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How to Work Hard

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Work Hard

#751

Post by BeetleB »

bhupy wrote: post #379
tidydata wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having children means sharing your marshmallows. It’s also a lot easier to chase a kid in your 20s than your 30s. It’s also maturing, enjoyable, and spending time with them is the best part of the day. Not something many people say about work! Maybe when the work is truly meaningful (I wouldn’t know). The notion that people need to work through their 20s for this unknown future prize is silly and wasteful. Spending t…

> 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 if you actually have a clear view of what a desired end goal looks like (it could be anything: a house with a yard in the Bay Area, enough money to retire early, etc etc), it can be entirely reasonable to defer gratification.

The one thing I often don't find people discussing is that you may actually achieve your goals and find them not at all worth the effort.

I'd put a lower bound of at least 50% likelihood that the goal you seek is not the goal you'll be happy with if you achieve it. Of course, you won't know until you get there.

I have goals - I hope I attain them and I do work towards them. But keeping the above in mind, I will try to ensure that my present life is also on the positive. Even if I attain my goal and find it worthless, my time/life would not have been wasted.

Re: How to Work Hard

#752

Post by klyrs »

quacked wrote: post #640
WalterSear wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, I've been burnt out too many times now, for too long. Every job now ends in burn out and takes 6+ months to recover from before I can start looking for another job. This time, however, feels different - it never felt insurmountable like this before. I can't work on my own stuff, can't level up my skills, not sure how to get back to that. I suspect that my situation is likely common among aging coders a…

Why not work a service job for a while? There's no delayed gratification in bartending or waiting tables. Show up, clock in, serve drinks, go home. It's not easy, but the success conditions are clear, and when you're done you can completely forget about it until it's time to go in again.

This is something I've considered, as I'm in a similar situation to OC. With a PhD, I feel certain expectations about my career haven't been met. Publications dropped off, I'm not even sure I could pass an undergrad exam in my field of expertise anymore... so I look overqualified but feel underqualified. I'm nervous about unexplained gaps in my career because I regularly see that as a reason not to interview a candidate. But a service job? All I can hear is my judgy coworkers laughing at a resume with recent non-technical work.

Re: How to Work Hard

#753

Post by an_opabinia »

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…

> On these days I'd typically try playing a video game (my hobby before college)… wasting time… hard work was not healthy

It sounds like playing video games was your medicine, and denying it from yourself traded “wasting time” for something worse, like bad anxiety, which you don’t have to get into.

It’s obnoxious that the Paul Graham culture targets video games. The alternative medicine is always worse.

Of course, what he’s omitting isn’t some nuanced take on what is and is not wasting time. He’s omitting that he doesn’t give a fuck about hard work that isn’t about making money.

Re: How to Work Hard

#754

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: How to Work Hard

#755

Post by abhinavsharma »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #736
abhinavsharma wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's sensible, but it's an extremely difficult thing to build concrete awareness for when you're so deeply in a problem space that often your best ideas just pop up from your subconscious.

There's also ways some kind of work you can be doing for any given energy level that adds up to your end goal.

Do you have good advanced strategies for knowing how to identify when you're too tired to do work in complex scenarios. Always happy to absorb more of those :)

I should also clarify that I think this essay is written with the best intentions. I also think there's a specific audience that can very easily misinterpret it. You're not in it, which is great!

Re: How to Work Hard

#756

Post by acscott »

WalterSear wrote: post #617
throwawayboise wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just burned out. I hope you have some financial cushion and can take some time to just do nothing. Or try gardening, or woodworking, or something really different that can be personally rewarding with no pressure to meet anyone else's expectations. With time you should heal.

Unfortunately, I've been burnt out too many times now, for too long. Every job now ends in burn out and takes 6+ months to recover from before I can start looking for another job. This time, however, feels different - it never felt insurmountable like this before. I can't work on my own stuff, can't level up my skills, not sure how to get back to that. I suspect that my situation is likely common among aging coders a…

I do not know your situation, but my observation is high-performance requires high-maintenance.

Also, see this article: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32056943/

Anything else I might suggest might sound like an advertisement, but apply your skills in software to what's required for your high-maintenance needs.

Re: How to Work Hard

#757

Post by dharmaturtle »

an_opabinia wrote: post #753
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…

> On these days I'd typically try playing a video game (my hobby before college)… wasting time… hard work was not healthy It sounds like playing video games was your medicine, and denying it from yourself traded “wasting time” for something worse, like bad anxiety, which you don’t have to get into. It’s obnoxious that the Paul Graham culture targets video games. The alternative medicine is always worse. Of course, wh…

Do you think he writes essays to make money?

Re: How to Work Hard

#758

Post by RC_ITR »

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.

The Bill Gates Mythology in this essay is a bit odd though. No doubt a hard worker, but the claim

>"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."

doesn't align with the facts that have recently emerged about him. [1] Maybe PG should examine selection bias and self-reporting bias a bit more before making the claim he does here.

[1]https://nypost.com/2021/05/10/bill-gates-womanizer-held-nude...

Re: How to Work Hard

#759

Post by KerrickStaley »

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).…

> Take a look at the top 10 highest valued YC startups. All their founders came from schools with less than 10% acceptance rates.

This is not true. AirBnB is the top valued company that went through YC [1]. AirBnB was founded by Brian Chesky among others. Brian Chesky went to the Rhode Island School of Design [2]. The RISD had an acceptance rate of 20% in 2020.

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Chesky [3] https://www.risd.edu/about

Re: How to Work Hard

#760

Post by _carbyau_ »

d0m3 wrote: post #581
devchix wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can hardly sit through an entire two-hour movie or play a video game without feeling like I should be doing something else. One summer we rented a beach house, I had delusions of lazing on the beach under a big umbrella, drinks, books, dogs, netflix, music, a endless orgy of entertainment and sunny weather. I went stir-crazy in about half a day, there's only so much lazing about I can do, after 2 movies I thought…

Going on vacation doesn't mean doing nothing. Like you I don't understand how/why people do this. I think it's about doing something different. Travel, visit, explore, camp, hike, do sport, meet new people, share that with family/friends or not.

For me it is about the approach. I like to plan very little. Plan something, but not very much.

Holiday goals, simply to have somewhere to go. They don't matter if you don't do them.

As you get to that goal, you take time to look around, maybe duck into a place here, do an activity over there. Or maybe not, and simply let life roll on by as you stroll to your destination.

I have gone hot air ballooning, day hiking, snorkelling with turtles. Wander over, have a chat, book it in for the next day or two. It is then the goal for that day and might lead to something else.

For me having a list of "places to be, things to do" means I have to be switched on, getting there and doing that, and if I don't then I have failed.

Holidays is noFail time. Allow serendipity to take charge.

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