“Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

Beginner competence

“Is the juice worth the squeeze?” is the way a friend of mine likes to talk about the investments of time and effort. I’ve been thinking lately about the variety of projects I have going at any given time. Over the last few months, basically since taking on the chair role first as acting, and now as permanent, and the corresponding responsibility to ensure the well-being of my department, I’ve found myself not keeping up with my projects. My weekly tracking went consistently red before I abandoned it altogether at the end of the spring semester. This past week I restarted the tracking, telling myself I needed to recommit to my other projects. By nature, I’m a generalist. If I don’t have a lot of projects ongoing, I feel incomplete. Importantly for me, the projects have to be fairly diverse in nature. Part of the reason I like this approach is because being a beginner yields a high degree of value for relatively little effort. 

The concept of diminishing returns is very important in economic thinking. It applies to both consumption and production models. For a consumption model, where we are consuming something, we usually see diminishing utility (additional satisfaction, happiness, jollies, whatever) from consuming additional units. For example, you likely get a lot of happiness from your first scoop of Ben & Jerry’s (that’s the world famous ice cream), some happiness from your second scoop, but not as much as from your first, and more but less happiness from your third scoop. After your third scoop, you might even start to feel sick, so you see your happiness go negative. That’s diminishing returns from consumption. That’s pretty intuitive. Once you’ve had a couple of scoops of B&J, instead of another scoop, what you’d really like is to consume something else. Maybe a nice glass of pinot grigio or maybe some Tums. We like diversified consumption because the first few units of most good things add a lot of value, but pretty quickly more of the same thing gets boring (or makes us sick!). 

In the graphic above, you can see we get a lot of gains (x or vertical axis) from our initial consumption (y or horizontal axis). But the curve of gains flattens as we continue to the right, adding more consumption of the same good. We get some additional gain for the same amount of consumption later on, but not the same amount of gain as we experienced initially. As we continue to consume more of the same thing, eventually we cross from increasing but diminishing returns to decreasing returns. This is where we have eaten too much ice cream (or spent too many days on the beach, or drank too many pina coladas, or too many of anything) and one more just makes us feel worse than if we hadn’t consumed it. 

Diminishing returns applies to production as well. The example I often use is additional labor in a pizza parlor. If you imagine a pizza parlor with two ovens and one cash register, the initial gain from having one employee is quite high - you go from making no pizzas and therefore no sales to making some pizza and some sales. Hiring a second employee makes the operation more efficient, as does probably a third and maybe a fourth, but the gains from each additional employee are diminishing. Eventually, if you hire too many employees, they will start getting in each other’s way as the kitchen gets too crowded and there are too many people at the counter. 

But more to my initial point is gains from effort in projects. For me, I think of projects as skills I am trying to master. For example, some personal projects (you could call them hobbies) include Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ), visual art, and poetry. These are projects (hobbies) that yield gains based on consistent practice over time, which is why I have weekly goals for each (3-4 BJJ practices per week; 5-7 practice sessions for the other two). With art-related projects, you don’t gain a lot from sitting for hours on one day, and then doing nothing. The returns from effort diminish quickly over the short run (i.e., single day or week). Shorter practices with regular repetition (and coaching) over a longer run (months, years) yield much greater improvement, but are still subject to diminishing returns as one approaches mastery.

I invested a lot of time and effort in mastering digital photography from about 2009 to 2018. I would say I moved from beginner to intermediate skill. I had (and still have) a good understanding of both the camera and post-production tools (i.e., Lightroom and Photoshop). In the early years I felt a genuine exhilaration as I moved through the rapid gains of a beginner, going from knowing nothing to knowing something. Then the gains slowed as far more effort was required to achieve additional gains in skill - the intermediate period. Additional juice required a lot more squeeze. It was around then that I shifted my efforts from photography to drawing and painting. I stopped putting effort into photography and started trying to make art. I engaged in several daily art projects (as long time readers might remember). The transition to drawing and painting was very exciting because I hadn’t worked in those media regularly for many years. I had played around in high school and college, but then had long gaps for many years (decades, really). Picking up the pen and brush again was mostly starting as a beginner. I made big gains early on, copying artists I saw on Instagram and watching technique videos on YouTube. I’ve never really passed late-beginner level for art because I haven’t sought out formal training, but also because as I felt the returns diminishing again, I have sought other outlets.

For the last year my main personal project has been learning BJJ. I’m firmly in the advanced-beginner stage. Although any given practice can be good or bad, I can tell that I have made progress based on how I perform against upper belts, and certainly against people with less experience than me. The returns are still coming fast in the appropriate scale of years of practice, which means most days I have my arms twisted or I get choked out, but I can tell from month to month I’m making progress. The effort to make progress from white to blue, the first real promotion, is typically about two years of regular practice. I feel that coming. People who make black belt in BJJ usually take 10-12 years of regular training. There is a joke that people ask, “How long does the typical person take to make black belt?” And the answer is, “The typical person never makes black belt.” That is because the typical person quits long before s/he invests enough time and effort to make it to black belt in BJJ. The diminishing returns to training, in terms of gains to rank, take effect very quickly. It takes years of persistence to gain the skills necessary. Most people give up long before they make it. You stop getting the juice of satisfaction with improvement as each small improvement comes with more effort, and so people get discouraged and quit. I’m hoping that won’t be me, but I’m late in life to be taking on this challenge, so we’ll see. 

Is the juice worth the squeeze? I think there are some things worth pursuing all the way to mastery. Perhaps the skills you use to earn your income. But there is a lot of value to be gained from starting new projects and trying new things. You can gain a lot of value from giving something a serious effort for a period of time, achieving advanced beginner status, even if you ultimately abandon it. I think of my projects as a portfolio, diversifying my efforts. I work on my teaching and my research all the time because I need to for my work. I’m pretty advanced with that work. Getting better at it takes a lot of effort and time, and the progress often isn’t gratifying in the short run. So I keep other projects ongoing, like BJJ and my art, because as a beginner, I can feel real progress being made. Having projects at different stages of mastery helps give me satisfaction. While I wait for big breakthroughs in one area, feeling the small wins in others keeps me from feeling worn out. The juice keeps coming, even if it comes slowly later on.

Personal projects are worthwhile, even if they don’t earn income. The sense of competence you gain from being a beginner as you master the first skills is juice that keeps you going. 

What does your portfolio look like? Do you have side projects that you are working on that give you a sense of rapidly improving competence? If not, maybe that’s something worth considering.