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How to Work Hard

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Work Hard

#271

Post by piaste »

warent wrote: post #99
giantg2 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then there are many people like me who work a job they hate, still don't get much time to enjoy life, all just to pay the bills. Less time on the planet might actually something many of us look forward to as life is full of pain and misery.

I hope this doesn't come across as insensitive but this is something I've never understood. If life feels like this, that seems like an indicator that it's time for some massive change. Usually people give some vague abstract response about why massive change is just unrealistic, indicating some fragile house of cards, while in a simultaneous act of cognitive dissonance dreaming of the day it topples. Perhaps we coul…

> Perhaps we could: sell everything and move into a van to live on the road; or get a cheap house boat; or declare bankruptcy and move into a Buddhist monastery; quit jobs to transition into a more mindless one that allows more free time; find a nonprofit organization in a different country to throw oneself into; teach English in a foreign country; etc...

You are making the extremely generous assumption that the person is unbound and able to effectively disappear with no responsibilities to anyone other than themselves.

Among the truly miserable people I have encountered, the most common reason was bearing the burden of one or more dependents. A little sister with severe mental health problems, a sick parent unable to work, a drug-addicted and orphaned nephew. Can't exactly sell the house and move to Japan when your sister needs her SSRI and therapy to not hurt herself.

And the second most common reason was having little or no income at all, for whatever reason, in which case getting a job that they hated would _already_ have been a step up.

Re: How to Work Hard

#272

Post by fchu »

There is something fascinating about this article, and it's not the tips about how to properly work hard, which aren't new or particularly insightful (otherwise reasonable and well summarized).

It's the fact that throughout the article, hard work is an implied imperative in life, the main thing to do (otherwise it brings a "feeling of disgust"), without questioning if that's healthy, right, or so absolute. Maybe instead of the how, I was expecting something about the why, a reflection on the bad aspects of working hard too, and its associated costs on other parts of one's life, whether it's Paul, Patrick or Bill.

Re: How to Work Hard

#273

Post by Spooky23 »

giantg2 wrote: post #44

Hard work can be good, but only if you own a substantial capital interest in the company/result. But if you can hire people to do it for you, then you can reap the benefits and live a life worth living. If you are just part of the labor and not the capital, then there really isn't an incentive to work harder than necessary to keep you job or earn a measly raise. If you tell people that if they work 12+ hours a day in…

Working hard is an attitude, not just hours. The Gates example is more approachable as we’ve all heard of them.

I’ll use myself as an example both ways. You don’t know who I am, and you never will, I’m just a cog in the wheels of society. I was a shitty student, always interested in whatever wasn’t being taught. I became good at working the system instead of working.

When I started working in high school at farms and later in sales, it clicked that the people who worked harder and did a better job… did better. That didn’t always mean money, but it meant respect, better shifts, etc. It was more real to me than academics.

Later on in my professional life, working really hard and delivering more, whatever more was, paid off in innumerable ways. It turns out the way to know what you’re talking about is to do stuff. Now I’m a midcareer director level person and that hard work means when I pick up the phone, someone answers. When there’s a problem or a solution, people listen.

That said, there’s lines I won’t or can’t cross. I won’t sacrifice my family’s life, which is a career ceiling. My mediocre performance as a student effectively locked me out of high end schools and the jobs that follow.

Re: How to Work Hard

#274

Post by lifekaizen »

UglyToad wrote: post #33
dhimes wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're on to something here. I'm struggling to articulate that somehow this essay addresses, albeit well, the low-hanging fruit of working hard, at least in the move-the-world-forward sense than this is written (he's not talking to bricklayers, he's talking to the architects). You have options; you have family/social support, and so on. These things allow the other things to become. [As you can seem I'm still…

This is sort of tangentially related, since TFA doesn't really talk about long hours as such but I definitely prefer the following angle: https://ericlippert.com/2019/12/30/work-and-success/

That's a good post. Addresses the societal imbalances that are sometimes hard to see, adds a little more context:

>If hard work and long hours could be consistently transformed into “success”, then my friends and family who are teachers, nurses, social workers and factory workers would be far more successful than I am.

Re: How to Work Hard

#275

Post by throwaway894345 »

giantg2 wrote: post #236
throwaway894345 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then you can reap the benefits and live a life worth living I wish we could make the "inequality" point without resorting to hyperbole like this. The median American lives a life that is the envy of 99.9% percent of people who have ever walked this earth including most monarchs and emperors, and certainly >90% of people alive today. I do agree that something needs to be done to keep inequality in check; I just happ…

"create more problems than they solve." Like what? Or was this ironic use of your own hyperbole?

Like causing people to lose trust in the "anti-inequality" message. If we need to lie or exaggerate to persuade then we may rightly lose credibility. Pro-inequality folks can even deflect the conversation to our own exaggeration. I didn't mean to imply that hyperbole is comparable to inequality in scale or severity, but rather that any gains afforded by hyperbole tend to be short-sighted.

