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How to Work Hard

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Work Hard

#321

Post by arkitaip »

david927 wrote: post #278
shmageggy wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What I'm hearing is that you should startup a biz to sell those doctor-making carrots.

Re: How to Work Hard

#322

Post by canada_dry »

> natural ability, practice, and effort

I'd argue that perseverance (vs practice) is a better partner in that combination.

Practice suggests doing the same thing over-and-over.

Perseverance is never giving up when there are road blocks.

Re: How to Work Hard

#323

Post by herodoturtle »

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 never traveled outside the UI

Beautiful typo :-)

Re: How to Work Hard

#324

Post by SlapperKoala »

tgtweak wrote: post #188

This rhetoric furthered by Elon, Jack Ma and several others where working 7 days a week for 18 hours is "ideal" and that rest and relaxation are had at the expense of productivity/success is a real dangerous position. You know what happens to the majority of people when they get to a state of anxiety when relaxing and not working? Stress and burnout. Let's acknowledge that it may have been the path to success for SOM…

> SOME of the 0.1% who can work 18 hours a day nonstop for a decade with extreme natural ability

I'm sceptical of whether they actually exist as described tbh. There's an obvious incentive for rich business people to emphasize the amount of work they put in, and I've not seen any independent verification of their supposedly high output

Re: How to Work Hard

#325

Post by bhupy »

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…

> 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 better life X years from now (where in our case, X = 5-10 years).

X can be whatever you want, and it's up to individuals (or families) to decide that for themselves. But once you do, delayed gratification is an important social concept; as evidenced by the marshmallow test administered in children. For adults, "rejecting the marshmallow" can mean working a little harder in your '20s, so that you may get 2 marshmallows when you're in your '30s — which for a lot of people is important as that's the age when they have children.

Re: How to Work Hard

#327

Post by hkrgl »

gotsa wrote: post #124
leokennis wrote: post #19

> There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, but to do the best work you need all three: you need great natural ability and to have practiced a lot and to be trying very hard. I'd like to add that it is more than fine to not do great work. If you like to spend a lot of time with your kids and tend to your vegetable patch, by all means only t…

Playing as Devil's advocate here. I think that "good work" is much wider that you are considering. Having quality time off with your partner is "good work" Raising your children is "good work" In a more philosophical way. "Work" could be defined as trying to make a change in your reality. So yeah, that life discovering the arts, eating tasteful and healthy food, and spending time with your beloved ones is "good work"…

This, exactly. It takes a lot of hard work to raise children and have a good relationship with your partner. I consider taking vacations to lay on the beach with my partner or children a part of that hard work. The definitions in the essay seem a bit short-sighted to me.

Re: How to Work Hard

#330

Post by SlapperKoala »

dahart wrote: post #103

This only barely glances the number one way I’ve found to work hard: to work for yourself. Working on things other people want is, for me, more difficult than working on things I want. Working at someone else’s company is more difficult than working at my company. With my own company, when things were going relatively well, it was easy to spend every waking minute working. At other companies, putting in overtime is m…

In my experience "working for yourself" means in practice "working for your clients." You still need an external party willing to give you money for your work. And they will have requirements about how it is done and when it is delivered that you won't necessarily like
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