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, dream about programming, then wake up and continue programming just where I left off.
One thing from this essay really stuck out to me:
> The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working without anyone telling you to. Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off.
One thing that always happened at the end of a semester is we'd have a few days after exams but before flights back home. On these days I'd typically try playing a video game (my hobby before college) and every time I would stop playing after just an hour with deep feeling of unease at the pit of my stomach. "Alarm bells" is exactly how I would describe it - a feeling at the core of my psyche that I have been wasting time and there must be something productive I should be doing or thinking about.
Years later, having tackled anxiety problems that had plagued me most of my life, I came to recognize that my relationship with hard work during my college years was not healthy and that this deep seated desire to do more work is not a positive thing, at least not for me.
I've since reformed my ambitions, instead of looking to start a company or get a PhD in mathematics, I've decided that hard work is not the love of my life and instead I should focus on my hobbies while looking for a career path that can be simultaneously fulfilling but laid back.
I feel the same. I can hardly sit through an entire two-hour movie or play a video game without feeling like I should be doing something else. I cannot feel good about myself if I cannot sense that I'm making progress learning a skill, and am stuck for hours looking down at a blank page as a result.
But what's dangerous for me is that this alarm system does not trigger consistently. I might spend too much time on HN, for example, because my impression is that HN is a place to have intellectual discoveries. I might spend too much time on YouTube because I can't think of anything else to do. Ironically there is a wealth of knowledge contained in some games that would be more worthwhile than a bunch of highlights on YouTube, but YouTube is just too easy to go back to.
When I work on some of my programming projects, I come out with the feeling that I'm just using the act of constantly working on them as an excuse to not have to worry about the fact that my life outside of them is one-dimensional and currently stagnating. I work way too hard on such non-work projects and burn out only to stop and instead spend weeks anxious that because I'm not doing anything, I am not growing as a person. I still believe this is true; I don't think I am much different from the me of two years ago, except that I've made some progress on programming projects.
But it's weird because I enjoy programming. I think it is because I enjoy programming so much that I become blinded to things that I should have seen as more important. I think I am already good enough at programming to not need much more to learn, and am only applying the skills that I happen to have built up for years.
But when I turn back to the other hobbies I always told myself I wanted to spend my life doing, all I find is a void of interest, and I ultimately accomplish little.
I also believe this was a result of how I was raised and the coping mechanisms my upbringing/college ingrained in me.
This is me. Though I didn't just learn this in my upbringing - I feel like my entire working life has been one of false promises and dehumanization, that has left me unable to enjoy anything.
I'm 47 now, have worked at 6 failed startups in a row, and can't face work, or looking for a job. I used to blame social media and hacker news, but I now recognize that too much delayed gratification and overwork have had a much greater effect.
At this point, I can't work, and can't not work. I do a lot of sitting quietly, with my mind almost empty of thought. All the processes and systems I have used in the past to overcome this are failing me. I feel exploited, betrayed and overwhelmed by alienation; genuinely broken.
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 technical issues of a job to the extent that some bosses who cannot stay on top of what you are doing may feel they would be more comfortable with a safe, matey colleague than a bit of a strange wizzkid who gets to be known as the oracle of all things.
Fortunately, 47 is still pretty young no matter what the newer generation of employed go getters thinks, and there is life yet to be pursued.
I would say try taking up a sport - gym, cycling, rowing, jogging, or even something physical and competitive. Get the buzz of routine and physical wellbeing and socialising going again.
Then take a deep breath and think about everything that you have learned over the years that can be actualised into real value. The great thing about coding is that it teaches its practitioners that progress only happens from meeting certain logical imperatives - build on that and problem solve your way to another commercial enterprise.
You have got this. The main thing holding you back is your own thoughts.
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. experiment, try variations, new activities—but keep going back to it. (Their seems to be some initial resistance that is partially psychological if you're just beginning to work out after a long time without; parts of you, maybe unconscious, may try to convince you to quit. Be understanding of that, but persistent in continuing (imo)).
> It is possible that you may even be compromising your career by being good at the technical issues of a job to the extent that some bosses who cannot stay on top of what you are doing may feel they would be more comfortable with a safe, matey colleague than a bit of a strange wizzkid who gets to be known as the oracle of all things.
This is always a possibility... however in my experience things tend to fall more on the side of bosses being all too happy to offload responsibility onto that whizzkid and then tuck them away in a box away from any possibility of career advancement.
After all, if you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.
True - I have seen this on a few occasions; sometimes the 'tucking away' includes a social element applied by overriding responses in conversations, making detracting remarks and generally casting shade over said whizzkid - boxing them in in the co's social as well as organisational hierarchy.
> have worked at 6 failed startups in a row, and can't face work, or looking for a job
I don't know much about your situation but this comment on HN from 2013 (1) might be helpful in your situation:
Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. It's the result of a negative prediction error in the nucleus accumbens. You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.
[snip]
On the heels of the failure of a project where I have spent weeks building up for, I will quickly force myself to do routine molecular biology, or general lab tasks, or a repeat of an experiment that I have gotten to work in the past. These all have an immediate reward. Now I don't burn out anymore, and find it easier to re-attempt very difficult things, with a clearer mindset.
You're just burned out. I hope you have some financial cushion and can take some time to just do nothing. Or try gardening, or woodworking, or something really different that can be personally rewarding with no pressure to meet anyone else's expectations. With time you should heal.
Unfortunately, I've been burnt out too many times now, for too long. Every job now ends in burn out and takes 6+ months to recover from before I can start looking for another job. This time, however, feels different - it never felt insurmountable like this before. I can't work on my own stuff, can't level up my skills, not sure how to get back to that.
I suspect that my situation is likely common among aging coders and might contribute to a lot of what is otherwise attributed to ageism. I can no longer pretend that the kind of work open to me is going lead to anything but more suffering, and I feel like this results in increasing interview anxiety.
So stop coding, or put yourself out to pasture at a low intensity coding gig.
I came from a family of engineers and I watched my dad work himself to death at the expense of virtually everything else in life. One day he up and died, and that was the end of it. Most of his projects are no longer applicable or noteworthy. Life is the process of taking a daily step towards death every day. In 100 years, no one is going to remember us. Even the man rich enough to prolong their life can only make their path longer, but we all get there in the end.
Just find things you can enjoy and do them. Everything else is wasted time.
As someone who's considered this idea, the problem I wind up with is "but people still want 8 hours of my time per day".
If people are laying claim to that, then I want to be compensated as highly as possible for it. Try as you might, it's very hard to get rid of one of those 8 hour blocks, and make time for yourself, while retaining that daily/hourly rate.
Are you hooked on that quarter million per year at a FAANG (or on getting there)? Yes you will probably have a hard time getting rid of those 8 hour blocks.
Get a 'normal' job at a normal enough company? You can probably do a comfortable version of the 8 hour blocks that you enjoy, which sometimes are 9 or 10 hour blocks and sometimes 6 or 7 hour blocks or an afternoon off.
Personally I love the pandemic WFH. It's been possible to do flexible time arrangements without the 'bad feeling' you have when you leave the office early, while everyone else stays. People are in different timezones anyway now, asynchronous communication for many things is normal etc. YMMV as always, like that WP article that is also currently up here on HN.
