Worth highlighting, for those of you that are skipping through.
Like exercise capacity, one's ability to work hard can also be improved through practice. This doesn't mean pulling all-nighters and chugging caffeine to override the sleepiness, though. It means setting incremental goals to try a little bit harder and then following up with proper rest and recovery.
For example, if you install time tracking software and measure that you spend 3 hours in your code editor every day (a reasonable amount for someone working an 8-hour day, due to time spent reading documentation, in meetings, and other activities), it would be a mistake to set a goal to spend 6 hours in your code editor. You'll get burned out and hate it.
However, if you set a goal to spend 3.5 hours in your code editor every day, you can likely find low-impact ways to make that happen. Maybe you're more efficient with transitioning from meetings back to coding. Or maybe you cut down time spent reading articles on HN or Twitter by 30 minutes and apply it to coding instead.
Over the course of a 5-day work week, that extra 30 minutes per day adds up to almost 3 hours extra work. If your starting point was 3 hours per day, you've basically added an extra work day to your week without giving up much.
I would be careful trying to set up such metrics for yourself.
I can stare for hours at code and not getting anything done. Then away from the screen on a walk or sitting down with pen and paper I solve the problem and implement it in 15 min in code.
My point is, I would focus on a tasklist. Clear things to do at once. (Or in parallel if they are trivial.) Getting things done, not spending time doing things.
Otherwise I agree to your post.
Patience, sensitivity and regularity is my best bet now. Also, it's fairly well known that a lot of ideas and understanding comes outside/after workouts.
ps: this is also true in music (which blends physical and intellectual sides)
edit: Lo and behold my sibling is taking on one of the memes I mentioned. :) If you're working less because you feel it's doing too much in the favor of your employer, and not because you're otherwise going to start becoming less productive because of it, you're probably underworking in the sense outlined here.
There are two kinds of workaholics - the ones who enjoy work and those who suffer from their work.
The article hits on the first kind in the passing
>> Of course, to work hard, it really helps if you enjoy your work.
Working hard when you enjoy your work is easier and might look like workaholism to someone who is definitely not. If work is play, you might play longer & that gets a lot done, because mistakes you throw away don't feel like wasted time.
The workaholic that people knock are the ones who work because it gives them positive feedback they lack in the rest of their lives - from an inattentive parent, disrespectful spouse or demanding children.
My work environment is extremely gamified and well designed to give me great feedback to improve, excellent rewards for performance and throw in some respect of my peers. The home life is Sisyphean in comparison - cook dinner today and it doesn't lie on a progression towards cooking less tomorrow.
It's easy to get sucked into that and work on a death-march, because it feels like progress on a daily basis. That "How we built Internet Explorer" tweet felt very familiar to me, because I would definitely get sucked into a mission like that.
As a pretty hard worker who is very far from workaholic, I strongly disagree. Work hard. It's super important. Put the time in or else you won't progress. But you don't need to go right up to the edge. If you put in solid work reliably for years, other factors will matter so much more than whether you go right up until that point.
I'm not sure there's any real empirical evidence for this in the absolute way you stated it.
There are plenty of highly productive creative people who do 4 hours of highly focused work a day and then spend the rest of their time walking around a garden. If your goal is to produce great lasting work that seems to be a formula that works a lot.
Working up to your limit is useful for other scenarios, like where you want to crank out much more routine work. If you want to get promoted in a structured environment like a big tech company, then this strategy works well.
There are definitely cultures that value working long hours. You see it both in business and in academia, and I'm not aware of any evidence that it's better than the system where you empower workers to focus on as they need to and then take the time they need to recharge.
It does also apply to companies who demand that their workers have bums on seats in an office 8-9 hours a day...
Companies often don't seem to understand that loading employees with meetings and bureaucracy, then wondering why productivity isn't higher, is fairly foolish.
Like my employer...
What's not obvious is to find the line between doing too little and doo too much. There are just too many variables and a lot of nuance to consider.
Even though I know that working all night till 6 am is wrong, I still do this now and then, because work is sometimes addicting.
I need such message from real genius to help me control myself.
On a daily basis, I do so more often than not.
Additionally, I think the obsession over "intelligence" and "natural ability" is vastly overstated, in general. It absolutely helps, and it compounds, to be smart, but a person who "works hard" is infinitely more valuable to their colleagues than a smart person who doesn't, and tries to rely on raw intellect.
My problem, and I wonder if others have this issue as well, is how hard it is to know these things intellectually, and also apply them to my life. I just cannot, for the life of me, maintain a "work hard" mindset. I'm still trying, but I very often fail at this, and its frustrating because I know how valuable it is to being good at what I do.
I'm being a bit hyperbolic here, but the gist of my point is: not everyone who works hard is worth keeping around, especially if their hard work leads to an un-managable mess in the future.
