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How to Work Hard

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Work Hard

#421

Post by caymanjim »

gentleman11 wrote: post #370
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…

You can be unhireable in your 40s in tech. What do you do to face age discrimination later?

I've heard this trope for decades, but the only time I've seen it manifest is when the 40+ people haven't learned anything in 20 years. Are there people in their 40s who've kept their skills up and still aren't getting hired?

Re: How to Work Hard

#422

Post by bhupy »

tidydata wrote: post #402
bhupy wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

This is only an "unknown future prize" if the defined goal is very specifically to have a successful pension fund, or to thrive in a specific industry.

Using the example of what makes you, personally, feel the most fulfilled: children die prematurely (disrupts everything), or they have developmental challenges that make it difficult to do much else in life. None of that changes the fact that you're probably still better off devoting your life right now to rearing children.

You're absolutely correct that there's uncertainty in the future, but none of that refutes any of what I said in my comments, or PG wrote in his article. It's a "yes, and" addition, rather than a "no, but" refutation.

YES, there's significant entropy in life, AND given that, the most reliable way to do "great work" is still (as laid out in PG's blog post).

> 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!

I argued no such thing. It clearly bears repeating that the more abstract notion is that investment in XYZ early in your life, rather than ABC is more important. XYZ and ABC can be the exact same thing, if your circumstances permit; there's no requirement that they be different things. If you find the most fulfillment and joy in life raising children resources notwithstanding, then you can certainly start doing that early in your life. If you think that raising children will only be more fulfilling if you have some baseline threshold of wealth, then you may have to defer that in favor of a career. Again, it all depends on how you, as an individual (or as a family), defines XYZ and ABC.

I have no problem with how people define XYZ and ABC. What I have a problem with is in telling people how they ought to define XYZ and ABC. Neither PG's post nor my comment did the latter.

Re: How to Work Hard

#423

Post by tempson »

Created this account to reply to this thread.

In my opinion, this article could be much better if it accounted for few additional perspectives.

1. There are people in this world who do better with consistency over volume. Dedicate 1 hour every day on your subject of interest. You are bound to get really good at it in few years. The challenging part is “1 hour every day.”

2. Work-centric life shouldn’t be celebrated to this extent. It just doesn’t do good at the end.

Re: How to Work Hard

#424

Post by jcims »

gentleman11 wrote: post #370
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…

You can be unhireable in your 40s in tech. What do you do to face age discrimination later?

If you build your life around this assumption, you're going to be unpleasantly surprised when you see how easy it is to get a job in your 40's. I was hired by a FAANG at 43 with a high school diploma, quit and hired on again non-FAANG (at 45!) and have since nearly doubled my TC in that role over the past five years. In that time I've applied to three jobs just to keep fresh, two FAANG and one at a specialist company in my domain and got offers for two of the roles.

If you face obvious age discrimination, put them on blast and keep looking.

Re: How to Work Hard

#425

Post by rllearneratwork »

Very few people regret on their deathbed that they simply did not work hard enough. What they typically regret is not trying things and not spending time with family. Yes, trying things could mean work very hard, like starting a startup but it also often means not backpacking in Europe, not sailing around the world, not opening their own bakery, etc.

Re: How to Work Hard

#426

Post by meheleventyone »

bhupy wrote: post #396
meheleventyone wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get used to looking 5-10 years ahead are you sure you'll stop and starting living that better life? Or will there just be more goals another 5-10 years ahead? I lost a whole bunch of friends in my 30s and nearly died myself a few weeks ago. Later on doesn't arrive for everyone. I don't think that means you should never delay gratification but just don't put all your eggs in the future basket.

Yeah, we don't disagree. Like I said, there's an "in-between". Always "living in the moment" can be bad, depending on what you want out of life. Always "living in the future" can also be bad, depending on what you want out of life. Ultimately, they both depend on the same thing: what you want out of life. The key is for everyone to define that goal for themselves; an exercise which is possibly the single hardest part…

The weird thing at least for me in reading that is I very rarely worry or even think as abstractly as what I want from life.

My own take is that question comes very much from the living in the future side of things.

Re: How to Work Hard

#428

Post by jcims »

caymanjim wrote: post #421
gentleman11 wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be unhireable in your 40s in tech. What do you do to face age discrimination later?

I've heard this trope for decades, but the only time I've seen it manifest is when the 40+ people haven't learned anything in 20 years. Are there people in their 40s who've kept their skills up and still aren't getting hired?

>Are there people in their 40s who've kept their skills up and still aren't getting hired?

Those are my people and the answer, at least for my cohort, is an emphatic no. They are extremely mobile and move from job to job with relative ease.

Re: How to Work Hard

#429

Post by helen___keller »

lovecg wrote: post #333
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…

If you read his footnote, he’s talking about how these alarm bells go off on the order of days, not hours, and how taking vacations is good.

Thanks for pointing this out.

While I fundamentally believe I experienced the phenomenon PG writes about, there's something to be said about the scale of it. Taking a sufficiently generous interpretation of his essay, an admirable goal for self-growth is not to work hard all the time but to develop the self-discipline to work hard when you intend to be working (with the restraint to not be working when you intend to not be working, and the internal clock to help you schedule the two at whatever the correct balance is for your life).

Perhaps as a life goal as I enter my 30s, I should endeavor to revisit my love for mathematics and computer science (as opposed my work-life-balanced but frankly boring current career path), using both the restraint and discipline I've learned, so to not make the mistakes I made in my early 20s.

After leaving the work-always atmosphere of CMU, I moved in with my then-girlfriend (now-wife) and committed to working exactly 8 hours every day to keep work from taking over again. Trying to cram all the ambition and passion for work I once had into 8 hours of junior dev work basically turned me into a soup of anxiety, inferiority, and resentment[0] for some time. I thought I was wasting my career, after trying so hard in college. It took years to reorient my priorities (and also to reach a position that was a bit less meaningless than tech support for Matlab).

I think nowadays I could do better. Maybe next time a hip startup emails me with a job opportunity, I'll give them a call ;) thanks

[0] Anxious to try and find ways to work harder and achieve more in a bland corporate environment where the build system was more of an obstacle than the actual project, inferiority compared to the success that some of my still-overworked friends were experiencing in silicon valley (with opportunities I didn't have in Boston), and even occasional resentment towards my girlfriend, for whom I had chosen to restrain myself to 8 hours of work a day, because I felt I could do such great things without that limitation.

Re: How to Work Hard

#430

Post by justinator »

throwawaygh wrote: post #399
justinator wrote: post #215

It's very shocking to read this and not even mention how supportive the privilege of starting out wealthy is. Hard work looks different if there's no where to go up or out.

> Hard work looks different if there's no where to go The essay assumes a lot about who the reader is and the type of work they're doing. This perspective on work is obviously utterly alien to a single parent who's a dental assistant, part-time wait staff, has two young kids, and is barely making ends meet. But that person works a hell of a lot harder than any startup founder I've ever met. For them, the answer to "h…

But PG isn't writing to that audience. The primary audience for many of his essays are people like him: guys who grew up geeky in upper middle class suburbs. There's nothing wrong with writing for the audience, but he does a kind-of bad job at signposting the fact that this is the target for his advice.

If that's his audience, perhaps a better essay would be, "Look you've got it pretty easy in life already, don't blow it (and even if you do, you'll probably have a second/third/fourth chance)", not: "listen to me about how to work hard because I know", because I haven't been convinced that he knows.

No need for navel grazing.

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