Why not work a service job for a while? There's no delayed gratification in bartending or waiting tables. Show up, clock in, serve drinks, go home. It's not easy, but the success conditions are clear, and when you're done you can completely forget about it until it's time to go in again.
This is something I've considered, as I'm in a similar situation to OC. With a PhD, I feel certain expectations about my career haven't been met. Publications dropped off, I'm not even sure I could pass an undergrad exam in my field of expertise anymore... so I look overqualified but feel underqualified. I'm nervous about unexplained gaps in my career because I regularly see that as a reason not to interview a candidate. But a service job? All I can hear is my judgy coworkers laughing at a resume with recent non-technical work.
I don't know if this helps, but I've hired people in situations like this.
If somethings stands out in a resume, people will ask. But the fact it's there doesn't mean it's negative - the question is what's the story. If the resume as a whole makes sense but has a curveball I'm probably more likely to have them interviewed, not less.
Maybe call it a sabbatical on your resume. You get to decide what is and isn’t a sabbatical for you. Then disclose the details if and when you trust the hiring manager.
Most of all, don’t let worry about that damage your long term mental health.
I've got a cousin who unsure with things got a job as a delivery van driver for a while. Worked ok for him. He now has a fairly cushy lowish level job at a pr outfit.
The main issues from the person comments don't seem to revolve around money. And doing nothing won't make any money.
This is not something you have to do for the rest of your life.
But the point is to do something, anything to avoid sinking into the swamp. Visible goals that you can mentally pick up and put down with some human interaction thrown in, might help. Only one way to find out.
this is what I don't get about this site. The world is software. you can code anything. and yet the majority of people sit around and complain. Its no wonder that you all are burnt out and bitter. The best is when people complain about tracking software, or windows telemetry. Software engineers wrote it! they are you're own people. its not a business guy that wrote the code. you're all weak!
You have some toxic ideas about what "strength" and "weakness" are.
Strength is facing your demons, being honest with yourself, admitting your mistakes, being able to change your opinions in the face of new evidence, and admitting when you're failing. Real strength is humble.
Weakness is "manning up" instead of dealing with the problem, reducing all situations down to a conflict of two sides because the reality is too complex, being unable to admit that you were wrong, "pushing through" instead of working out why, and being unable to face reality when it's not what you expected. Weakness is a fragile ego full of pride.
Yes, software engineers wrote tracking software. That doesn't mean we all agree with what they did. They're not "our own people" because we don't see the world as "software engineers vs business guys".
The world is not software. That's a silly catchphrase.
You can't code meaning, joy, health, or good company into someone's life.
Software won't provide company and solace to a dying patient or make you feel blissed out when having sex. It can't give you the pleasure of talking to your six year old child or getting into the mosh pit of an aggressive rock show.
Software development is a nice profession with lots of benefits. But it's easy to spend too much time in solace and inside your head. And as a human we have needs that it won't be able to meet.
I can't believe that I've never heard of the phrase "high-performance requires high-maintenance" before. I really like little aphorisms like this as a way to regulate behaviour. Thanks!
Maybe try finding an open-source project you are interested in and contribute to it? It might energize you and let you re-connect with whatever you originally were looking for in a job.
It might morph into a side-project, but either way its something you can keep going even while working at a regular job, and then the job might be less of a make-or-break proposition.
I feel bad for you. but eventually if you've failed 6 times, you have to look at yourself and understand what you're doing wrong. It actually sounds like you might have clinical depression, and that's not anything to take lightly. There is tons of help and support and if you want, I'd be happy to help.
in my early 50's, and I think 5 failed startups now. I kinda lost count. Just closing off the latest failure this month.
I'm taking July off completely, finishing some creative coding projects that I haven't been able to work on while coding for the startup. Then I'm going to work out what's next.
I sleep a lot. There's no motivation to work. But I've been through this before, and it changes. I went through a serious clinical depression a few years ago, and have learned that the trick is to keep breathing and trust that everything will change over time.
The whole "work hard" mantra is interesting, and not nearly so simple as PG makes out.
Yes, to do great things we need to work hard. I love those times, when I'm inspired, the work is flowing, and all I want to do every day is work.
But working too hard for too long is not healthy. It causes this kind of burnout. Sitting staring at the keyboard, the last thing I ever want to do is switch to the code window. Emotionally drained. It's not a matter of discipline, or willpower. It's deeper than that. I'm literally unable to focus for any length of time even if I force myself to work.
I love my work. I genuinely enjoy building things. But I can't do it all the time. I have to take time away from it because it's a marathon not a sprint, and I need rest periods.
"Do you want to do intellectual work? Begin by creating within you a zone of silence, a habit of recollection, a will to renunciation and detachment which puts you entirely at the disposal of the work; acquire that state of soul unburdened by desire and self-will which is the state of grace of the intellectual worker. Without that you will do nothing, at least nothing worth while." ~ A.G. Sertillanges, O.P.
At 41 y/o I am going mostly through the same. Without my wife I would have become a completely numb robot. But even if you don't have a good partner -- or friends, or your older family -- to turn to, I'd recommend the following:
Engage in interviews but be upfront: you're not looking to prove yourself, you are not interested in stocks / futures / options / whatever, you're not scared of tough work but you're also looking for a good work-life balance, and you're willing to take a small pay cut for not taking on all the responsibilities that senior programmers are expected to have.
Say something like this: "I have all the chops to not only be a senior programmer but also a team leader; I have all the necessary qualities but I don't want to practice them for a while. I'd like to use those skills simply to be the best colleague you have."
I don't know you so the following might be severely misplaced and please forgive me if so: but I'd advise you to take A LOT of walks in nature. Even if you don't have some nearby, find a routine every now and then: take a taxi to a nearby big park (or bike/drive to it), and force yourself to just not think about anything.
Additionally, re-read a favourite book -- even if it dates back to your teenage yours.
You likely have a lot of negative inertia in your brain and you need to engage in semi-passive lifestyle to help it remove the negativity by itself which usually happens by eating well and sleeping as much as you need.
Finally, consider cannabidiol (CBD / cannabis) pills. They are absolutely harmless, they cause no hallucations at all, you can't overdose on them (I am getting those with 15% concentration), and their general effect is to slightly alter your brain chemistry in the direction of reducing anxiety. It will help you look at things from a new angle and I found it extremely therapeutic because this in turn helped me deal with my problems in sustainable and lasting ways. (Unlike before when my knee-jerk reactions only made things worse with time.)
Meditation, if you can master doing it for 30-40 minutes, works wonders too. Mind you, some people need weeks of practice every day until they feel this tranquil state of mind. Eventually everybody succeeds though.
I wish I could actually help you because I think I know what you're going through. There is a way out but sadly it never happens exactly as we want it, e.g. we can't just not work until we feel better. But there are middle grounds that help achieve the same result, albeit slower and with a bit more deliberate effort.
I hope you manage to pull through.
