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How to Work Hard

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Work Hard

#931

Post by TrackerFF »

Tycho wrote: post #923
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).…

Every time pg puts out a new essay, we get into this privilege bingo stuff. It’s always irrelevant. There’s a huge audience of people who don’t care if their CEO is 300x better paid than they are, or that they didn’t go to an elite school, or that they didn’t have prestigious family connections: what they want to know is how did he work , what can we do to unlock our productive potential, how can we create things tha…

Maybe the way he worked is also a product of his environment, and could thus be dependent on things like wealth, family/genetics, upbringing, network, etc.?

Re: How to Work Hard

#932

Post by BLKNSLVR »

westoncb wrote: post #835
Andy_G11 wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work is a drug and I seriously think it triggers some sort of endorphin response in the same way that exercise does. Unfortunately, many white collar types of work are insular and while you are sitting on front of a screen getting a buzz about solving little problems, or even quite big ones for specific issues, the world is moving on. It is possible that you may even be compromising your career by being good at the t…

I'll second the advice to take up a sport or other physical activity. Easiest for me to get going with was 'body weight fitness' aka calisthenics, since all I needed was my apartment + youtube videos + time/practice. It took me a while to turn it into a regular habit, but now the effect on my mood + energy is a night/day change. Wish I'd made this happen years ago. A last tip on it: if it's un-fun, doesn't stick, etc…

Might I suggest healthy / healthier eating to go along with physical activity and fitness.

Eating more healthily stabilises energy levels which makes physical activity less challenging to 'start'.

Re: How to Work Hard

#933

Post by rustyboy »

sjg007 wrote: post #711
rustyboy wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you tried volunteering?

You know, I once read, or was told, that volunteering is a great way to get out of your head. In fact I spent a good amount of time before traveling doing so and really enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to getting back to stationary life to get more involved in it again.

Have you had good experiences volunteering?

Re: How to Work Hard

#934

Post by hundt »

zz865 wrote: post #479

Does PG ever spend time with his children? I always feel I should be working harder which makes spending time with family difficult.

One possibility is that he "works hard" at that, too, e.g. by consciously thinking about what the best things to do with them are and endeavoring to spend as much as possible doing them. Perhaps if you internalize the idea that spending time with your family is in fact work, of a different but also valuable nature, then you will not find it as difficult.

Re: How to Work Hard

#935

Post by markus_zhang »

stryker7001 wrote: post #887
markus_zhang wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same feeling, out of the fact that I have not achieved anything I want in my life so far and I can't adjust my targets according to my shortcomings. Everytime I take a vacation I feel bored from the 2nd or 3rd day and want to _do something_. Maybe I can indulge myself in one night of games/movies but the second night I'd definitely feel very uneasy. And frankly the older I am, the stronger the feeling is.…

maybe its time to be honest with yourself. you don't have the drive to achieve something big. you watch movies as your big night to relax. do something better. who feels accomplished after watching a movie. cmon. the amount of people on this site that lie to themselves is too much.

I wish I could do so because I really want to go over those 4-500 games in my backlog and stream them for fun. It's an impulse that I can't control.

Re: How to Work Hard

#936

Post by helen___keller »

markus_zhang wrote: post #672
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…

>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, dream about programming, then wake up and continue programming just where I left off. This is such a great experience. I wish…

> This is such a great experience. I wish I could study at CMU on-site and experience all this. I'm an old horse still kicking :P

In truth, it was a great experience, it was just also the worst experience of my life. It's a little tough to explain but, in the end it comes down to personal expectations and mental health.

I often miss the work itself. A single problem set at CMU felt more interesting, impactful, and substantial than a multiple months-long project at a corporate job. Professors typically give you starter code that's ready to start working on "the meat" of the problem - here's a C++ project that loads a 3d geometry and renders it but the key function in rendering isn't implemented. Now go write a raytracer. Now go write a typechecker. Implement "malloc". Take this efficient sequential algorithm and design a parallel version that's provably more efficient, and implement it in functional code.

The big problem is that the pacing was brutal and inescapable and for many - such as myself - failure was not an option. When you don't get to sleep on sundays, wednesdays, and thursdays, every single week for a few months, all while dealing with the anxiety that maybe doing your best still isn't going to be good enough, you start to daydream that maybe you'll get hit by a car finally have an excuse to take a break.

Re: How to Work Hard

#937

Post by Tycho »

TrackerFF wrote: post #931
Tycho wrote: post #923

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time pg puts out a new essay, we get into this privilege bingo stuff. It’s always irrelevant. There’s a huge audience of people who don’t care if their CEO is 300x better paid than they are, or that they didn’t go to an elite school, or that they didn’t have prestigious family connections: what they want to know is how did he work , what can we do to unlock our productive potential, how can we create things tha…

Maybe the way he worked is also a product of his environment, and could thus be dependent on things like wealth, family/genetics, upbringing, network, etc.?

And those could also be good topics to explore. There’s room for different types of introspection and self-reflection. But from the perspective of how can we learn from or emulate or find proxies for the benefits of these other factors, not starting from the preposterous notion that Graham is writing self-serving screeds to hoodwink us.

Re: How to Work Hard

#938

Post by brnt »

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…

The protestant work ethic: it's a real thing, and it makes real victims.

Re: How to Work Hard

#939

Post by silent_cal »

The "hard work" meme always made me feel awful, and I never knew why until I read "Leisure: the Basis of Culture". It's a philosophical book that explains the origin of this impulse to work for work's sake. It's a modern phenomenon, and it's not good.

Re: How to Work Hard

#940

Post by jodrellblank »

I often think about this The Onion article[1]: https://www.theonion.com/97-year-old-dies-unaware-of-being-v...

A tragedy that she never discovered her violin talent. All that life and she never wowed audiences or had a TV show special or met the Pope. All she had were these poxy supportive family, friends, and community experiences.

Who could be satisfied with merely that?

[1] it's fictional/satire, just to be clear.

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