How to Work Hard

Hard agree on this.

People lie all the time and in the direction that can make them virtuous and a bit contrarian. How come that they all love their wife and family is important thing they have (although work is important along with their sacred responsibility of producing jobs and wealth) and then we find out they either treat their partners as inferiors in the relationship, have affairs, have been living in separate houses for years if not decades? To me it is all fine since except in case of abuse, people can all choose how to live our life as they please. But isn't all of that taking advantage of credulous people, like entrepreneurial wannabes when the gospel is not "love your kids", but "work hard"?

Looking back I worked quite hard, as I see it, or very hard, as others might see it, at various stages of my life, but I would not write a propagandistic essay about "working hard". And you know why? Because I see life as full of ambiguities, because I have nothing to sell and I have not a public persona that I am trying to build, defend or that I use to generate views.

When I hear or read "work hard", "hard work", "work ethic", "never give up" and similar memorabilia, I immediately judge the speaker and writer negatively. Maybe it is just me, but I don't like to be sold personas.

He is talking about doing great work, not about becoming rich or successful. You do need luck for your great work to take you places, but your own agency counts for much of your ability to do great work. Plenty of great work will not reap great rewards; it is done because someone feels that it has to be done.

The article isn't wrong or incorrect in itself, but since the definition of "doing great things" once again centers on extreme Bill-Gates-level success, I take issue with two points:

In these extreme examples (Gates, Bezos, Musk, etc) the environment is the true differentiator to go from success to extreme success. Not talent, not working hard. Doing the right thing at the right time in the right environment creates the snowball effect. It still requires hard work, but hard work is not rare or unique. Bezos is about a 100.000 times richer than a "plain" successful millionaire, so surely hard work is not the game changer here.

Success requires hard work, extreme success requires luck or foresight. In the case of Gates clearly luck, as he pretty much missed every single tech trend in the decades to come. He has zero foresight, but I'm sure he worked hard in his most energetic years, like pretty much everybody.

I protest against leaving out the luck factor as these people and their admirers truly believe they are some god-like character, a 1000 times smarter than everybody else.

There has been an entire industry trying to replicate the success of Jobs, for example. As if you can replicate that. You can't replicate any of these outcomes as they are time-bound. You can do exactly what Jobs did and the outcome would be shit, no matter your talent or how hard you work.

The second part of my protest is completely leaving out the enablers of your success: workers. 99.9999% of your wealth in the case of extreme success is delivered by them, not you. Not even mentioning that is classic hero admiration. And this doesn't even go into how often the relation is highly exploitative. We know the issue with Amazon workers, as well as the true reason of Microsoft's success: the merciless elimination of competitors in criminal ways.

Did you find anything about the current post, "How to Work Hard", contentious?

Honestly that'd probably be the one criticism I don't have.. most of the content I've seen is pretty mild-mannered and mundane.

I worked my way through college as a mover (and came out the other side with high 5-figure debt). Many of the older guys I worked with had drug habits. I worked 16-hour days with those guys. They'd get on me for not running up stairs, for packing with too little paper around glass, for setting things down more than once. None wrote articles entitled "How to Work Hard." None knew Warren Buffet as a child (see Gates). None attended the most expensive schools, if they had they certainly wouldn't have chosen to drop out because they got bored or were unfulfilled (see Graham and Zuck). Take a look at the top 10 highest valued YC startups. All their founders came from schools with less than 10% acceptance rates.

Privilege is what I'm getting at. Having an income 300:1 your lowest paid employee is disturbing. Making millions or billions off speculative, debt-fueled VC is disturbing. Proselyting your brand of success is disturbing. Recommendation: every time a founder, investor or businessperson starts to wax poetic on virtue, look for an angle. Why do founders want to appear virtuous and hardworking? Why do we need that from them? How else can they justify making sometimes up to 50% of their companies entire payroll? How emotionally satisfying must it be for Graham and his ilk to tell you why they got what they have?

What if most of serious wealth and success is decided at birth?