(EDIT: Forgot to mention something important: cardio exercises! Forget strength training. Absolutely learn basic yoga for stretching -- especially the exercises that deal with your core area because they will heal your guts and bowels! -- and do loads of cardio: run, bike, plank, nevermind which one. Find your cardio thing. Again, forget about strength training. We the sedentary people need to get our metabolism going again. Make your heart pump faster, consistently and regularly. That's the exercise that's going to make the biggest difference for your mental health.)
Great comment, but I wouldn't throw out strength training that quickly.
Some people are more motivated to do strength exercises than cardio, for whatever reason. And there are types of strength training that get your heart rate up as well. I think the most important thing is to do not overdo it, or you'll just end up with one more thing that puts stress on your system.
The biggest benefit of cardio (in my opinion) is that there are many things that you can do outside. Not quite as simple with weight lifting for example, although possible.
Yeah, I don't disagree. F.ex. planks are definitely both strength training plus cardio and they are my favourite cardio so far. Riding a bike I love as well but I am in the middle of a city and just biking to a big park that I love is by itself an entire workout session, quite the long and risky one at that (since you have to navigate traffic and people -- no bike lanes).
My message mostly is: "get your heart pumping". The sedentary lifestyle reduces the speed of the metabolism which is one of the worst things that can happen to our bodies. Thus we have to actively work against this negative phenomena.
How does one go about it is indeed a personal journey.
If you wear a heart rate monitor, you'll find that genuine strength training spikes your heart rate something fierce, much more akin to HIIT than low-intensity cardio.
And building lean mass as one tends to do with strength training is one of the most effective ways of increasing one's metabolic rate. Lean muscle mass is much more metabolically active thank a similar amount of fat tissue.
And that's not even getting to the effects on glucose/insulin sensitivity, body composition, self-confidence, quality of life improvements, etc.
Ideally one should be doing a few hours of cardio and a few hours of strength training every week.
Thank you for the kind words. From where I am standing, I can completely sympathize with my parent commenter and I know how it feels like being stuck. I wish our society tried to help us treat all of this (because avoiding it in the first place seems to be too much to ask of it).
They are just words and I have no big hope they will help somebody but if they do, that will genuinely make me little happier.
I can only feel happy if my blabbering helped you. Reach out if you have any questions or need advice (although advice is a dangerous thing in general). I've been around, I learned to be kind and I love helping people when I can.
Advice as I see it is a bit of a risky affair because (assuming you do want to actually listen to it and implement it) you kind of give up on a situation and would like to be steered in a certain direction because you feel you cannot make the right decision at the moment.
I am well-intentioned but I don't know your life, your upbringing, nor am I empath / telepath and thus I don't know how do you feel inside. Hence, me giving you an advice assumes a lot of context that applies to myself only and not to you. So if you follow my advice you will likely end up in a situation that I can deal with. But will it be a situation that you can deal with?
Example: I am one of those people who can deal with meetings and people quite fine BUT I get tired of it and there's an upper limit to it, and surpassing that limit renders me literally useless for the next several hours. Thus, I could give people advice of the kind "you feel your job requirements are not clear and that's stressing you out -- go chat with your team lead, your colleagues, then your manager, it will help you have a peace of mind". Good advice, right? But some people can't be in a meeting more than 20 minutes a day before they need to retreat back into their shell and thus this person could have one small meeting but have no strength for the next ones. What's worse: from the perspective of the more outgoing people they started a good initiative but never pursued it to completion.
So I'd say that in this hypothetical situation I actually gave them a bad advice while still having only good intentions.
(A better advice in the above situation would be for this person to have a very quick voice/video chat with their manager and tell them they feel the requirements towards them aren't clear and that they would like to receive a document / Wiki outlining those in clear language. This avoids the additional meetings.)
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TL;DR: Advice, even when given with the best of intentions, misses a lot of context. The receiver of the advice has to carefully weigh this factor; it's OK to reject an otherwise excellent advice if it doesn't apply to you one way or another. And sadly there's also the aspect of people blindly accepting your advice and then blaming you for the consequences.
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.
I am in a similar boat and the most painful part for me personally is trying to overcome the hurdle or stigma associated with being older but not having idyllic career beats to show off to potential employers.
It's easy to look at past failures and blame those failures for your present circumstances. But say one of those startups had made it big. What would you be doing instead? Because if your mind is stuck mindlessly scrolling social media and shaming yourself for it, it could be worse - you could have $10mm in the bank and still be mindlessly surfing social media, and shaming and guilt tripping yourself for not doing more with it and you'd feel even worse about it, and fall into substance abuse issues (eg Tony Hseih; Zappos).
Mindset is key. If you want to get into philanthropy with your imagined largess, there are tons of philanthropic organizations looking for help, not to mention, fundraising for non-profits isn't entirely different than trying to get VC funding.
6 failed startups in a row!! Sounds like recipe for burnout and depression. You may well have shown much resilience to not end up in a mental hospital after that. Which could be a good sign in terms of recovering from all this? (It may take time though) Why do people do this to themselves I wonder? Must've been super hard work, and for what? I guess, the hope of making it big? To achieve 'FU money'? Well, going forward from here, there are less stressful tech jobs... They don't pay as much, but... a not-very-well-paid software job is still overall a not badly paid job. As for ageism which you allude to in other post, can be a problem if all one's colleagues are much younger, depends on the environment of course. I'm a similar age to you, seems like if one has good (i:e in-demand, and of long-term value) skills, people generally don't mind one's age. My coping strategy with age (less energy and tiring responsibilities outside work) is look after your productivity super-powers e:g command-line, vim, which take years even decades to learn. Sometimes us oldies are more efficient than the younger ones even if they can put in more hours.
Why not join a slow enterprise F500 and recharge, focus on hobbies and coast through the 9-5? Start ups in contrast over work you and leads to burn out.
start ups lead to burn out if you're not successful. That's what most people on this site don't understand. You are in control, you are in charge, don't blame others.
> I can hardly sit through an entire two-hour movie or play a video game without feeling like I should be doing something else.
One summer we rented a beach house, I had delusions of lazing on the beach under a big umbrella, drinks, books, dogs, netflix, music, a endless orgy of entertainment and sunny weather. I went stir-crazy in about half a day, there's only so much lazing about I can do, after 2 movies I thought meh, I'm wasting this day. I envy the people who say they're going on vacation and do nothing for a week, two weeks even. I can't seem to do that, and I don't know whether that's something intrinsic to who I am, or that's a toxic thought pattern I need to get rid of. When I'm back at home and at work I am so busy I have a tendency say "I wish I had some more time to unwind" a lot.
At the present, I'm trying to have focused and purposeful idle time. With intent, sit through a movie, read something, play a game, whatever, for a chunk of time, or deliberately do nothing at all. The last one is very hard for me, I don't think I've managed 15 minutes of it.
I had a very similar experience a few years ago after travelling to Rarotonga for a holiday. There was little reception for mobile data without a new sim - this turned out to be an absolute blessing. The first day or so was easy, but the next few were restless. We had explored the island, snorkelled, swam in the pool, and tried lots of the local food. We had run out of things to do.
