Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Work Hard

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 1001 posts

Re: How to Work Hard

#491

Post by publicola1990 »

tidydata wrote: post #347
bhupy wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't listen to PG, kids. Live the life you want to have now, not the life you think you'll want to have several decades out. Isn't there an in-between? My wife and I both delay a little bit of gratification with the expectation that we'll have a better life in our mid-30's or early 40's. In other words, we're choosing not to live the life we want to have right now , because we're trading that off for a potentially…

Having children means sharing your marshmallows. It’s also a lot easier to chase a kid in your 20s than your 30s. It’s also maturing, enjoyable, and spending time with them is the best part of the day. Not something many people say about work! Maybe when the work is truly meaningful (I wouldn’t know). The notion that people need to work through their 20s for this unknown future prize is silly and wasteful. Spending t…

Framing it that way makes it seem that he's espousing a Stakhanovite approach.

Re: How to Work Hard

#492

Post by AnimalMuppet »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #473
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also negatively correlated with IQ. That's surprising, I wonder why.

Among other things, bright kids are often not challenged in school. Many of them learn to coast and not be too troublesome and do what little they have to do to hit the check marks the adults around them require while secretly pursuing some means to quietly also meet their own needs. They can end up feeling like school work is pointless and like "a monkey could do this."

That fits my experience. My first real college class was a shock.

Re: How to Work Hard

#493

Post by eloff »

nineplay wrote: post #317

One of my greatest regrets is how much time I wasted on 'work' in my 20s and 30s. I was an engineer, I made a comfortable salary, but I rarely took a vacation, I never traveled outside the UI, I took days off reluctantly with a vague feeling that I was letting someone down. "Later", I told myself. When I'm successful, when I'm stable, when I have the money to travel in style and not backpack around and stay at hostel…

I feel like you could be talking about me. I'm 37, and I worked very hard through my twenties and thirties. I kept telling myself there was time to live later, when it accomplished my goal of starting a software company. That still hasn't worked out, although I haven't given up.

> When I'm successful, when I'm stable, when I have the money to travel in style and not backpack around and stay at hostels.

That's the exact line I've been telling myself.

My wife and I want to travel for a couple years before we have kids (and it's getting to the point where we have to stop delaying that.) We've set a year from now as the hard deadline to start. Because otherwise we'll just keep pushing it back until we're too old to enjoy it or something happens and the dream becomes impossible.

Re: How to Work Hard

#494

Post by TameAntelope »

This feels like the kind of essay describing a thing that, if you have to be told about it, you don't have it.

I'm on HN during my work day. People who "work hard" probably aren't. They probably only know about pg through direct connections, not through idly scrolling the Internet bored one day.

Re: How to Work Hard

#495

Post by CobrastanJorji »

caymanjim wrote: post #485
helen___keller wrote: post #162

When I was an undergrad at CMU, I learned how to work hard. Really hard. After having coasted through too-easy high school, I spent all day every day at CMU either programming, doing mathematics, or thinking about one of those things (to great effect: often the trick to prove a theorem would pop into my head while showering or while taking a walk). I would fall asleep while programming in the middle of the night, dre…

I'm closer to retirement age than the beginning of my career. Some of my age peer friends are already retired, and many of them could be if they wanted to. It's not even on the radar for me. I'm a bit envious, as I'd love the freedom to be done for life, and to be able to take or leave work as I please. The flipside is that I've taken a lot of time off along the way. I've taken whole years off between many jobs, I've…

You remind me of a coworker I had four a couple of years. He and his wife were both extremely competent and well-compensated programmers. Their lifestyle was basically "work for two years or so, save up a bunch of money, then quit and wander the world doing whatever they liked until the money ran out, repeat." I've thought about them several times. Some part of me is really, really uncomfortable intentionally living off of my savings for a prolonged period, but I also sometimes wonder if they haven't figured out something important that I haven't.

Re: How to Work Hard

#496

Post by NalNezumi »

helen___keller wrote: post #162

When I was an undergrad at CMU, I learned how to work hard. Really hard. After having coasted through too-easy high school, I spent all day every day at CMU either programming, doing mathematics, or thinking about one of those things (to great effect: often the trick to prove a theorem would pop into my head while showering or while taking a walk). I would fall asleep while programming in the middle of the night, dre…

For me the similar thing was when I started to read HN, 3 years ago.

