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How to Work Hard

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Work Hard

#951

Post by Karsteski »

dejw wrote: post #945
Karsteski wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not gonna lie, this is incredibly ignorant. Just because you cannot appreciate the story telling of games, or the skill/teamwork needed to play competitive games, does not make them a waste of time. The value of time spent is in the eye of the beholder. There are people who burn every evening/weekend playing games, and they are less happy and enriched from it. Equally there are people who spend a lot of time gaming a…

your argument is flawed. in your story gaming could be replaced by drinking or toilet cleaning. as long as you are doing it with friends/strengthening relationships the activity is positive. but that is precisely what gaming is missing! there is nothing wrong with doing a lan party with your buddies, but playing an hour every day of the week your favourite game is just a waste of time. it's highly unlikely that your…

It's odd to me that you're telling me what I am feeling. Regardless, does everything have to be some hyperefficient activity for you?

Re: How to Work Hard

#952

Post by RivieraKid »

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.…

Well to be the best in a very large group of people, you need to max out all of the main factors: luck, talent, hard work. That's just statistics.

I agree with you though. I find it annoying when people play down the role of luck in their success, it's kind of narcissistic. Unconsciously, they like the feeling that they are better than others, and by achieving success, they prove it to themselves. Giving luck too much credit would break this line of reasoning.

Also, one very important but overlooked factor of hard work is that it's highly correlated to the expected reward. It's much easier to work hard at a quickly-growing startup that you co-own, compared to working hard at a regular job that you don't find meaningful. The hard-workers in the former example then think they "deserve" the success because they've been working harder than others, when in fact, they were just lucky.

Re: How to Work Hard

#953

Post by AvocadoCake »

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…

Good health and proper nutrition is the not the baseline, as over 40% of children in the US are overweight, obese, or severely obese [1].

Two parents, let alone parents who "don't suck", is also not the baseline, as 25% of children grow up in single parent households [2].

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity-child-17-18/obe... [2] https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/543941-americas-single-p...

Re: How to Work Hard

#954

Post by RivieraKid »

eloff wrote: post #510
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.…

PG says: > There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, but to do the best work you need all three: you need great natural ability and to have practiced a lot and to be trying very hard. I think that's the fundamental secret to success at anything. If you want to compete at the top level you have to have all three. It's not sufficient to just…

Fundamental secret? I thought this is obvious. Imagine the following simple model. People have 3 normally distributed attributes: luck, talent and laziness, their sum determines succcess. If you generate 1 million people and sort them by success, the top 1000 will be good at all of the 3 attributes

Re: How to Work Hard

#955

Post by soheil »

rgifford wrote: post #884
soheil wrote: post #872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What difference does it make if there were factors they had control over? I suspect grit or tendency to work hard is primarily inherited just like intelligence. So you could also say anyone who works hard is not really doing so by their own doing. I’m not sure what exactly you feel victim of.

Hey Soheil! I'm actually doing really well and my life is awesome. No complaints personally. I'm worried about the future -- my own, yours, my parents, those of the guys I worked with at the moving company, etc. The problem when wage growth stalls for most of the population [1], but wealth grows disproportionately for the wealthy [2] is three-fold: - The wealthy don't spend additional wealth, they invest it. This lea…

I guess you have to balance the harm caused by the "lower velocity of money" as a result of wealthy investing a portion of their earnings vs decreasing the incentives that allow one to become wealthy in the first place thus reducing wealth generation to flatten the inequality. Hasn't this been tried in almost every socialist country in South America?

Re: How to Work Hard

#956

Post by nverno »

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).…

Then we would be living in an alternate dystopian reality.

Has privilege just come to be a catch-all to explain any difference in outcomes? I mean you mention Buffet first, kinda ruins the point you are making here.

As a software engineer, I fail to see what is so impossible about any of the people's origin stories. With a little programming knowledge, a somewhat novel idea, and a laptop anyone could become the next Zuck. They aren't royalty, no special blood requirement anymore.

Re: How to Work Hard

#958

Post by RivieraKid »

Joeri wrote: post #512
pydry wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill Gates wants to be the hero of his own story. He's not going to claim that his success was the result of a few bets that paid off in spectacular fashion, strongarming OEMs and mommy being buddies with the CEO of IBM. It's going to be hard work, spectacular insight, old fashioned grit, persistence in the face of adversity, etc. - all the things Hollywood slavishly worships with either a clichéd montage or a poigna…

Well, who doesn’t want to be seen as the hero in their own story? What I suspect is that it’s a case of “all of the above”. Yes, gates got lucky, but he was also talented, and he worked hard. To be an outlier you have to defy the odds, and luck, talent and grit are different ways of defying.

Me. I try to be objective and honest about everything, including myself.

Re: How to Work Hard

#959

Post by bobobob420 »

bloqs wrote: post #776
bobobob420 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do I have such low conscientiousness?

Your childhood can be key. Your username makes me think you like to play with mind bending drugs that directly interfere with prefrontal cortical motivation.

Awesome thanks for sharing. I think for myself, it might be childhood since I was young I hated being forced to study and do work. Funnily enough I do all my day job while toasted cause its super fun, coding while sober seems so boring. I am trying to train myself to be more conscientious, I don't know why I did not pick it up as a child. My parents tried a lot with tutoring and studying.

Re: How to Work Hard

#960

Post by conductr »

RC_ITR wrote: post #825
conductr wrote: post #820

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because “not taking a day off” and “naked pool parties” are incongruent. Like I said in the parent. No doubt a hard worker, but let’s not mythologize for no reason

Incongruent? I've frequently worked full day and then hosted a pool party in the evening. More often, I've also hosted pool parties in the day time and went on to work 12+ hours afterwards.

I'm left assuming either you've never owned a pool and incorrectly assert that it's a full day activity to host a party or since you seem to want to be a myth buster I could assume it's the "naked" part you see as an issue. This completely ignores the fact that in the '80s, it was not uncommon to do business at strip clubs and a naked pool party is really not much different. So maybe the party was his work that day? He sold software, right?

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