Great article!!
How to Work Hard
401–410 of 1001 posts
Re: How to Work Hard
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Not something many people say about work! Maybe when the work is truly meaningful (I wouldn’t know). The vagueness of "work" in this article is (IMO) a feature, and not a bug. Raising your children can be great work, to your own point. You can't half-ass raising your kids, as you well know, and it sounds like you get the most purpose and fulfillment from doing that. What PG appears to be arguing is that, whether yo…
But is _is_ an unknown future prize, and countless stories prove that. Pension funds go belly up, whole industries made obsolete, an accident/injury disrupts everything, etc.
I think your premise of “telling people how to live their life” falls more on the popular notion that investment early in career, rather than family or life experience, is more important. I believe this is wrong and it’s repeated more frequently than my counterpoint!
Re: How to Work Hard
#403One 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…
PG briefly touches on it here, but one of the biggest factors on being able to consistently work hard is reward.
PG mostly talks about intrinsic reward in this article. We should work on stuff that is interesting to us, and brings us fulfillment. However, I believe that Paul is missing a huge component here, and that is extrinsic reward.
Extrinsic reward complements intrinsic reward. Extrinsic reward allows us to push through the hard, difficult work that we might not be interested in, because we know the work will be rewarded. It is the light at the end of the tunnel for difficult work. PG, and Bill Gates were able to work so hard because they had internal belief that there was an extrinsic reward for all the work they were doing.
In a perfect world, we would all be completely self motivated to work on every task, but this just isn't realistic. Especially in today's working work. People like PG, and Bill Gates are able to fully credit intrinsic reward, but fail to mention that the extrinsic reward ($$) validated the hard, gritty work they put in.
Re: How to Work Hard
#404One 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…
Investing your time is just like any other kind of investment; you are taking a variety of risks which have a variety of rewards. Pick the ones which line up best with your preferred balance of risk tolerance and goals.
Don't over index on high-consequence/low-likelyhood risks, but keep them in mind as part of your overall strategy.
Re: How to Work Hard
#405One 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…
> when I have the money to travel in style and not backpack around and stay at hostels
I think that's where you went wrong. The backpacking at hostels is the best (as long as you pick hostels and fellow travelers that do not look like your typical backpacker haha). The thing is, now that I'm 30, I feel it's probably out of fashion. But these nights I spent in big-city hostels had the most fun, stories and affairs.
> 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.
You can do both. The thing is, you can backpack 1 month per year and still work really HARD for 11 months of the year. 1 month is enough to visit 3-4 countries, and have 20 something night out. Over 15 years, that's over 300 night out. Way too much. And you still worked very hard for most of your youth.
Re: How to Work Hard
#406One 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…
He's got an audience that he is writting too. He's talking about building great things, not how to live a full and happy life.
While working at Tesla, we definitely all built great things but that's all we did. I left, took a 70% paycut to start my own consulting business and work 4-5 hours a week while being a 'Digital Nomad'. I've never been happier and guess what, that nagging feeling of 'I'm not doing real work' or finding 'idleness distasteful' goes away when you don't feel like the whole team has a gun to your head.
Re: How to Work Hard
#407One 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…
Did you read the whole essay? He writes about finding out what's important. That doesn't have to mean (and probably doesn't mean) some mindless job. He also talks about constantly re-evaluating what the correct time commitment is for the given work, and that it's not the same for everyone nor for every task. Bill Gates not taking a vacation day wasn't trying to communicate that we all should be this way; it was evide…
Your resonse is valid and interesting, even moreso without the first sentence!
I think one thing that could be added is that the metric of success is not necessarily monetary. Financial success often depends more on socioeconomic conditions, rather than hard work. But intrinsic satisfaction seems to be based on truly earned achievement.
Re: How to Work Hard
#408One 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 understand what you mean by health problems, because I too have health problems that limit my ability to work and play the way I dreamed of. But Paul Graham never recommends mindlessly working on things that don't interest you for the sake of some imagined tomorrow. He even recommends not to do it: "...if you think there's something admirable about working too hard, get that idea out of your head. You're not merely…
> "It's good to go on vacation occasionally, but when I go on vacation, I like to learn new things. I wouldn't like just sitting on a beach."
There are few things I enjoy more than just sitting on a beach. When you go on vacation, actually go on vacation. Turn off your phone. Leave your laptop behind. Bring some fiction, or maybe select non-fiction (biographies are great). Put sunscreen on. Get a cold beverage. Fall asleep with the book on you.
I recommend learning new things while you're on vacation! But learn about the place you're vacationing at. Learn about the culture, the people, the history, the geography. Expand your horizons and waste time.
Re: How to Work Hard
#409One 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 think you and PG are actually in agreement on this: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1404321931491430403
It depends on what your life goals are. If you want to travel the world, do that. If you have big ambitions™ then work hard. Either is OK.
This essay is not a call for everyone to work hard, it is a guide for those who choose that path.
Re: How to Work Hard
#410Has hard work burned anyone else out? I spent my 20s working my ass off as an employee, and while it helped my career a lot, I am completely burned out now. All that creative work and effort which didn't end up amounting to much personally. Maybe the caveat to working hard is you should work hard for yourself and not others.
I see a very common arch of "I want to achieve" -> "Okay, life is about more than that, I'm going to practice balance" in these comments. I have also gone through it.
Around 19-24 years old I was working like a dog and making some great career progress. That helped me today, like you said, but I'm now the happiest I've ever been by enjoying this fine summer and working when I feel like working.
I look back on those years and truly wish I saw the other things life has to offer at the time.