This is some next level clickbait and we all fell for it. With „hard work“ he is touching on somthing we all can relate to. So we read the thing.
What he is trying to get across is: a) i know hard work, that is why i „made“ it. b) it takes hard work to make great things c) this proves i made great things.
This is not a philisophical reflection. It is marketing BS. I am not a hater. Just trying to give name to the elephant in the room.
How to Work Hard
521–530 of 1001 posts
Re: How to Work Hard
#522What I'd like to see first is:
"Why work hard"
To me, it seems that if we've put ourselves in a society that requires hard work, we've failed somewhere along the way, when do you run a business and value making things harder for customers? So if we've made societal success hard, we've kind of failed as a society in my opinion.
Re: How to Work Hard
#523One 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.
Time is what you are made of. Money is a number in a database. Your sentence makes no sense to me. You have no idea what will happen because you almost touched the butterfly in your garden, or struck up a conversation with a stranger at the cafe. Your life is just process, just pure flow. Each moment lives on its own.
Re: How to Work Hard
#524Reading this makes me think of the quite "If you're so smart, then why are you unhappy?"
Re: How to Work Hard
#525>One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you'll have to work very hard.
Says the guy who made it big in his 32th year by selling a company he had just founded 2 years before.
An aspiring message to single mothers working two jobs and barely making rent and all other kind of working stiff working their arse off to keep the lights on, the buildings clean, the power running, the cables installed, the food served, the minerals for the PCs mined, and so on, in the backbone of the "digital" economy...
>Bill Gates, for example, was among the smartest people in business in his era, but he was also among the hardest working. "I never took a day off in my twenties," he said. "Not one.
Well, that's because he never "worked" the way 99.9999% of the people he is lecturing do: he did what he wanted to do, running his own company, bossing other people below him, and making billions whole at it.
If Bill Gates tried working as an employee on someone else's business, with BS bosses and middle managers running you around, and not making anything to write home about, we'd see how fast he would have wanted a day off...
(Not that there's any reliable way to cross-check whether he really "never had a day off" in his 20s, or what his work day actually amounted to)...
Re: How to Work Hard
#526The correlation between working hard and being successful is a necessary but not sufficient cause.
Re: How to Work Hard
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pers…
Good point, thank you for the perspective
Re: How to Work Hard
#528When 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…
I feel the same. I can hardly sit through an entire two-hour movie or play a video game without feeling like I should be doing something else. I cannot feel good about myself if I cannot sense that I'm making progress learning a skill, and am stuck for hours looking down at a blank page as a result. But what's dangerous for me is that this alarm system does not trigger consistently. I might spend too much time on HN,…
I try to have hobbies outside of programming that still feel productive, either due to a social, health, or simply intellectual aspect.
BJJ hits all three for me.
Re: How to Work Hard
#529When 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…
I had a similar realization. My inner desire had weird bits of fear and narcissism at its core. When that side of me cracked the desire to perform vanished. I did do some math after that (mostly to asses brain damage after health issues): i could do some new stuff, and did enjoy it.. but something changed, there need to be solid reasons: either aesthetical (a sudden epiphany that I need to study topology) or social for me to go into workhorse mode.
Another thing is that I also realized that crushing is not progressing.. so very often I understood things without any effort, what it took is for my brain to accept an idea more than anything else.. so I stopped forcing things, I simply walk around ideas and let things come and go.
All in all.. I also believe that is simply biology talking.. when young all you care is being the best, with age your focus spreads over other people (SO, kids, family)
Re: How to Work Hard
#530I think the Hamming piece that circulates here infrequently is very insightful:
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
> Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!
> What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.
On the other hand, I would also recommend caution here -- I strongly believe that some people simply have a much higher capacity/tolerance for work. John Carmack appears to have been able to sustain 80-hour weeks without burning out. I can't. I don't feel bad about this gap. This observation is pretty mundane; it's exactly the same way that the average person's psyche or physique simply can't tolerate the training workload of an olympic athlete.
"Work harder" might be the right advice for someone who has excess capacity that they are not using. It might be terrible advice for someone who is already trending towards burnout working 50-hour weeks when their capacity is 40-hour weeks. There's an element of self-knowledge required to honestly evaluate yourself and determine exactly how capable you are. (Of course -- push yourself sometimes. You might surprise yourself. I personally think it's a good experience to have pushed up against burnout on a project I care about, to know what my limits are. But I don't aspire to ride that line in perpetuity.)