How to Work Hard

I'd go a step further and it sounds woefully disconnected from the joys of culture and life. For those it works for, I imagine that this seems satisfying but for the rest who work hard and don't hit acclaim and fortune (or at least not wild acclaim and fortune), they're going to have midlife crises when they realized they itemized away their youth... I'd guess.

> I had to learn what real work was before I could wholeheartedly desire to do it. That took a while, because even in college a lot of the work is pointless; there are entire departments that are pointless.

The arrogance! This is one of my pet peeves at work: When someone looks at another person's work and judges its value or difficulty. "That's easy." "That's pointless."

Ugh.

Everyone else's job looks easy and/or pointless until you're the one doing it. Then it's important and challenging (hopefully).

Most people who feel their own work is pointless simply don't understand how their role fits into the bigger picture. I assure you, the profit motive is very good at weeding out truly unnecessary costs. It may lag, sometimes. But if there's a dollar being spent that doesn't need to be spent, someone is going to eventually find out and eliminate the expense.

I think this mentality comes from a deep need to feel superior to others. So when we can't understand or appreciate someone's job, it feels powerful to declare their work easy or pointless.

But that's just ignorance, arrogance, and, frankly, bullying by other means: I'll make myself feel bigger by making you feel small, and I'll do it in front of all of my friends so they can affirm how big and tough and awesome I am.

> It's like a cognitive defect, a disability except you're unable to not-do.

He specifically trained himself to have leisure anxiety and advises other people to do this as well:

>> The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working without anyone telling you to. Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off.

It's certainly effective, but as you say, effective to what end?

For me, I stopped watching TV twenty years ago - but then transfered my neurotic novelty seeking behavior to the internet. But because I quit once, it made it easier to reign in my mindless internet consumption. And then stop any mindless book consumption. Then mindless video-games.

So for my - "No TV" is a easy way to express "I'm trying to maintain a ballance between living a vigorous life and consuming meaningful media"

"Natural ability" is a cop-out and PG should know better. It'd be fine if this came with a disclaimer, "we don't know what natural ability is and the more we learn the more complex and diverse this umbrella term becomes." But taking it at face value is fuzzy thinking. It feels like this was included to hedge his bets.

The Polgar sisters(1) serve as evidence that while "natural ability" may be a thing it's even less important than you might imagine. Instead this and work like that of Ericsson(2) on the development of expertise point to repeatable environmental factors for success.

I look forward to a day when we can eliminate this phrase and replace it with measurable phenomena and repeatable processes.

(1) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r

(2) - https://smile.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Han...