The funny thing is, it took there being nothing to do, no phone to idly turn to, to truly start to unwind and relax. I didn't initially realise it at the time, but my body and mind had been in this constant state of stress. After pushing through that initial restlessness and that constant need to be actively doing or reading about something productive, my whole body began to feel noticeably more relaxed. The invisible state of constant stress was finally parting. Waking up later than usual, grabbing some tropical fruits and enjoying them around the pool with a light fictional book at the ready started to feel more natural and enjoyable. It started to feel like I could truly enjoy doing "nothing" and just bathe in the relaxation.
After returning home, there were many noticeable improvements to my creative thinking, productivity, and my general feeling of wellbeing.
My take away from this experience is that it is so incredible difficult to fully disconnect from day-to-day life when your phone can provide constant access to information. It's oh so easy to go on holiday but still turn to your phone and hn or reddit when idle. I highly highly recommend taking a holiday either without your phone, or without any easy access to the internet.
What works for me is, in advance, saying that I will be doing X thing for 10 minutes, an hour, or whatever.
Even when I'm waiting for something, I'll say: "I will leave in 5 minutes" and set an alarm, knowing and trusting that I will leave and I can relax until then.
I know it sounds paradoxical, but it helps for me to schedule both creativity and relaxing time since I know for those times that I'll be able to do be purposeful about my relaxing or making.
Going on vacation doesn't mean doing nothing.
Like you I don't understand how/why people do this.
I think it's about doing something different. Travel, visit, explore, camp, hike, do sport, meet new people, share that with family/friends or not.
For me it is about the approach. I like to plan very little. Plan something, but not very much.
Holiday goals, simply to have somewhere to go. They don't matter if you don't do them.
As you get to that goal, you take time to look around, maybe duck into a place here, do an activity over there. Or maybe not, and simply let life roll on by as you stroll to your destination.
I have gone hot air ballooning, day hiking, snorkelling with turtles. Wander over, have a chat, book it in for the next day or two. It is then the goal for that day and might lead to something else.
For me having a list of "places to be, things to do" means I have to be switched on, getting there and doing that, and if I don't then I have failed.
Holidays is noFail time. Allow serendipity to take charge.
> Like you I don't understand how/why people do this. I think it's about doing something different.
You raised the question and answered it in two sentences. This is exactly why some people are able to take a complete break and "do nothing" - their daily life is already filled to the brim with work, family, kids, etc, that when they get on vacation, what actually feels different is doing "nothing".
Fair point. I believe I manage to save enough time of "doing nothing" in my daily life (although it might feel uncomfortable sometimes as others pointed out in the thread) that I don't need that during vacation. I see it as an opportunity to do things I don't have time/energy to do otherwise.
Fair enough too. In my case I tend to go for 50/50 - I take about half my vacation days to literally "do nothing" (meaning catching up on games I missed since my son was born by lack of time, waking up late(r), watching movies and series, etc) and the other half as a family getaway, bringing my son to new places, trying out new things together.
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. I want to tell myself that OK this guy can achieve _nothing_
I want in his life and he is almost 40 so maybe relax, but I don't listen to myself.
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.
Why sitting through a movie is a bad thing? Have you tried watching some “harder” movies? Maybe you’re just bored with the specific movies you are watching. I for example know that I have a very specific love for sci-fi genre; but unfortunately a lot of sci-fi is basically trash with good CGI and I can’t help myself but think that I am wasting my time when I watch stuff in that comfort zone.
However there’s a lot to film that is quite hard to watch. Maybe of the recents Almodovar comes to my mind. It’s engaging and very unique.
It's a moving target. At first I wouldn't sit through genuinely asinine popular media, like 'Friends'. This is not unhealthy: most of it is shit. But over time, I've found that I can't sit through anything that isn't utterly engaging. My SO used to joke that I 'hated everything' until that started to make me feel bad.
Paying attention to anything that isn't doesn't at least appear to be addressing existential dread has lost all flavour. I'm not sure what the solution is.
Before anyone suggests it, it's clear that I'm dealing with clinical depression, but medical help has been of limited benefit. Therapists don't seem to be familiar with the situation that is being described by posters here, don't have tools to suggest. I suspect that it's not so widespread a phenomenon outside of knowledge work.
Psilocybin results in profound sadness for me, that lasts for days. Microdoses, macrodoses - it just varies the intensity/duration of the dysphoria.
NMDA antagonists were an amazing find. A ketamine prescription allowed me to function at all for the last few years, until I started to develop bladder pain and had to discontinue it. I've recently experimented with nitrous oxide, but hasn't turned out to be feasible.
LSD, I can't source. Given my experiences with Psilocybin, I haven't tried very hard.
The further out stuff, such as salvia divinorum, is so under examined as to be utterly speculative. Can't say it had much of an effect, either.
I've also used induced hyperthermia, which has a minor effect on my mood. The effect is also of very short duration.
Since you're willing to try some out-there stuff, here are the two things that turned my life around: a shamanic healing ceremony (literally saved my life) and EFT/tapping (allowed me to work through what was left).
I was in the same boat you seem to be -- crushing, horrific depression that hadn't responded to anything medical and counselors and therapists had no idea what to do with the sense of dread and self-loathing I was experiencing. They kept telling me to try meditating or do breathing exercises, which I did to no effect.
Then a single 20-minute encounter with a shamanic practitioner changed everything. This was over 10 years ago and to this day I have no cogent explanation for the experience.
As an aside, I later learned that I was hurting for quite a few nutrients -- most notably B12, magnesium and lithium. When you get nutritional insufficiencies sorted out, you start feeling a lot better.
How is it getting ketamine prescribed in the US for depression? Do they give you 30 lozenges to take one a day? I've had no success with SSRIs and want to go that route, but don't know how to ask a doctor for it without looking/sounding like I want to get high, when I just want to be functional and normal.
Find a doctor that specializes in treatment resistant depression, which IIRC is defined as failing more than two conventional antidepressant.
I'm anything but objective on this, but I'm convinced that SSxx classes of antidepressants are entirely useless for depression (and likely anything else).
The usual method is IV ketamine treatment, every 6 weeks, but this can cost $400+ per session, which at the time I started treatment was not an option. My doctor went out on a limb for me and prescribed intranasal ketamine, which is off-label, and only $60 for a six week supply. I was taking it every three days for several years.
There is also intranasal esketamine, which is quite likely what you will be offered these days, as it has received FDA approval. Unfortunately, this is not as effective as regular intranasal ketamine, while getting you 'higher' into the bargain. Why did this get drug get developed? Because ketamine isn't patentable, but an enantiomer of ketamine (s-ketamine) is, so there was money to pay for clinical trials and pharmaceutical executive enrichment. The other enantiomer, r-ketamine, is actually less innebriative and more therapeutic. So, why produce s-ketamine? There's no reasonable explanation for them to bring s-ketamine to market other than to be able to milk the patents as long as possible.
That said, I'd still encourage you to pursue s-ketamine, if it is your only option, but IV ketamine may be better route, if you can afford it: insurance will cover esketamine, but not IV ketamine.
I should mention: It's not clear whether the ketamine alone was responsible for the bladder discomfort (which was never more than a mild sensation - I discontinued mainly out of concern that it might worsen): it's likely that autoimmune illness played a part too. It's not usual to experience this on the dose of ketamine that I was taking. S-ketamine is not any easier on the bladder, and it was able to pass the clinical trials.