That is, usually these few hard workers are typically the ones responsible for getting a company to profitability precisely because of their GSD attitude. Now that the company has some runway, the architecture and refactoring can proceed.
There's a different sort of hard work involved in achieving deep mastery over something. Reading, researching, building and testing ideas... it takes hard work to become an expert at something, but I guess you're far more likely to see the former type of hard work than this.
Personally, I prefer "work diligently" over "work hard" because the most useful mental model for me is that it's a marathon, not a sprint. The idea is to go far, not fast.
I can't sit down at a piano and play a song, not because I'm incapable of it, but because I've never put any effort into learning how.
That may be true for something like digging a ditch, but IQ is needed to make those necessary logical leaps for more abstract matters. Only hard work is like adding 1+2+3....n. Having a high IQ is knowing the shortcut to sum it instantly.
The common thread is "work hard", not "be smart", but people obsess over intelligence/natural gifts, and consistently underestimate the "ditch diggers".
Jobs was a ditch digger.
Gates was a ditch digger.
Musk is a ditch digger.
PG is a ditch digger.
Tao is a ditch digger.
Jordan was a ditch digger.
Woods was a ditch digger.
Carlsen is a ditch digger.
Some (all) of them also are naturally gifted, but their success is due to their ability to "work hard", or at least that's what I've read them say over and over again. Maybe I and they are all wrong about it, I'm open to that possibility, but theres a consistent theme that every successful person I can think of repeats when asked, and it's some variation on "work hard".
Fact of the matter is that we make progress when collective effort is put onto something. Not everyone of us is a Terry Tao, or John von Neumann, but we can at least exploit our comparable advantage and help those better than us. Sucking your ego sucks but coming to terms with our inherent limits is freeing.
1) Knowing when to apply previous experience is a skill that requires work and practice. 2) Someone else knowing a shortcut that I don't know means they worked hard when I was not observing them.
I had an art teacher that pointed this out about Picasso. He got famous for his Cubist/Abstract work, but he was actually an excellent realist.
I'm tired of hearing "work hard". Very often, working hard does not lead to success. It sure as shit didn't work out that way for me. There are many people who do not work hard and make tons of money in things like NFT, crypto, securities, office politics, scams, etc. It seems like luck is the shared variable... of which I have none.
It's been a while since I looked into it, but last time I checked, I couldn't find any evidence behind "hard work".
This article kind of sums it up: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-success-come...
> If you wake up in the morning full of vim and vigor, bounding out the door and into the world to take your shot, you didn't choose to be that way
Your coworkers that come into work early ready to crush through the workload in anticipation, and when the day is over, can't find the will to stop working, because frankly there is nothing outside their work that they are more passionate and excited about so they keep working. Well they are not finding it hard to do so, it's the opposite in fact, they'll find it hard to not work and do other things.
In your case, I think the conclusion is important as well:
> What if you've been unlucky in life? There should be consolation in the fact that studies show that what is important in the long run is not success so much as living a meaningful life. And that is the result of having family and friends, setting long-range goals, meeting challenges with courage and conviction, and being true to yourself.
Success is overated, and I've known people where success actually hid a deeper loss of enjoying life without self-judgement and constant comparison to others.
You need luck to not have broken families and friends. Sustaining a family is so fragile these days.
So if you can't load the dice what can you do to get those high rolls? Well, maybe you can roll the dice more often (try more avenues, work harder), maybe the dice aren't all equal and you can observe many dice and pick the ones that happen to be paying out higher than you would expect if they were truly fair (market research), or something else.. I think people write about all those things not to claim that the dice rolls don't matter but because there are things that are both controllable and matter.
I agree with the burnout though, it can be hard to keep playing when you feel like a high roll is "due" but can't get one. I feel like some part of this is how we are wired, to solve the multi-armed bandit problems that life present us.
But what do I know, my rolls haven't been very high. I wish you luck in beating the burnout.
The thing is it is impossible to know if will be lucky or not. So the only way to know the truth is to roll the dice.
Also, if you're not really motivated by anything working hard can get you, then there's no point in hard work. Most people hate hard work and it's not worth it for them, hence they coast doing the minimum that doesn't get them fired. It's a perfectly valid life strategy, although the American religion of workoholism treats it as heresy (while millions of people practice it, feeling unnecessary guilt doing it).
- Your genetics - Your intrinsic abilities - Your intrinsic tastes - Your parents - The teachers you had - The time you were born in - The environment you were born in - Etc.
So for example for mathematics you'd assume you need some predisposed genetics, you need some good education towards it, access to books and material, you need to be someone who loves doing math, you need to be in a position to have the time to dedicate to math (so access to food, shelter, etc.)
