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How to Work Hard

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Work Hard

#731

Post by varispeed »

rgifford wrote: post #690

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).…

> Having an income 300:1 your lowest paid employee is disturbing

I can imagine how and why communist revolutions were so "successful". This ratio simply shows theft from the workers. Probably, if we don't get a regulation in that area, so that let's say the maximum ratio could be no more than 10:1 and heavily tax capital gains, dividends and other means that privilege class use to extract value without having to work for it, this history will repeat itself. In some western countries, extreme left parties gain huge support, because people are simply fed up of reading that e.g. Amazon got another record year while they themselves have to sleep in a tent because they cannot afford paying rent.

Re: How to Work Hard

#732

Post by nonbirithm »

rustyboy wrote: post #518
nonbirithm wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Your description here, and others, eerily match my own angst with 'being productive'. As someone who has spent covid traveling the States in an RV i've come to realize that I don't know what I really like doing that's not work (for example I enjoy, but have no deep passion for, outdoors recreation). Instead I spend hours aggressively reading and writing reviews on books because that feeling, 'being productive' is the…

Like you, I was very recently considering doing some kind of traveling. I don't know if it would be in an RV or other vehicle. I'm still on the fence however; it would be the most radical thing I will have ever done with my life.

I understand that just traveling isn't really a solution to my problems, but I feel like my life at present is too sterile and I don't have much to say. Some writers say that first-hand experience is valuable in creating new ideas. Maybe I just need more experience.

It's like when I read the passage in Kerouac's On The Road where the protagonist wakes up in a motel and realizes he's farther away from home than he's ever been. I feel like, if I choose to write for fun, I don't think I can write properly without experiencing that kind of thing myself (though opinions may vary between people). That's at least true for everything fictional I've written so far, despite how little I've actually written.

If that doesn't work then I could find something else like working abroad, provided I have enough contacts to help me, but I struggle with that sort of thing. I also wanted to find some people I feel comfortable keeping in touch with, though I haven't quite put in enough effort to reach that point.

Because about all my therapist does is sympathize with the things I talk about (such as the issues in my parent comment) I don't think much real change is going to come out of that relationship; it would only keep me sane. That carries its own value, but I feel that there's something more I'm missing. This is the kind of thing that I have to get my hands dirty in order to have any hope of fixing it.

Re: How to Work Hard

#733

Post by ipnon »

rgifford wrote: post #723
ipnon wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all hardworking and talented people become successful, but all successful people are talented and hardworking. Some people are born with better chances than others, but we should strive to make a society where at least most people are born with a good chance.

> ...all successful people are talented and hardworking. I doubt it. Most measures of economic mobility show this is becoming less and less true -- if it ever was. I think believing it is important though.

Suppose someone is average and lazy. They're practically guaranteed to live a life of coasting by from job to job, living paycheck to paycheck, and struggling to get by in America these days. That is not success by my measure.

Re: How to Work Hard

#734

Post by s1artibartfast »

bachmeier wrote: post #498

> It was similar with Lionel Messi. He had great natural ability, but when his youth coaches talk about him, what they remember is not his talent but his dedication and his desire to win. I can assure you, there are many kids that practice harder than Messi did when he was young. He is not a great player because of hard work, he is a great player because of luck. I know the VC thing about the importance of hard work.…

You are arguing a completely different point than PG.

PG is talking about the ingredients for "doing great things" and "great work".

You are talking about getting rich. Sometimes these are aligned, and sometimes they aren't.

It seems like you are looking for a predictive model of who succeeds in society and who doesn't, while PG is offering life advice on the value of hard work (something within an individual's control) - a different topic.

Re: How to Work Hard

#735

Post by selfmodruntime »

pauldickwin wrote: post #623
jmrm wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time we read or hear that quote, we have to remember that Gates also lose and win a lot of money playing poker in university, so there was also time for non-work related tasks :-)

Poker can be considered work. If you actually truly learn to play it, it teaches you a lot about people, emotions, thinking ahead several steps, probability, and risk and reward.

Talk about moving goalposts..

Re: How to Work Hard

#736

Post by AnimalMuppet »

abhinavsharma wrote: post #717
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…

Having been through CMU and YC, I think while this piece makes sense for the average person, for someone who's been to CMU it's very easy to read this with a re-traumatizing reaction of stop-glorifying-working-to-the-bone. CMU and YC were maybe the 2 hardest working environments I've been in, but CMU SCS was just plain more hours of staying awake, more implicit peer pressure, less mature peer support systems (mostly…

I didn't go to CMU. But to me, as I read this essay, that was balanced by the "quit when you're too tired to do your best work". That's not working-to-the-bone. That's working hard, and then stopping.

Now, someone who went to CMU may be too traumatized to hear that, but PG did say that...

Re: How to Work Hard

#737

Post by dempsey »

bachmeier wrote: post #498

> It was similar with Lionel Messi. He had great natural ability, but when his youth coaches talk about him, what they remember is not his talent but his dedication and his desire to win. I can assure you, there are many kids that practice harder than Messi did when he was young. He is not a great player because of hard work, he is a great player because of luck. I know the VC thing about the importance of hard work.…

You have to put yourself in a position to get lucky. Doesn’t mean that you will.

Re: How to Work Hard

#738

Post by danielmarkbruce »

Is anyone else surprised there isn't more discussion of focus? I know many people (myself included) who work hard but on too many things simultaneously and the results aren't as good as folks who seem to just keep plodding along on one thing. Two of my friends who are extremely successful seem less interested in the field they are in, and while intelligent not outrageously so, and don't work super hard. But they just keep at one thing without distraction. Over 10-15 years it's added up. And it's not an easy thing to do. Sticking at one thing 50 hours a week for 10 years is intolerably boring for many people.

Re: How to Work Hard

#739

Post by 908087 »

ipnon wrote: post #715
rgifford wrote: post #690

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).…

Not all hardworking and talented people become successful, but all successful people are talented and hardworking. Some people are born with better chances than others, but we should strive to make a society where at least most people are born with a good chance.

> all successful people are talented and hardworking

This doesn't even remotely align with the reality I've witnessed in my lifetime, at least as far as financial success goes.

Re: How to Work Hard

#740

Post by rgifford »

CheezeIt wrote: post #713
rgifford wrote: post #690

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).…

It isn’t, obviously, because look at the example of Bill Gates: starting a business as a 20-year-old college dropout puts you at a big disadvantage compared to people with more life experience.

Take a look at the faces on the Forbes list and get back to me. Just how white, male and western are they exactly?

It's not that Gates wasn't smart or hardworking. It's just that it's easy to be hardworking and ambitious when you had books growing up, proper nutrition, when your parents stayed together, when you're in good health, when you got tutors and went to great schools, when you were engaged in extracurriculars, when you lived in an affluent society, when your parents were well connected, and on and on and on.

Are his contributions to humanity worth 60B+? Scientific discovery springs up in a bunch of places simultaneously and organically. I have to assume his contribution to society would've too, maybe with a smaller amount of value extracted to his personal fortune?

He's a philanthropist now, so that's good. I would be too the way social and political tides are turning. Funny how philanthropic the wealthy become. Even Epstein.

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