A reasonable question. But, it's very hard to watch a "serious" movie or read a "serious" book while at the beach. There's a reason why there exists a genre called "beach reads". I am not going to watch Almodovar or Bunuel or Bergman or Aronofsky or Inarritu on the beach.
I can't watch trashy movies either, but my tolerance for them is more flexible at the beach.
Severely off-topic to the OP but have you tried watching "Battlestar Galactica" in full? (The remake from the 2004+, not the original -- tried the original and didn't like it at all.)
I mean, you don't get much CGI there but the premise is extremely realistic and the actors are absolutely brilliant.
Plus, you'll get to cry, a lot, during the long series finale.
Yeah, that part was a bit weak and not well explained but it was IMO a natural evolution for thinking and feeling beings. I agree it could have been shown better and more gradual -- it was kind of sudden in the series and that's one of the valid negative remarks towards it.
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 only somewhat satisfying feeling in my life.
Have you had any luck adjusting your thinking or finding other joys in life?
I didn’t have “hobbies” for a while after graduating. Having kids and making time for them as they grow up was one of the catalysts that helped me (re)discover things that I enjoy.
My grandfather passed away a while ago and when we had to empty his house, I took some of the larger telescopes he had. He was a die-hard astronomer and astrophotographer. I’ve always loved looking up at the night sky and now I’ve picked up astrophotography too. It’s a great mix between gear, science, patience, skill and technology. There’s something very rewarding and humbling about capturing the light of a galaxy 21 million light years away.
Electronics is another one of his hobbies that I was always fascinated by that I’ve now picked up. Building some toy gadgets, getting the soldering iron out to fix one of my children’s toys. It feels fun & productive.
I used to play sports as a kid and teenager and kind of forgot about that for more than a decade while working hard. I’ve now picked up skateboarding with my son. I love it. I think our human body benefits from intense movement, especially when you’re used to sitting stationary all day. Skateboarding is rewarding because you can learn something new every session. The place that organizes my kid’s skateboard lessons also does sessions for parents. It’s double fun since you also get to meet other people.
Anyway. I was in the same “work hard” position 2 years ago. My mind spent most of its “cycles” thinking and worrying about work. Now it gets diversions and downtime. I think it helps.
Hobbies are this thing between work and entertainment. It’s rewarding like work without being forced or mandatory.
Like you, I was very recently considering doing some kind of traveling. I don't know if it would be in an RV or other vehicle. I'm still on the fence however; it would be the most radical thing I will have ever done with my life.
I understand that just traveling isn't really a solution to my problems, but I feel like my life at present is too sterile and I don't have much to say. Some writers say that first-hand experience is valuable in creating new ideas. Maybe I just need more experience.
It's like when I read the passage in Kerouac's On The Road where the protagonist wakes up in a motel and realizes he's farther away from home than he's ever been. I feel like, if I choose to write for fun, I don't think I can write properly without experiencing that kind of thing myself (though opinions may vary between people). That's at least true for everything fictional I've written so far, despite how little I've actually written.
If that doesn't work then I could find something else like working abroad, provided I have enough contacts to help me, but I struggle with that sort of thing. I also wanted to find some people I feel comfortable keeping in touch with, though I haven't quite put in enough effort to reach that point.
Because about all my therapist does is sympathize with the things I talk about (such as the issues in my parent comment) I don't think much real change is going to come out of that relationship; it would only keep me sane. That carries its own value, but I feel that there's something more I'm missing. This is the kind of thing that I have to get my hands dirty in order to have any hope of fixing it.
Travelling by motorcycle added a dimension to it. I always had to plan ahead, keep the bike running, find my next place to sleep, and generally make sure I'm not just driving through and missing everything. It's hard to just sit there when you don't carry your home with you.
It felt pretty productive, in the sense that your only idle time is riding the motorcycle, and the end-of-day beer and meal.
It felt rather silly to take a vacation from my vacation, but sometimes I just had to stop for a bit longer to recover. It really felt like work, but the kind that leaves you proud and fulfilled.
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.
I can relate to a lot of this. One thing I learned about myself recently is that I tend to default to programming because it practically guarantees that I'll feel good (dopamine from making things work, fixing bugs). Since I don't have many other hobbies that guarantee similar reward, there's not much of an incentive for me to do anything different whenever I'm feeling antsy about sitting around and not feeling productive.
one thing I've been doing with the help of some therapy recently that's somewhat helping is scheduling time (1 hour) to NOT program. No expectation of actually doing anything and accepting any uneasy feelings that arise. Just making sure that I make the time to tune in to feelings / thoughts without the option of picking up my computer as a sort of pacifier.
first time I did this, I just sat nervously for 30 minutes until I got bored and then looked for problems around my house to fix (which took 2 hours and was pretty satisfying). After a few rounds of this I noticed myself acting on small, non-programming interests outside my scheduled times.
just figured I shared in case others are feeling same and want something to try :)
Me too. I've been actively working to do the opposite. To build my outside of work life, give it priority and give myself the permission to have it be the main focus of life and stop running from the bear all the time.
I have started using a pomodoro timer, not as a way to keep myself working and improve my productivity, but as a way to remind myself to stop and smell the roses.
I don't have anything substantial to add to the discussion beyond another data point: I also relate to the feeling of wanting to be 'productive' most of the time and not really enjoying pure leisure time.
I recently spent 2 weeks working remotely from a nice location in Italy and definitely would've enjoyed the time less if I couldn't have also worked from there. I also enjoy hobbies/free-time less when I believe it ultimately doesn't lead myself to becoming the person I want to be.
On the one hand, I think this is only natural if you are an ambitious person (this desire is imho exactly one of the things that allow a person to achieve ambitious feats); on the other hand, I am definitely struggling with finding enjoyable, non-work activities that recharge me.
Really appreciate you saying this because it matches the way I'm feeling exactly.
I grew up poor, achieving and being productive made me stand out. Went to a good university got a job at FAANG and feel pretty empty, unable to relax because it feels unproductive, spend time working on side projects I don't care about because it feels productive.
Really well written, thanks. It's interesting to read how others have faced and are facing the same problems. I've found it's a question of comfort and social environment that pushes you regularly to do things you'd not normally do and forcing you to set aside the whatever programming or other "self-improvement" you were planning to do.
It's not necessarily a bad thing if you can diversify your targets of learning to multiple areas that are not as solitaire as programming. Music, anything with performing and socializing is great. Gym or a physical sport - very important. It doesn't have to be just programming. And I at least am more happy after having practiced music than having just played video games.
But I grant that even with multiple hobbies one still sits well inside their own bubble and it isn't really a life-altering experience to practice music instead of coding some npm library. What one needs is social connection to satisfy the basic primal desire for one's own tribe. It's weird how we are hard-wired like that, but if one stays alone inside programming something "useful" it does not really tick the boxes our biology craves.
In any way, my point is - do I have a point? Well, the problem is basically how to rewire our brains to react to certain input in a way we find the most pleasing. We all can't be rich, beautiful and famous so one should do with what they got. If chatting with friends makes you more happy than programming inside maybe you should focus on nurturing that. Not being content is a good start for development. I think some people really try to fool themselves to believe their current reality is 'ok' while in fact they are not happy. I guess taking responsibility for changing things is too much and they rather just forget they even had a chance.