Since all these things are out of your control, the question becomes, what if you bad lucked in all of them, can you still, through sheer hard work, make a valuable contributions to the field of mathematics (and not by luck of hitting your head, or stumbling randomly on a key fact), but simply from your constant effort towards it?
But I'd say I think the author presupposes you've been mostly lucky already, and is talking about how to go beyond that luck, and achieve even more gains with what you do have control over.
Picking the right problems to work on is also necessary, and difficult to get right. Worming in on a hard unsolved problem that is eventually incredibly important is the scientific equivalent of winning the lottery, and we know lots of examples of this. Recently, mRNA vaccines, neural networks, and the twin primes conjecture come to mind. But there are doubtless many, many other examples of people working on a possibly-fundamental problem which never actually break through, and we never hear about it.
But I would argue it's still worth making a concerted effort to identify good problems to solve, and specifically thinking about what makes a good 'hard problem.' It's much easier to make progress in an under-studied area, simply because the low hanging fruit haven't been eaten yet. The danger, of course, is that understudied things may be understudied for a reason: they're not actually relevant to anything else, or there's some secret impediment and many others have already failed.
By contrast, cracking away at ridiculous subproblems from the last generation of academics is almost always a dead end, imo; you're competing with people who already know the field extremely well, the low hanging fruit has been picked, and the obvious roads to relevance have probably already been well-explored. Unsolved problems in a long-standing discipline are often unsolved because the right tools are missing or it's impossible within the existing paradigm... Or the problem is just irrelevant, relative to the amount of effort needed to solve it.
ramble ramble ramble
It can be math, biology, coding, music, woodworking, anything. If you’re convinced that you’re quite good at what you’re doing and you only work 9-5 on your skills and projects, then it means you’re either developing crud apps, or you’re ignorant of what you actually don’t know. Again both are perfectly fine if that’s all you want from your career or hobby, but if it comes to questioning working hard in a generalized sense at the least you should preface it with your choices in this regard.
- Everyone in the USA
This seems counter-intuitive, because Tao's blog is by far the least accessible of those above 3 blogs on a technical level. There's almost no reason to visit Tao's blog if you don't have a graduate maths degree.
There are constructive, well-informed comments on Marginal Revolution, but I wouldn't call them the majority...
Also there's plenty of shows and news about MU, SSC etc. I'm also surprised that Tao's rather specifically niche blog attracts such comments. Is it possible that the other blogs are just better moderated and Professor Tao doesn't need or care to?
Those other sides also tend to have a fair share of low quality comments as well. A lot of troll bait or off topic stuff. I just don't read the comments, often I find that I am not missing out on much by not doing so.
Looking at my RSS feed, I'd also endorse Andrew Gelman's blog (applied stats), A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (history), and Applied Divinity Studies (rationalism à la ACX).
Trying to motivate a cleaner, assembly operative, driver, cashier, warehouse operative, packer and other low level workers with it is like telling them to go fuck themselves.
It sounds like bullshit. It is bullshit. No one fucking loves these jobs. There's nothing to aspire to. Working hard means just killing yourself faster (but not fast enough).
The rich have been telling the poor how to live their lives forever.
Jesus being the exception. (He wasen't rich)
I only get offended by wealthy boys giving their midlife, or old age, success speech
Or, thinking they can advise on art, philosophy, or writing, because they have a mouthpiece.
Every one of them leaves out the emphatic wealthy father who knows how difficult it is to make it big in a very competitstive system.
Realistically, at mid-to-senior level, I've already seen all the significant changes to class that I will likely see. Hard work isn't even the main way to get ahead in the corporate world. Politics and social BS will have way more sway, and besides that, you just have to ensure that you don't have a reputation for incompetence (however exceptionalism is optional). Your mileage may vary, but in any case, hard work only gets you so far.
While I might be able to squeeze out an extra 10 or 20 grand here and there, salaries don't really go down, and it's not likely for that incremental improvement to have much of an effect. You know what will effect me though? Sacrificing the little personal time I do have.
It will only make me crazier and less healthy, by causing me to skip self-care and socialization. Something has to give, and I will not be seeing my friends, skip working out and cooking, or my house will be a disaster. I've done the math and 40 hours plus cooking/cleaning/exercise, basically yields 0 free hours, and whatever remains has to be use to relax or hang with friends.
It's just a bigger middle finger to the kind of low paying jobs you're talking about, because at least in engineering, you get a bigger payout for that sacrifice, and a chance of advancement. That's no small thing, and I'm not trying to say things are exactly the same, but it's not so different.
This reads as true given how most jobs are currently organized/implemented. I don't think it has to be true though.
I used to work bagging groceries and pushing carts for a supermarket. I loved it. I worked quite hard and was recognized by customers for doing so. I personally enjoyed being able to help someone through great service.
Many of these jobs are naturally game-like (checkout the day before Thanksgiving = time trial). They are critical _essential_ positions.
