Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Work Hard

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

841–850 of 1001 posts

Re: How to Work Hard

#841

Post by emodendroket »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #604
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.…

Your comment about VCs makes no sense. If a VC wants you to work hard because that’s how a VC gets rich, that means that working hard leads to building a successful company. If it were purely luck, why would the VC care if you worked hard or not?

I think the criticism is not so illogical. Let's just assume your company has a 5% chance of wild success and you can double it by working insanely hard (I think these numbers are likely generous, but easier to take round numbers for the sake of argument). It is in this case simultaneously true that it's in VCs' interest to convince you to work very hard and also that it's probably not in your interest. It only makes sense for them to promote because the one or two lucky groups will make up for all the duds.

Re: How to Work Hard

#842

Post by rgifford »

jdross wrote: post #777
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).…

I was a mover and then I ran a moving company. I love movers and the culture of people who work with their hands. They tend to be much funnier than office workers. I realize yours is a common reality, but it's not been my experience. I always felt surrounded by underdogs, and our privilege mostly came from former underdogs choosing to bet on me. My parents are middle class New Yorkers. I went to a public high school,…

I appreciate you sharing your story! It's cool to hear about your success and I definitely understand that it's different than some might think of it. Congrats! I'll try not criticize your narrative or how you frame it and focus on sharing how I think about mine instead.

I'm American, white, male, and got into an American college. I studied economics in school, got super stressed about my debt and income inequality. So I came to SF after college, doubled down on my debt with a bootcamp, and got a high paying engineering job. It was a big, stressful risk and paid off. I paid all my student debt off in a few months. My life has been an absolute dream since. I would never, never in a million years say this:

> ...our privilege mostly came from former underdogs choosing to bet on me

From working with those guys at the moving company I can tell you, seemingly small missteps lead to irreversible stagnation in traditional measures of success (career, achievement, wealth, etc). Let's cast all that aside though and just focus on demographics. Americans represent ~4% of the world's population. About 32% of Americans have graduated college. ALREADY I'm part of ~1% of the world's population and we haven't even included white/male. And I bet you like what half of SF engineers and YC founders fall in that population? Just incredibly disproportionate.

During the Great Depression stocks didn't rebound for 20 years. Over the last 20-40 years interest rates have steadily declined, ROI across the board has shrunk, and VC funds have proved highly profitable. All of that means that the last 20 years have been gangbusters for VC funding, SF, and software engineering. Had the next long protracted economic crisis hit during my job search, what would've happened? I was job searching for 6 months before I got my first job offer at a doctor's salary. What even is that!?

I worked hard, I was lucky, and I was successful. I don't even pretend to understand the cause and effect there.

Re: How to Work Hard

#843

Post by huachimingo »

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…

Read Byung-Chul Han, he has some insights on this.

Re: How to Work Hard

#844

Post by imgabe »

fchu wrote: post #272

There is something fascinating about this article, and it's not the tips about how to properly work hard, which aren't new or particularly insightful (otherwise reasonable and well summarized). It's the fact that throughout the article, hard work is an implied imperative in life, the main thing to do (otherwise it brings a "feeling of disgust"), without questioning if that's healthy, right, or so absolute. Maybe inst…

You should work hard if there’s something important to you that you want to achieve. If there’s nothing that you particularly want to accomplish then there isn’t much point in working hard.

Re: How to Work Hard

#845

Post by sn41 »

huachimingo wrote: post #843
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…

Read Byung-Chul Han, he has some insights on this.

Thank you for this suggestion. As an Asian, I have always found the American fetish for "passion for work" disconcerting. My passion is for poetry and grammar. Unfortunately, in Asia, you really can't feed your family on this. Your career is distinctly "what you are forced to do". So it is a sense of duty and self-sacrifice that forces me to work, and I would gladly avoid any unnecessary bullshit work and virtue signalling, so that I can read fiction and poetry.

Re: How to Work Hard

#846

Post by void_mint »

plantsbeans wrote: post #840
void_mint wrote: post #536

I came here to rip apart this post and PG for propping up hustle culture bullshit, but am actually pleasantly surprised at his takes. I would reword most of his post to be more about "being engaged" instead of "working hard", because "work" has so many flavors and misconceptions. > My limit for the harder types of writing or programming is about five hours a day. Whereas when I was running a startup, I could work all…

It’s a frustrating essay, because it comes close to having a helpful message. A phrase like “being engaged” seems closer to what he tries to get across, but a lot of young people will probably mostly take from this essay that they need to hustle, which is the kind of useful advice you’ll hear from a high school guidance counselor.

One must not forget that PG has an agenda to push just like every other influencer. I believe he was specifically aware of his use of hustle culture language.

Re: How to Work Hard

#847

Post by human »

“ Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off. I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm working hard, but I can be sure I'm getting nowhere when I'm not, and it feels awful.”

I recognize this feeling, but oh god, it’s a perfect recipe for a burnout.

Re: How to Work Hard

#848

Post by rgifford »

rgifford wrote: post #842
jdross wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a mover and then I ran a moving company. I love movers and the culture of people who work with their hands. They tend to be much funnier than office workers. I realize yours is a common reality, but it's not been my experience. I always felt surrounded by underdogs, and our privilege mostly came from former underdogs choosing to bet on me. My parents are middle class New Yorkers. I went to a public high school,…

I appreciate you sharing your story! It's cool to hear about your success and I definitely understand that it's different than some might think of it. Congrats! I'll try not criticize your narrative or how you frame it and focus on sharing how I think about mine instead. I'm American, white, male, and got into an American college. I studied economics in school, got super stressed about my debt and income inequality.…

One other thing, last I checked one third of the world doesn't have access to clean water daily.

Facts like these should be a mandatory preface to any success stories, tips, or tricks shared by the ultra-wealthy. The preface should also include this xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/1827/

Re: How to Work Hard

#849

Post by musingsole »

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…

> having two parents who don’t suck, is a regular American baseline that public school kids experience

Is it? Not from my experience, but I wish every community could boast such "baselines".

Re: How to Work Hard

#850

Post by emadabdulrahim »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #725
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).…

> What if most of serious wealth and success is decided at birth? There is no 'what if'. It's just a fact. You can pretty accurately predict what a child will be able to attain in life by looking at their zip code.

While I'm not naive to not see that life is inherently unequal, I completely disagree with you.

I know plenty people, including myself, who not only had the wrong zip code, they didn't even have a zip code. Somehow they made it. You can get lucky after you're born. And if you work hard, you can increase your luck odds.

Also, why zip code is the axiom here? I'd say having good parents is more significant than being born in the right zip code. Who's to say?

Post reply on HN