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How to Work Hard

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Work Hard

#811

Post by heavyset_go »

CheezeIt wrote: post #789
rgifford wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 extracurricular…

Having good health, proper nutrition, and extracurriculars in an affluent society, i.e. having two parents who don’t suck, is a regular American baseline that public school kids experience. Gates’s particular advantages were being smart and having access to computers in high school in his day, which countered the bad luck of not being born a few years earlier such that he’d encounter computing in college with the sam…

> Gates’s particular advantages were being smart and having access to computers in high school

You're forgetting something important[1] about Bill Gates' mom:

> Her tenure on the national board's executive committee is believed to have helped Microsoft, based in Seattle, at a crucial time. In 1980, she discussed her son's company with John Opel, a fellow committee member, and the chairman of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other IBM executives. A few weeks later, IBM took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer.

More about this here[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates#Career

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/how-bill-gates-mother-influe...

Re: How to Work Hard

#812

Post by quickthrower2 »

fungiblecog wrote: post #778

The problem with these kind of essays is that - like the whole 10,000 hours thing - people take away the "Work" part but miss that the "work" has to be intentional. There's no point putting in 14 hour days on busywork that gets you nowhere. Unfortunately that's where a lot of people end up.

Username checks out

Re: How to Work Hard

#813

Post by quickthrower2 »

Just want to comment to say it’s totally ok not to work hard (nebulous definition but let’s say hard = forgetting your mum’s birthday hard)

I think articles like this imply (whether intentional or not) that our existence need to be driven towards some big goal.

Reading a lot of this worldview on HN and other similar places can make one feel that living a normal life is somehow not enough. That’s the trap I hope people don’t fall into.

Don’t cargo cult bill gates! If you want to work like a dog, fine, but as long as it’s an internal decision not to please the expectations of others.

Re: How to Work Hard

#814

Post by csallen »

WalterSear wrote: post #605
scandox wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do a lot of sitting quietly, with my mind almost empty of thought. This is a totally natural state. There's nothing wrong with it and if you want a change of mind then I suggest you let it happen. And probably get off social media too.

It's not. It's anhedonia. It feeds on itself. It makes things worse over time. Mindfulness is overprescribed. Having practiced meditation for quite a few years in the past, I'm convinced that it's not good for people that are prone to anhedonic depression.

No solution suggestions here, just curiosity, so feel free to ignore. What does your depression look like in terms of time? Is it constant, or do you get hours/days/weeks/months off? Is it recurring, or is this your first experience? How long has this bout of depression lasted, and what triggered it -- the end of your last job?

I've had a few bouts of depression myself, three to be exact: ages 21, 31, and 34. The've always initially been triggered by some extremely negative emotional experience (e.g. a breakup), but continue for 4-6 months, long after U'm over whatever the initial cause was.

Re: How to Work Hard

#815

Post by Sophistifunk »

When people like PG give this advice, it serves two purposes; makes them feel a little better about everybody they ignored growing up, and makes you feel like maybe you'll be a billionaire one day if you just put in 80 hour weeks for this other billionaire.

You won't.

Re: How to Work Hard

#816

Post by OpieCunningham »

swman wrote: post #625
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.…

Okay, but nobody is going to become anywhere close to Messi without working hard. That's the point. Do you think someone could become Messi by putting in barely any practice or effort? You might get into a team, but you won't be a Messi lol. Be honest with yourself. Obviously luck plays a role, but most people (>90% I'll bet) who are successful in the end get there due to hard work. I could sit on my butt and do noth…

Put it this way: if you’re lucky and work hard, you could be like Messi. If you’re very very lucky and don’t work hard, you may still be like Messi. If you’re unlucky and work hard, you won’t ever be like Messi.

Just ask Babe Ruth, he didn’t work hard like Messi. He was very very lucky to be born with phenomenal talent.

Luck is the critical factor, hard work is secondary, though beneficial in that it decreases (but can never eliminate) the required amount of luck.

Re: How to Work Hard

#817

Post by kylestlb »

rgifford wrote: post #744
ipnon wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What if that someone is average and lazy in their work to devote the rest of their time to their family? What if they raise a bunch of kids that love their parents, care about each other and the world and want to make it better? Would that be success? What if they were molested and use drugs to cope, but live their entire life without molesting anyone else? Would that be success? What if they have serious depression…

Just want to say that I agree with everything you've posted in this thread, and it's always shocking to me that people still believe the prosperity gospel in 2021.

Re: How to Work Hard

#818

Post by bradlys »

sbierwagen wrote: post #807
bradlys wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can do both. The thing is, you can backpack 1 month per year and still work really HARD for 11 months of the year. 1 month is enough to visit 3-4 countries, and have 20 something night out. Over 15 years, that's over 300 night out. Way too much. And you still worked very hard for most of your youth. Wat. 300 nights over 15 years is way too much ? That is utterly insane to me. That means on average, you only wen…

You've "gone out" 300 times in a year? I can't imagine that would leave a person with much functional liver tissue, or you're using "going out" in some unusual way.

I don’t drink. Not everything has to revolve around getting blackout drunk.

Re: How to Work Hard

#819

Post by cma »

lanstin wrote: post #560
jasperry wrote: post #25

Maybe the world also needs people who are not so achievement-driven, who act as a kind of lubricant in the machine of society by making the environment around themselves lighter and more pleasant. And people who are that way should learn to value themselves and not feel guilty for not being as driven as some. A world where everyone is a nose-to-the-grindstone overachiever seems like a pretty dreary one to live in.

And really is Viaweb that big of a deal? He got rich by selling .com in the .com bubble to another .com company. That wasn't so hard at the time. He wrote a good book on Lisp, and used his riches to invest and get richer. None of this seems particularly extraordinary. Does he somehow imagine Dropbox or Viaweb have transformed human experience? He writes a good essay, but he seems overly impressed by his own success.

He has had many successes. He essentially was the first to solve the commercial email spam problem:

http://paulgraham.com/spam.html

If you remember email before and after those techniques were implemented into mail clients of the time, it was night and day.

Re: How to Work Hard

#820

Post by conductr »

RC_ITR wrote: post #758
CheezeIt wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

I don’t see misalignment at all. I see complete irrelevance between that quote and the facts. Why can he not be a womanizing workaholic? They are not mutually exclusive and possibly actually correlated.

Sex lives need to be private or at least not included as judgement of individual as they are not relevant at all to people’s accomplishments in politics, business, academics, or any other facet of an individual’s life.

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