Learning to play a musical instrument is hard. So is trying to run a marathon, writing a term paper, and caring for a sick child. These things involve frustration, pain, and disappointment — yet we do them anyway. In part two of Hidden Brain’s look at the allure of suffering, psychologist Michael Inzlicht explains what we get from doing things that are difficult, and why the things we think will make us happy often do not.

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Why do people enjoy doing difficult things?

“You can imagine that some people are willing to work hard, but go about it from a sense of duty and responsibility,” Inzlicht told me for my New York Times story. “But other people—call them ‘joyful workers’—this is what they live for. This is what gives them purpose. This is what makes them feel important. This is what helps them make the world make sense.” The existence of “joyful workers” suggests that, even if the Effort Paradox applies to everyone, it doesn’t apply equally. Where you sit on the Meaningfulness-of-Effort scale probably reflects a changeable mix of nature and nurture.

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