Sep 22, 2025 · 1 hr 1 min · 13 segments
What is Wise Effort? In this episode, Dr. Diana Hill is interviewed by Dr. Carl Erik Fisher about her new book Wise Effort: How to Focus Your Genius Energy on What Matters Most. They explore how wise…
Carl Erik FisherGuest
It was always the question I asked whenever I met Buddhist teachers earlier on in my practice and continuing to this day.
Out of the whole Eightfold Path, I was like, effort? What do you mean wise effort? Like, is it more better? Or like, how do I know it's wise? Like, if I'm at the basic level of mindfulness versus more complex phenomena, it's like that.
I've always been, and like to this day, for sure, still extremely uncomfortable with that tension between...
The discernment between making the effort to change versus relaxing into an acceptance, the way that the very title of ACT puts it, or like the dialectic in DBT, like I always come back to that.
So that's like, whether related to the book or to your overall practice, I was just curious, like how you sum up, like, if somebody came, like Allah me 20 years ago, like, what do you mean? Why is it like, what is effort? How do I know what's wise versus unwise?
Well, the way that I've gone about it, so just to orient, I'm stealing a word that is, you know, sometimes it's called right effort, that is part of the Eightfold Path.
So, you know, Buddhism has all these lists, right? So there's the four noble truths, the sort of source of our suffering, the cause of our suffering.
And the fourth noble truth is that there's a way out of suffering, and the way out is the Eightfold Path.
On that Eightfold Path, there's eight things that are, even though it's a path, it's not linear.
What are you doing with your life and your time and your making of money? Like this is wise livelihood for Carl Fisher and for Diana Hill.
It was always the question I asked whenever I met Buddhist teachers earlier on in my practice and continuing to this day.
Out of the whole Eightfold Path, I was like, effort? What do you mean wise effort? Like, is it more better? Or like, how do I know it's wise? Like, if I'm at the basic level of mindfulness versus more complex phenomena, it's like that.
I've always been, and like to this day, for sure, still extremely uncomfortable with that tension between...
The discernment between making the effort to change versus relaxing into an acceptance, the way that the very title of ACT puts it, or like the dialectic in DBT, like I always come back to that.
So that's like, whether related to the book or to your overall practice, I was just curious, like how you sum up, like, if somebody came, like Allah me 20 years ago, like, what do you mean? Why is it like, what is effort? How do I know what's wise versus unwise?
Well, the way that I've gone about it, so just to orient, I'm stealing a word that is, you know, sometimes it's called right effort, that is part of the Eightfold Path.
So, you know, Buddhism has all these lists, right? So there's the four noble truths, the sort of source of our suffering, the cause of our suffering.
And the fourth noble truth is that there's a way out of suffering, and the way out is the Eightfold Path.
On that Eightfold Path, there's eight things that are, even though it's a path, it's not linear.
What are you doing with your life and your time and your making of money? Like this is wise livelihood for Carl Fisher and for Diana Hill.
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