There’s a part of Navy SEAL training called “drown-proofing” where they bind your hands behind your back, tie your feet together, and dump you into a 9-foot-deep pool.
Your job is to survive for five minutes.
Like most of SEAL training, the vast majority of cadets who attempt drown-proofing fail. Upon being tossed into the water, many of them panic and scream to be lifted back out. Some struggle until they slip underwater where they proceed to lose consciousness and have to be fished out and resuscitated. Over the years, a number of trainees have even died during the exercise.
But some people make it. And they do so because they understand two counterintuitive lessons.
The first lesson of drown-proofing is paradoxical: the more you struggle to keep your head above water, the more likely you are to sink.
With your arms and legs bound, it’s impossible to maintain yourself at the surface for the full five minutes. Even worse, your limited attempts to keep your body afloat will only cause you to sink faster. The trick to drown-proofing is to actually let yourself sink to the bottom of the pool. From there, you lightly push yourself off the pool floor and let your momentum carry you back to the surface. Once there, you can grab a quick breath of air and start the whole process over again.1
Strangely, surviving drown-proofing requires no superhuman strength or endurance. It doesn’t even require that you know how to swim. On the contrary, it requires the ability to not swim. Instead of resisting the physics that would normally kill you, you must surrender to them and use them to save your own life.
The second lesson of drown-proofing is a bit more obvious, but also paradoxical: the more you panic, the more oxygen you will burn and the more likely you are to fall unconscious and drown.2 In a sick and twisted way, the exercise turns your survival instinct against you: the more intense your desire to breathe, the less you will be able to breathe. The more intense your will to live, the greater the chance you will die.
More than a test of physical will, drown-proofing is a test of each cadet’s emotional self-control in situations of extreme danger. Can he control his own impulses? Can he relax in the face of potential death? Can he willingly risk his life in the service of some higher value or goal?
These skills are far more important than any cadet’s ability to swim. They’re more important than his resilience, his physical toughness, or his ambition. They’re more important than how smart he is, what school he went to, or how damn good he looks in a crisp Italian suit.
This skill—the ability to let go of control when one wants it most—is one of the most important skills anyone can develop. And not just for SEAL training. For life.
Most people assume the relationship between effort and reward is one-to-one. We think that working twice as long will produce twice the results. That caring about a relationship twice as much will make everyone feel twice as loved. That yelling your point twice as loud will make you twice as right.
The assumption here is that most of life exists on a linear curve, that there’s a one-to-one ratio between effort and reward with everything:
But allow me to inform you—as someone who just tried drinking twice the normal amount of Red Bull so he could finish editing this damn thing—this is almost never true. Most of the world does not exist on a linear curve. Linear relationships only exist for mindless, rote, repetitive tasks—driving a car, filling out reams of paperwork, cleaning the bathroom, etc. In all of these cases, doing something for two hours will double the output of doing it for one hour. But that’s simply because they require no thought or ingenuity.
Most activities in life do not operate along the linear effort/reward curve because most activities in life are not basic nor mindless. Most activities are complex, mentally and/or emotionally taxing, and require adaptation.
Therefore, most activities produce a diminishing returns curve:3
Diminishing returns means that the more you experience something, the less rewarding it becomes. The classic example is money. The difference between earning $20,000 and $40,000 is huge and life-changing. The difference between earning $120,000 and $140,000 means your car has slightly nicer seat heaters. The difference between earning $127,020,000 and $127,040,000 is basically a rounding error on your tax return.4
The concept of diminishing returns applies to most experiences that are complex and novel, and even many of the mundane ones. The number of showers you take in a day, the number of chicken wings you inhale during happy hour, the number of trips home to visit your mother in a year—these are all experiences that start out highly valuable at first but then diminish in value the more frequently you do them (sorry, Mom).
Another example: studies on work productivity show that we’re really only productive for the first four to five hours of each day.5 Everything after that suffers severely diminished returns, to the point where the difference between working for 12 hours and 16 hours is basically nothing (not counting sleep deprivation).6
Friendships operate on a diminishing returns curve. Having one friend is vital. Having two is clearly better than one. But having 10 instead of 9 changes little in your life. And having 21 instead of 20 just makes remembering people’s names that much more difficult.
Sex has diminishing returns, as does eating, sleeping, drinking alcohol, working out at the gym, reading books, taking vacations, hiring employees, consuming caffeine, saving for retirement, scheduling business meetings, studying for an exam, masturbating, staying up late to play video games—the examples are endless. All give back less the more you do them, the more you try, or the more you have. All operate on a diminishing returns curve.
But there’s another curve, one that you’ve probably never seen or heard of before—and that’s largely because I make a lot of this shit up. That’s the inverted curve:7
The inverted curve is the bizarro “Twilight Zone” curve, where effort and reward have a negative correlation—that is, the more effort you put into doing something, the more you will fail to do it.
Drown-proofing exists on an inverted curve. The more effort you put into rising to the surface, the more likely you will be to fail at it. Similarly, the more you want to breathe, the more likely you are to choke on a bunch of chlorinated piss water.
But I know you’re thinking, “So what, Mark? I’ve usually had too many piña coladas to even find the deep end of the pool, much less bind my arms and legs and try to survive in it. Who gives a shit about inverted curves?”
It’s true, few things in life function on an inverted curve. But the few things that do are extremely important. In fact, I will argue that the most important experiences and goals in life all exist on an inverted curve.
Effort and reward have a linear relationship when the action is mindless and simple. Effort and reward have a diminishing returns relationship when the action is complex and multivariate.
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