Maybe it is evidence of an interest in writing. I am pretty sure that is the case with me. There is no place more likely to produce quick direct and possibly thoughtful feedback.
Writing for pleasure is a thing that is hard to accept as worthwhile. It costs our lives. Hours we will never get back for imaginary internet points.
I was the exact same way in college. I remember saying to a professor one time that whenever I was inside studying hard I would look out the window and say, "What am I doing? I should be outside in nature, enjoying the beauty of the world for the short time I have here." But when I would go outside, I would immediately say, "What am I doing? I should be inside studying so I can make something of myself and contribute to the world!"
No matter what choice I made, some other choice always seemed like the mature decision, and I was perpetually stuck in either a childish pursuit of good grades on paper, or a childish avoidance of work while I frolicked outside. I just couldn't win.
> I also believe this was a result of how I was raised and the coping mechanisms my upbringing/college ingrained in me.
It probably is. You deserve the chance to know. Wether it be through therapy, an ayahuasca ceremony, months long backpacking trip in a foreign country or nature to find yourself - whatever floats your boat - you're worth the effort. Dig deep into your psyche and unwrap the trauma that makes up your personality. You'll live better for it. Framed under capitalism, if a month off helps you better realize your potential, such that you earn twice as much money the next year, then the month off pays for itself in a year.
Every personality has its problematic characteristics. I think that one of the more problematic, even toxic, ones shared by many Type A personalities is a need to try and make other people feel bad for not themselves being sufficiently neurotic.
(I realize the Type A/Type B personality theory is largely crap. I'm just using it here as a useful shorthand that many people will recognize.)
That paragraph the quote came from makes me feel kind of sad. It prompted me to mentally re-frame PG's life, not as one that is defined by material success, but one that is defined by near constant anxiety. The material success is apparently just a by-product of that anxiety.
On the other hand, at least he gets to have some excess material comfort to take the edge off a bit? I imagine things would be much harder for him if he had fallen into the presumable silent majority of people sharing the same kinds of productivity-oriented anxieties who haven't been so lucky in their business dealings.
On the other hand, maybe it doesn't work that way. Maybe it just raises the bar, so that your future accomplishments have to be even more spectacular before you're able to see them as genuine accomplishments. Which sounds to me like a bleak existence. A bit like that of an addict who's forever chasing the dragon.
I saw PG speak once. He didn’t strike me as the anxious type. And I do not think it was polish: he is a good speaker, but he also seems like the type of speaker who would be exactly the same after the speech.
It felt more like he was….excited. Like in a childlike way, in a positive sense. That’s how I’ve interpreted stuff like the paragraph you cited: he is like a big kid excited about his work and does not want to waste time getting distracted from it. The same way a kid might acutely have a sense of boredom if not doing what they thought was important. The key here is PG really seems to find meaningful work fun.
I’ve known anxious types and they’re all rather different. Beset by doubts among other things.
It is possible that he is fueled by an anxious drive. Even probable, but there are a small group of people that find meaning in what they do. When the work towards that they get a buzz that is insatiable.
This was exactly my experience except Masters instead of Bachelors. I had this feeling that I mostly coasted during my bachelors, only putting any effort the week before Finals or Unit Tests. I did my Masters in EE from a university renowned for being a tough program. I was up for the challenge, doing exactly what you did: thinking math all the time, feeling like I was wasting time any moment I was not in front of my books.
I have the exact same problems you mentioned: not being able to just be, always anxious to be doing something productive, can't bring myself to watch a movie unless the movie was an all-time classic and "worth wasting time on".
The pandemic, weirdly enough, brought me back down to Earth. I faced some real mental lows but now I am able to relax more. Time management and deep work a few hours a day goes a lot further than just fretting about being productive all the time. I still have a lot of work to do, and I still don't think I've fulfilled my potential but posts like yours have definitely helped me re-calibrate my expectations.
There are university programs where you can coast through a degree, and others where doing that will at best leave you at the back of the pack.
It can be fun to be in a program where everyone is pushing hard but it can also be very stressful and not healthy for everyone who tries it. It is possible to live the rest of your life like that, but the vast majority of people I know who have tried it, aren't happy. The exceptions are outliers in several ways.
I'm closer to retirement age than the beginning of my career. Some of my age peer friends are already retired, and many of them could be if they wanted to. It's not even on the radar for me. I'm a bit envious, as I'd love the freedom to be done for life, and to be able to take or leave work as I please.
The flipside is that I've taken a lot of time off along the way. I've taken whole years off between many jobs, I've traveled a lot, and I've spent a lot of time just doing nothing. I have some minor regrets about not making better use of my time between jobs, but I don't have regrets about taking the time off. I would have gone insane if I had worked nonstop for 20-30 years, only taking a couple weeks of vacation a year.
If I were really passionate about the work--especially if I'd launched my own business--I might not have felt burnt out or wanted time off. But I never wanted to bust my ass just for the sake of working hard, or for some nebulous future goal (although that future is now my present). If health or something else prevents me from enjoying life as much in the future, at least I've got memories of the past.
You remind me of a coworker I had four a couple of years. He and his wife were both extremely competent and well-compensated programmers. Their lifestyle was basically "work for two years or so, save up a bunch of money, then quit and wander the world doing whatever they liked until the money ran out, repeat." I've thought about them several times. Some part of me is really, really uncomfortable intentionally living off of my savings for a prolonged period, but I also sometimes wonder if they haven't figured out something important that I haven't.
15y ago I met a guy who was specialized in repairing escalators. So what he did was repair some escalators in the city, and then he spent some weeks or even months motorbiking with his buddies. When money ran out, there was always a broken escalator to return to. Obviously he was so certain he would find work that he didn’t feel the need to save up any money.
That's awesome and you don't have to take it to that extreme. Right before covid I took a 3 months break after my last contract as independent consultant. Traveled in South America with a backpack and it was awesome. These 3 months feel (fill) in my memory so much longer than the year and a half of covid. Can't wait to do that again once travelling is easy again. Only issue is that when I came back I needed a more meaningful work meaning that I'm not independent anymore. But I'll trade that off again and repeat happily
> intentionally living off of my savings for a prolonged period
For most people, this is what retirement means, no? So one way to think about it is they are trading off time, and doing some things while they were young and sure to enjoy them.
The flip side is I have known people who never took a 'real break' and worked doggedly until 65 or whatever, then found a few years later health issues constraining what they could do.
That was my parents. Both worked into their late 60s. Both dead before 75. The amount of retirement they even had a chance at enjoying amounted to about three years.
Having been through CMU and YC, I think while this piece makes sense for the average person, for someone who's been to CMU it's very easy to read this with a re-traumatizing reaction of stop-glorifying-working-to-the-bone.
CMU and YC were maybe the 2 hardest working environments I've been in, but CMU SCS was just plain more hours of staying awake, more implicit peer pressure, less mature peer support systems (mostly from being younger) in the median case of a class/batch.
You can get by (with a huge cost, as evidenced by the semi-regularity of suicide when I was there) with that intensity solving finite problems in semesters that come to an end but not tempering that attitude and knowing when to take strategic breaks in the infinite game that business is can really do harm.