Re: How to Work Hard

#276

Post by jandrewrogers »

darksaints wrote: post #201
SonicScrub wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Millionaire Next Door concepts are still as relevant as ever, albeit the specifics are a bit dated. Millionaire status is reasonably achievable for someone whose income and cost of basics allow for modest discretionary income. This is certainly the case for the majority of software developers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millionaire_Next_Door

The Millionaire Next Door is about as misleading as it gets, at least for today. Let's not forget that $1M in the mid 1990's is about the same as $2M today, at least in terms of terms of CPI. Even then, that is after 20+ years of housing prices outpacing inflation by 2x or more. In the mid 1990's, the top 20% could get to $1M with some good financial discipline and hard work. Today? Maybe the top 1% could save $1M, a…

The median US household has ~$12k/year available to save/invest after all ordinary living expenses, per the US government (BLS), and that number goes up very rapidly for people above the median.

Americans are notoriously poor savers, also per the US government, but a large percentage of all households -- at least 40% -- could fairly easily accumulate $1M if they were diligent about saving and investing a decent fraction of that surplus income. The surplus income is available but Americans choose to use that income for things other than saving and investing.

Re: How to Work Hard

#277

Post by antiterra »

richardwhiuk wrote: post #248
antiterra wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant to allow for that with the ‘assuming he’d actually enjoy a day off’ caveat, but even so, there’s this, from Walter Isaacson: “Every spring, as they have for more than a decade, Gates spends a long weekend with Winblad at her beach cottage on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where they ride dune buggies, hang-glide and walk on the beach.” Yachts? How about this: https://moneyinc.com/a-closer-look-at-serene-t…

I just think that quote is a complete fabrication.

Are you saying you think the interview Time magazine had with Gates was a complete fabrication, or that the author just randomly made up that bit?

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,137132,...

Or do you mean you think Gates actually took days off and the suggestion he didn’t is a fabrication?

Re: How to Work Hard

#278

Post by david927 »

shmageggy wrote: post #218
david927 wrote: post #206

This falls into the Malcolm Gladwell genre of arguments made on top of specious anecdotal data. Paul's not wrong, per se, but it's not a well-formed argument. Bill Gates made his fortune by being in the right place at the right time with connections from his wealthy family, and software that he first sold and then went out and bought. If hard work helped him grow his empire, great, but I wouldn't use him as a great e…

> This falls into the Malcolm Gladwell genre of arguments made on top of specious anecdotal data. Paul's not wrong, per se, but it's not a well-formed argument. That pretty much describes anything that he writes on his blog.

Carrots are good for you. I had a friend who ate a carrots as a kid. He's a doctor now.

I wouldn't have even written my comment but this was just a big talking point after Gladwell's 10,000 hours book a few years ago (which also speciously and strangely used Bill Gates as an example of effort).

That Coolidge quote is 100 years old. I like us talking about things but let's endeavor to make it new things.

Re: How to Work Hard

#279

Post by bluedino »

gmadsen wrote: post #88
giantg2 wrote: post #44

Hard work can be good, but only if you own a substantial capital interest in the company/result. But if you can hire people to do it for you, then you can reap the benefits and live a life worth living. If you are just part of the labor and not the capital, then there really isn't an incentive to work harder than necessary to keep you job or earn a measly raise. If you tell people that if they work 12+ hours a day in…

if you are actually doing software 12+ hours a day for a decade, I find it hard you wouldn't find great success. unless you spend none of that time improving and just doing the same thing you learned in the first year, you will become an expert. Experts are well rewarded for their skills

Depends on if you're working on the next Twitter or plugging away at Java code as a corporate slave for an insurance company.

Re: How to Work Hard

#280

Post by dragonwriter »

johnwheeler wrote: post #82
kstenerud wrote: post #30

The true ah-ha moment comes when you finally realize how much bullshit this is. "Hard work" is the mantra that keeps you a slave. "Success stories" are the tasty carrots that keep you toiling away your best years enriching others in pursuit of the things you're supposed to seek in life: Power, success, status. "Life hacks" are little dopamine hits to keep your eye on the carrot. And the kicker is that those few who a…

This is bullshit. This is what people who’ve failed tell themselves to rationalize that failure. People who’ve succeeded at achieving ambitious goals are able to look at success from both vantage points: from having yet to succeed and succeeding. You’ll hardly ever, if ever, hear them say it’s solely the consequence of having the right networks and being lucky. Sure some luck is involved, but most of it is attitude,…

> People who’ve succeeded at achieving ambitious goals are able to look at success from both vantage points: from having yet to succeed and succeeding. You’ll hardly ever, if ever, hear them say it’s solely the consequence of having the right networks and being lucky.

Yes, people tend to adopt a personal narrative that maximizes their own moral status, so successful people artificially minimizes the effect of circumstance on average and unsuccessful people artificially minimize the effect of choice.

But we don't have to rely on competing personal narratives weighted by who has the resources to reach a larger audience; these are concrete fact questions, and there is plenty of evidence that (1) circumstance beyond personal traits has a very large role, (2) personal traits contribute in ways different than the popular narrative of the successful, and (3) the personal traits that contribute are themselves largely products of (mostly inherited and early childhood) circumstance, not active choice.

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