to sort more slips.
James Murray died in 1915, thirty-six years after he started his project. He was somewhere in the letter T.
By the time the last part of the Oxford English Dictionary was published in April 1928, it was up to ten volumes with more than 250,000 entries and close to two million quotations. The project took forty-nine years from when Murray started and seventy years after the Philological Society first proposed it. For most of those years, all it seemed like Murray was doing was sorting mail.
Behind every shine, there is a lot of grind. Everyone wants the shine. The grind? Not so much.
Stephen King said talent is cheaper than table salt, and that what separates the talented individual from the successful one is a ton of hard work that no one sees. Malcolm Gladwell famously referred to this hard work as the ten-thousand-hour road to success based on Anders Ericsson’s research on deliberate practice.
According to Ericsson, mastery of any subject area requires breaking a skill into parts and using feedback to refine each part, an exercise that isn’t exciting or worth watching, including for the person doing it.
I’ve been thinking about why the grind is so hard. Effort is usually not the problem. We can all do hard things for a stretch. It’s the continuous drudgery and labor, especially when no exciting results or rewards are tied to it, that makes us give up.
Andrea Bonezzi and his colleagues found that our motivation through a long task is U-shaped. High at the start, high near the finish, and lowest right in the middle. They explain that we measure from whichever number looks best. Early on, we count what we’ve done. Near the end, we count what’s left. In the middle, both numbers are unimpressive, so we stop looking, and our motivation starts to sag.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Across five studies, what predicted whether people stuck with a long-term goal was the immediate reward, the enjoyment in the doing. We often forget the delayed reward, the main goal, the whole reason we started.
We are not built to be paid later. The lesson for us is to find something to keep us going even when progress is invisible.
I’ve argued that the shortcut to self-improvement is through micro-skills —tiny, hardly noticeable changes in our behavior and daily habits. This may seem easy, but they are also too small to see, too small to feel good about.
Phillippa Lally’s team followed 96 people as they formed a new habit. The average time for the behavior to become automatic was 66 days, with a range of 18 to 254. Missing one day did not materially affect the process.
A missed Tuesday, then, is survivable. The harder stretch is month four, when month four looks suspiciously like month three.
So instead of asking at the end of an ordinary week what I had to show for it, I’m training myself to now ask if I sat down at the hours I said I would. Definitely a duller question, but maybe the only way to tell me whether I get to the end or give up midway.
Murray could not finish the dictionary on any given day. He could only sort that day’s slips. He died thirty-six years into the work, somewhere in T. T is not Z. It is also a very long way from A.
Not every immediate reward makes us more efficient, of course. P.G. Wodehouse acknowledged this in his dedication to The Heart of a Goof:
To my daughter Leonora, without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.
Perhaps the work takes longer. Perhaps it also gets done.