How to Work Hard

So... I actually have a theory. He had kids. His kids are precocious and bright. And if you watch him on twitter he loves to talk about how smart they are. Which is hardly weird. But read back through his early writing: PG's school experience seems kinda traumatic. He hated it, he has an essay likening schools to prisons. So he's projecting his anxieties onto his kids.

And modern educational thought (be it "woke" or not), has very much moved away from a focus on the Best and Brightest students and onto a theory of education that prioritizes the needs of the disadvantaged. PG's kids just aren't what people are talking about. Educators tend to assume they'll do just fine given their existing advantages.

But PG didn't do fine, in his mind. He thinks society is moving in the wrong direction.

Which is ironic, because if anything modern educational environments (my kids are almost the same age) are much MORE inclusive and benign and much less likely to produce the kind of anxiety he experienced. His kids will do better than he did BECAUSE the school brings everyone else into the discussion and doesn't drive a competetive prison. He just can't see it.

> One of my greatest regrets is how much time I wasted on 'work' in my 20s and 30s.

In my 20s I was similar. A 'long' vacation was a long weekend in Vegas with friends. Fun, but not much of a vacation. I was fortunate to meet my wife in my early 30s who pushed me to slow down a bit and take at least 2 consecutive weeks off a year (sometimes even twice) in a time zone that made work near impossible. We've been to many places across Europe spending 3-4-5 days in a single location, which is long by American standards.

> when I have the money to travel in style and not backpack around and stay at hostels

There is a lot of room between staying in hostels and traveling in style. It's possible to travel relatively cheaply and still be comfortable. I know some hostels are nicer than others, but tbh nothing about staying in a hostel sounds vacation like to me.

> 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.

It's hard to know. If I didn't work as hard in my 20s would I be in the position to take off 2-4 weeks/year since then? IDK. Hindsight and all that...

Finally, I think the most important thing people can do is learn to enjoy the day to day. Even if you're working hard, learn to appreciate those fun moments with your co-workers or those moments with your dog when you come home. Not everything has to be about the big adventure. As I get older I'm learning to find happiness in all sorts of mundane things, even something as simple as sitting the backyard with the sun on my face.

What happens when 'everyone works hard'? Sure, the people doing trading algorithms will make money but not the people doing CRUD apps.

So many things annoy me about this sort of self-help guru vagueness.

"One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you'll have to work very hard" - this is not true. You have to work, but the "hard" part implies that stress is important. Stress is incidental - everyone experiences stress regardless of work. I learned years ago that high achievers don't experience more stress... an in fact they tend to rephrase problems to give them LESS stress. They work, but they purposely make those things less stressful. The work itself, from their perspective isn't "hard" at all.

"There are three ingredients to great work: natural ability, practice, and effort". These aren't separate things! Natural ability is learned just like anything else. It's a set of skills that you develop through building your own ways of thinking. You get those through practice. And for some, that effort is often negligible for one reason or another - experiences and thoughts that they have because of emotions or places they grew up or what context they relate to. I could go on for hours about this specific topic.

"And yet Bill Gates sounds even more extreme. Not one day off in ten years?" - A surprising number of people do this anyways. If it's not stressful to them, it's not effort... it's just what you do. By the way, most of these people don't become rich. Why? It's not because of "natural ability" or "lack of practice and effort". It's because their daily work covers things that aren't, directly, money. "Cows got to get fed" or "lawn has to be mowed" or "kids need to be watched" or "spend a bit of time on something that I actually like". For Bill Gates, that "just what you do" was probably "work on microsoft". And if it failed, he's publically said that yeah, his backup plan was to go back to Harvard, becuase that was of course an option for him. Relatively speaking, it wasn't a super high risk decision.

"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". This sounds, honestly, quite unhealthy. It's "feel pain now because reasons. I have multiple theories on how this sort of thought process comes around. For example, When we can't relax during our downtime, or we don't actually get the rewards of our labor.

But you notice that outside of constructed work environments (like school, or any job where you have a direct boss), this doesn't happen. Those who practice violin practice until they're done practicing, then they relax, then they come back later and practice some more. They don't half-ass practice, because there isn't a point to that. If you're practicing, it's not "so that I can work hard, and if I don't I feel guilty". Instead it's "I need to polish this one part of the song" or "I'm struggling with my fingering here" or maybe even "I'm going to play with this section of the song, it seems fun". Note - it's not pointless work. So "I'm working, but not working hard" just... doesn't happen. Because why would it? That doesn't make the song better, it doesn't make you better.

The more I go through the article, the more I just think the goals are getting tripped up by a combination of external forces that take up mental resources, and a mental model where the stress of the situation determines the quality of the product.

I have tons of suggestions (I trimmed this comment down and rewrote it 3 times already). The big one though I think is learning to roll with what matters. Do everything you're doing, and then take a break, and then do it again. Honestly, unless you get into the nitty gritty details, It's really a lot simpler than people think.

I admire pg; I don't admire his essays, even though in broad strokes I agree with them. I feel his choice of style works against him; that's where I disagree.

Write like you talk, but if you talk like pg writes you lose your audience. His essays check out line by line, paragraph by paragraph, but they fail to drive at some deeper, more subtle point that can capture the imagination of an audience. I'm sure pg is nothing if not imaginative, but his essays aren't.

Another comment criticizes this essay as just another pg stream of consciousness; I feel it's the opposite: short on many of the details, digressions and emotions that can make an essay come alive, that can give you sense of the author and his world. Often when I read an essay that's what I'm interested in most and I don't think I'm alone in this.

I think I understand why pg has chosen his style; the principles and aesthetic sensibilities that went into his choice and I agree with them. Nevertheless I think it's a poor choice. I hope pg reads this and reconsiders. Innovate!