CMU is a weird place, the kids that get in are very smart but often have their inferiority complex relative to say MIT or Stanford, which coupled with the uncompromising academics makes them work insanely, often unsustainably hard. I loved it there, but I'm very glad I had a training in balance going in.
I didn't go to CMU. But to me, as I read this essay, that was balanced by the "quit when you're too tired to do your best work". That's not working-to-the-bone. That's working hard, and then stopping.
Now, someone who went to CMU may be too traumatized to hear that, but PG did say that...
That's sensible, but it's an extremely difficult thing to build concrete awareness for when you're so deeply in a problem space that often your best ideas just pop up from your subconscious.
There's also ways some kind of work you can be doing for any given energy level that adds up to your end goal.
Do you have good advanced strategies for knowing how to identify when you're too tired to do work in complex scenarios. Always happy to absorb more of those :)
I should also clarify that I think this essay is written with the best intentions. I also think there's a specific audience that can very easily misinterpret it. You're not in it, which is great!
I had the exact same issue in my undergrad. I was suffering from pretty severe anxiety/depression during highs school, to the point where I dropped out in my junior year. I started “thriving” in my undergrad, if by thriving you mean busy and getting good grades, and my anxiety was much reduced. But the reason it was reduced was because I was going to school full time and working 40+ hours a week and I simply didn’t have time to stop and think. Whenever I had a vacation, or significant time off, I had extreme anxiety, to the point of panic attacks, about not getting anything “important” done.
Ultimately the overwork gave me a chronic neck injury that forced me to have quite a bit of time off work, and over the years I have become very happy with myself, to the point where I can sit and do nothing, be alone with my own thoughts, for days without the anxiety and self-loathing entering my mind at all. I’m not sure when exactly the switch flipped, but it made me a much better person. And I am much happier with myself, my life situation, and my work.
Very similar experience for me. I have a hard time spending time on hobbies at the moment, because it feels like I should put that time towards my PhD instead of "wasting my time and energy". Yet, I somehow have no problem spending hours every day on reddit, YouTube, hacker news etc. because I think I tricked my mind into believing that those things don't cost energy so it's ok. Unfortunately they don't really bring joy and fulfilment the same way hobbies do.
I think the real problem for me is that the work of my PhD is never fully done until I've defended and submitted my thesis. It means that even though I definitely don't get even close to doing 40 hours of actual work per week, it feels like I am working all the time, which is exhausting. It's bad feeling like you are not supposed to take a break and wind down. It's probably why people burn out all the time...
The most impactful activities I pursued during my PhD had absolutely no bearing on my research itself.
Here's one example: I created a robotics blog where I wrote about some of the new, interesting developments in the field that piqued my interest. It ballooned into one of the top 3 robotics websites on the web. I felt guilty about it for a long time... until I realized that the blog had a bigger impact & reach than any of my research -- I was known in the community; articles were cited on Wikipedia and in Congressional testimonies; and it established my credibility.
There are at least a half-dozen similar examples -- including just pursuing random intellectual curiosities. What really helped me come to terms with this is "Structured Procrastination":
This is absolutely a common feeling in PhD programs - I think partially because it is a transition out of structured programs and a more nuanced idea of "done". I wouldn't beat yourself up about it, part of the process is learning for yourself how to deal with finding the right balance of focus and exploration.
> On these days I'd typically try playing a video game (my hobby before college)… wasting time… hard work was not healthy
It sounds like playing video games was your medicine, and denying it from yourself traded “wasting time” for something worse, like bad anxiety, which you don’t have to get into.
It’s obnoxious that the Paul Graham culture targets video games. The alternative medicine is always worse.
Of course, what he’s omitting isn’t some nuanced take on what is and is not wasting time. He’s omitting that he doesn’t give a fuck about hard work that isn’t about making money.
As someone who also did their undergrad at CMU, I can confirm that it was the hardest I've ever worked (even considering my 10+ years of professional experience). It was burnout level with how many units you had to carry and how difficult some of the advanced math and CS classes became.
We used to sit in the Tepper Faculty Lounge (always unlocked = free coffee) many nights from 10 PM - 4 AM to merely crank out a 6-question problem set...as a group.
I find that I can still get into the mode of "hard work" that CMU instilled but I also find myself generally disinterested in getting into a world where that becomes my life again...it was fun, but tiring, and I don't need to be tired/worn out to have fun anymore!
Yeah I went to a not-at-that-level-but-still-rigorous state school, and one of my first impressions of my internships and out-of-college jobs was... "WOW I get to get paid to code, and no homework? I can spend my evenings+weekends however I want!?"
Part of what makes programs like this work (there aren't a large number, but CMU is hardly alone) is the fact that it's a fixed time to create a pressure box in.
I know of an undergrad double honors program that was unreasonably proud of the fact that after inception it took something like a dozen (maybe fifteen?) years before anyone actually graduated from it; everyone dropped one or the other half to lighten the load. Trying to pitch something to almost-but-not-quite break you only works when there is a finish line.
> Years later, having tackled anxiety problems that had plagued me most of my life, I came to recognize that my relationship with hard work during my college years was not healthy and that this deep seated desire to do more work is not a positive thing, at least not for me.
This resonates with me.
I would often try to outwork depression, anxiety, grief...basically any difficult emotion. Work was my coping mechanism and all external signals were positive about that--i.e., "he's a real go-getter." The pathology of all this became apparent after, well, becoming a parent.
Fast forward to now, I still sometimes struggle with those "alarm bells" but for the most part I can solidly state that I am not defined solely by my productivity. Contentment is an active practice, I suppose.
While I fundamentally believe I experienced the phenomenon PG writes about, there's something to be said about the scale of it. Taking a sufficiently generous interpretation of his essay, an admirable goal for self-growth is not to work hard all the time but to develop the self-discipline to work hard when you intend to be working (with the restraint to not be working when you intend to not be working, and the internal clock to help you schedule the two at whatever the correct balance is for your life).
Perhaps as a life goal as I enter my 30s, I should endeavor to revisit my love for mathematics and computer science (as opposed my work-life-balanced but frankly boring current career path), using both the restraint and discipline I've learned, so to not make the mistakes I made in my early 20s.
After leaving the work-always atmosphere of CMU, I moved in with my then-girlfriend (now-wife) and committed to working exactly 8 hours every day to keep work from taking over again. Trying to cram all the ambition and passion for work I once had into 8 hours of junior dev work basically turned me into a soup of anxiety, inferiority, and resentment[0] for some time. I thought I was wasting my career, after trying so hard in college. It took years to reorient my priorities (and also to reach a position that was a bit less meaningless than tech support for Matlab).
I think nowadays I could do better. Maybe next time a hip startup emails me with a job opportunity, I'll give them a call ;) thanks
[0] Anxious to try and find ways to work harder and achieve more in a bland corporate environment where the build system was more of an obstacle than the actual project, inferiority compared to the success that some of my still-overworked friends were experiencing in silicon valley (with opportunities I didn't have in Boston), and even occasional resentment towards my girlfriend, for whom I had chosen to restrain myself to 8 hours of work a day, because I felt I could do such great things without that limitation.