These people probably don't love their jobs because they aren't treated as well as they should be. Realistically, bagging groceries is ~80-120% as hard as writing software (in terms of perceived effort); the software engineer shouldn't be making 5-20x more.
Making it clear that people are actually valued, by actually valuing them, makes a huge difference. Sadly, there are generations of MBAs who are allergic to the concept.
A comedian (David Mitchell) once joked that he's proud of the UK's terrible service reputation. It doesn't seem honest or appropriate for service staff to be so happy and enthusiastic, why would they be? There's very little to be happy about.
Reminds me of Richard Hamming talking about his professional envy of John Tukey:
One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!
From "You and Your Research": https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
1. Bode was a person
2. He was alive in the past 100 years
Tukey was a legit fucking genius.
Why? He is a genius, and most of us aren't geniuses.
And the thing is, I don't know if anyone is successful at that. I feel most success comes from people who had the motivation for it. Can you force yourself or others through work that they're not motivated to do and actually expect it to deliver on breakthroughs?
The point is that motivated or not, high quality output requires a lot of work. Working a lot on a particular thing is still going to be easier for some and harder for others.
I just find it a bit deceiving. Like people can hear that and think, damn, this person is able to work through something they hate doing, have no motivation to work on, and where there are other things they'd rather do, yet somehow they can power through using raw will and focus on putting tons of time and effort into it? Well damn, I must be a weak minded person then.
Personally, I think that second interpretation is common, and it does more harm than good in my opinion. Every time I have put a lot of time and effort into something, I either really enjoyed the thing, or I was really motivated by the outcome. In both cases, that made it pretty easy for me to put in a lot of work.
If you really like doing something, you'll get good at it, and some stuff might not involve other work you might not like. For example, there's a game I really like playing, I'm quite good at it, I don't care for any outcome, just like doing the work, so putting in time and effort to get good was pretty easy.
Other things, I really want the outcome, I'll go out of my way, do things I don't really like doing, because I'm motivated by the result, still feels easy because of that.
Now, okay, sometimes there's some things you really hate doing, but it's needed for something you want. I think those are the tricky one, because you need to remind yourself of your goal, how much you want it, and all that, but what you're doing there is motivating yourself. So ya, in my view, motivation is key.
"After many nerve-wracking minutes of closed-door de- liberation, the examiners did decide to (barely) pass me; however, my advisor gently explained his disappointment at my performance, and how I needed to do better in the future. I was still largely in a state of shock—this was the first time I had performed poorly on an exam that I was genuinely interested in performing well in."
"In retrospect, nearly failing the generals was probably the best thing that could have happened to me at the time."
[1] https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202007/rnoti-p1007.pdf
Worth the watch (IMNSHO). It's very short, and very encouraging.
I don't define myself or my self worth solely via the work I do.
Always. But then again, in my culture it's not as extreme as in other parts of the world.
This is actually the most critical sentence in the entire article.
I read an article somewhere, maybe 25 or 30 years ago, that was about this exact topic.
Some successful scientist, I don't even remember his name now, was asked about his success.
He said that others worked just as hard and diligently. But his skill was in selecting the projects that had a high degree of probability of success. He would watch others in his profession and see how they made horrible choices in the selection of their work. The unsuccessful people made a series of unwise choices. Tilting at windmills that had exceptionally poor chance of success, areas where there was no funding available or very difficult to get funding, and all sorts of other problems.
The same thing is true with everything. For example, lots of people start businesses that are shitty selection right off the bat - they have almost zero chance of success before they even begin. All teh perfect execution and hard work will be for naught. The founder has blinders on.
You always hear about the successes. People always say false things like, the idea is 1%, execution is 99% of it. Not true. It's more like, the idea is worth 99%, and the execution is the other 99% of success. Trust me, I've seen a LOT of great execution on shit ideas and the company goes down the drain. You just never hear of them. And by the way, this is in regards to ideas that are actually have a corporation started around them, as opposed to just aimlessly talking about ideas.
Anyways, take what you will from what I just wrote.
This holds up really well, in any STEM field, not just mathematics. Celebrate those dimples on the surface of human knowledge, if you can, in fact, even make them. Very few people can, and our future depends on them.
It takes time and effort to do difficult tasks? You shouldn't overwork?
What new insights, let me blog about it :)
For those who don't know, the 8 hour work days and holidays were talked about by Adam Smith more than 200 years ago. The reason that system was put in place was because letting people work as much as they wanted led to over-exertion and injuries, lowering productivity.
That was for physical labor by the way. In another 200 years, I expect people to finally realize that thinking is harder than repetitive physical labor and one can't do more than a few hours of it, per day.
Until then we'll have 'burn out' blog posts and people reading and posting on HackerNews/reddit/twitter during work hours.
