Diminishing returns

Trying too hard to get what you want in life—like love, respect, and happiness—often has the opposite effect: you end up lonely, dejected, and miserable.

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.