It wasn't until 3 month before graduation, when a guy at the lab that I admired suggested HN and all the hustle culture and the background stories of successes was available first hand, that I started to get truly anxious about the time I felt like I wasted/ was wasting during college. Playing games are really hard now, so is watching movies. My list of movies or clips that I'm supposed to see on downtime is filled with daunting "productive" materials.

Also created the bad habit of quitting (job) when I feel like I'm stuck or "not growing/improving" due stress. The mentality of having to "constantly be productive" also caused strain in my personal relationships.

Re: How to Work Hard

#497

Post by asdfman123 »

TameAntelope wrote: post #494

This feels like the kind of essay describing a thing that, if you have to be told about it, you don't have it. I'm on HN during my work day. People who "work hard" probably aren't. They probably only know about pg through direct connections, not through idly scrolling the Internet bored one day.

The thing about finding motivation is that you don't actually find it.

There are certain things you want out of life as a human being, and if believe your work is aligned with that, you'll pour your soul into it.

On the other hand, if you see work as a distraction from the rest of your life, working will be an uphill battle. I guess it's important to find work you care about, or find a deeper, more meaningful reason to do work.

Re: How to Work Hard

#498

Post by bachmeier »

> It was similar with Lionel Messi. He had great natural ability, but when his youth coaches talk about him, what they remember is not his talent but his dedication and his desire to win.

I can assure you, there are many kids that practice harder than Messi did when he was young. He is not a great player because of hard work, he is a great player because of luck. I know the VC thing about the importance of hard work. They love to promote hard work because that's how they make money. It's just plain silly to attribute Messi's greatness to anything other than luck - both his physical abilities and the environment that taught him how to fine tune his abilities.

Hard work is useless without that special precise knowledge of which work you should be doing. Few young soccer players know how to practice in a way to become Messi, even if they have the right body to do it. It's useless without being in the right environment too.

> Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off. I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm working hard, but I can be sure I'm getting nowhere when I'm not, and it feels awful.

That, my friends, is what a VC would love for you to believe. There's nothing sincere when someone in his position writes something like this. Because hey, if you're the 0.1% of the time that it works out, he gets rich. And if you're the 99.9% that wastes their time (like all the kids that never play soccer at the highest levels) he loses nothing.

I used to enjoy PG's writings. He's crossed a line where he believes that the only thing good in the world is what is best for VCs.

Re: How to Work Hard

#500

Post by throwaway894345 »

luffapi wrote: post #395
throwaway894345 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again with the wild hyperbole. The American safety net may not be the absolute best in the world but it is still far better than what is available to the overwhelming majority of people. Indeed, a huge swath of the world is far below the American poverty line. Why do you suppose so many millions of people risk their lives to get into America in the first place? Come on. We can advocate for better healthcare and socia…

It’s not hyperbole it’s reality. The US has the largest prison population in the world. It has massive problems with homelessness and violent crime. It has extreme wealth inequality. We have the most expensive healthcare and education in the world. The reality is that the US is a harsh place to live. Yes there are upsides but the hyperbole is that there aren’t significant downsides.

> Yes there are upsides but the hyperbole is that there aren’t significant downsides.

The original claim was that the median American’s lifestyle is enviable to the overwhelming majority of people on Earth today or at any other point. In other words, the downsides are few and far less significant than the upsides for most people today or at any time in the past.

It’s so exhausting to transparently argue that relative to the world, the US is a very nice place and suffer responses like “but there is lots of violent crime!” Of course there is always some referand for which the US has “lots of violent crime” but by world standards it does not. The US homicide rate for example is something like 30% below the global homicide rate. The poverty rate in the US is pretty comparable to European countries (bit worse than western Europe, bit better than eastern Europe) and far, far better than Asia, Africa, or South America. Even our wealth inequality is not “extreme” by global standards.

There is no truth whatsoever to claims that the US is a harsh place to live. According to the quality of life index which does not cherry pick metrics, the US is 15th globally (lower is better). https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.j...

Post reply on HN