I did this, ended up at MIT due to work ethic, and thankfully ended up having a number of kids who are akin to a vector field with locally negative divergence (for these feelings).
There are always things to clean up from the chaos, and so much more meaningful than if I were doing it fit myself.
I think I was lucky in a way. I had my first experience with vertigo while working 80+ hour weeks for several years. In my dizziness I couldn't see my computer or cell phone screen to email or text my boss to let him know.
I was down for several days, literally only able to lie in bed and breathe. It was then that it dawned on me that if I died right then, I sure would miss a few things I'd been neglecting or putting off in life.
Vertigo has not returned yet (may it never!). It was a catalyst to a lot of meaningful change in my life.
Hobbies can be a very useful endeavor. So can volunteer work. I've been intrigued to learn more about the Civilian Air Patrol (US based, CAP) and how they help during disasters. Also fun to go up in planes and take pictures, either for training or in consequence of supporting disasters. They have more they do as well, but these things are fascinating to me. There are thousands of organizations with these kinds of opportunities.
You're not alone. Good luck in your hunt for meaning beyond output!
I had a similar realization. My inner desire had weird bits of fear and narcissism at its core. When that side of me cracked the desire to perform vanished. I did do some math after that (mostly to asses brain damage after health issues): i could do some new stuff, and did enjoy it.. but something changed, there need to be solid reasons: either aesthetical (a sudden epiphany that I need to study topology) or social for me to go into workhorse mode.
Another thing is that I also realized that crushing is not progressing.. so very often I understood things without any effort, what it took is for my brain to accept an idea more than anything else.. so I stopped forcing things, I simply walk around ideas and let things come and go.
All in all.. I also believe that is simply biology talking.. when young all you care is being the best, with age your focus spreads over other people (SO, kids, family)
For me the similar thing was when I started to read HN, 3 years ago.
It wasn't until 3 month before graduation, when a guy at the lab that I admired suggested HN and all the hustle culture and the background stories of successes was available first hand, that I started to get truly anxious about the time I felt like I wasted/ was wasting during college. Playing games are really hard now, so is watching movies. My list of movies or clips that I'm supposed to see on downtime is filled with daunting "productive" materials.
Also created the bad habit of quitting (job) when I feel like I'm stuck or "not growing/improving" due stress. The mentality of having to "constantly be productive" also caused strain in my personal relationships.
> a feeling at the core of my psyche that I have been wasting time and there must be something productive I should be doing or thinking about.
It's a little bit of relief to hear that others have experienced this issue. I've had this feeling when playing a video game, reading a book, watching a movie, etc. As if a part of my mind has trained itself to believe that the only worthwhile pursuit must be "productive" in some way. I've had to teach/remind myself often that it's healthy to relax, so keep playing. I think it's starting to sink in over time. :)
> I've since reformed my ambitions, instead of looking to start a company or get a PhD in mathematics, I've decided that hard work is not the love of my life
I 100% agree. Having just finished my masters (a bit later in life, I'm in my 40s now), I have concluded that I have exactly zero interest in pursuing any further formal education. I just don't have enough f*cks left to give for that.
But I do dream of starting my own company. But maybe it will stay a dream. And even if I realize it, I'm talking about a lifestyle business and not an attempted unicorn.
He has these alliterative buckets, like Craft, Community, Contemplation, and Constitution. Everyone's priority stack is different but generally speaking ... all humans need a bit of each.
>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 I could study at CMU on-site and experience all this. I'm an old horse still kicking :P
>I've since reformed my ambitions, instead of looking to start a company or get a PhD in mathematics, I've decided that hard work is not the love of my life and instead I should focus on my hobbies while looking for a career path that can be simultaneously fulfilling but laid back.
Glad that you figure it out. Guess the study burned you out :(
> 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.
I also went to CMU and had a similar experience. I got into programming because of my love for video games and ended up thinking they were a waste of time. A few years after graduation, my friends tricked me into going to a PC cafe (telling me it was a hip bar) and I rediscovered my love for gaming.
I had exactly the same reaction, and I also went to CMU for undergrad (not SCS though). However I found that it didn't translate to long-term productivity during my PhD program, when I needed to think about my career goals 5 years in the future. There I needed to focus on sustainable work ethic and working "smarter" rather than "harder" -- for example, okay I got an A in my quantum field theory class, but who cares? Other students who took easier courses but were able to start writing papers probably got ahead in the long run.
> 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 was almost always the case for me in group projects as we'd invariably do a waterfally style project management and each person would be 1 day late turning my 7 day window into 3... And worse yet usually what I got handed was crap and I'd just have to rewrite the project keeping only the barest clues of their work in place.
Not that much has changed 20 yrs later in my career.
This idea that work is required(!) and that rewards of it should not be wasted can be traced to some religious roots, for example.
This view on work ethics has been given rise to interesting theory more than 100 years ago in the birth of economic sociology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...
> this deep seated desire to do more work is not a positive thing
This, 100%. I got trapped in a work loop for several months this past year and am slowly recovering from it.
One of the most important rules for sustainable productivity that doesn't damage your health is having hard limits for the amount of time you spend working. It's very tough, especially when there are deadlines and other people encouraging you to exceed safe limits.
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.
I currently experience this. Every moment of downtime the last 4 years is plagued with these alarm bells that I'm not properly using my time. That I should be working on something productive. This even extends to avoiding home improvement projects because a more efficient usage of my time would be to continue to work on work/side software projects.
I’ve heard this same mentality from many people who went to rigorous colleges or had a rigorous college experience. (It isn’t just prestigious schools that are like this - choose the wrong major at particular public schools and your life can be just as difficult)
I’m of the same opinion. I still don’t know how to enjoy just existing - even small pleasures can be hard to do unless I think there is some kind of “work” aspect to it. Video games need progression or bragging rights, hobbies need skills that will make me better at something, and simple pleasures must be only to get me back onto the progression track. Recharging must be to get me back in the game and working hard again. Etc… I was overtuned in college to always be working on something because if I didn’t, I was going to flunk out. (Yay for bad professors and academia that cherishes weeding people out than growing what they have)
I despise the way college trains people. Feels like capitalism training 101.
is it anxiety? I don't have a single hobby at this point that doesn't involve learning new stuff or having to work as part of it. I've totally stopped watching movies for enjoyment or playing video games because it feels so "unproductive"
Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions here but there seems to be something obvious that you and others in this thread are overlooking: not all leisure activities are created equal. Some nourish the soul or the body, some are spiritual deserts.
Video games are in the latter category. Of course you’re going to feel bad about spending your time on them. But you could instead read a classic novel, play a sport, play some music, converse with friends, keep in touch with family, etc., any of which will help you develop as an individual in dimensions that will simply not happen otherwise. They connect you with the rich tapestry of life and human society.
If anything, old video games were more innocuous, as they didn’t try to be anything other than simple distractions that you would naturally tire of before long. Today’s games are precision engineered to be dopamine treadmills in the guise of immersive cinematic experiences, yet due to the primacy of gameplay mechanics, remain hobbled as works of art or storytelling.
Sure, some gaming could be a healthy bit of fun in a social context, but it tends not to be, doesn’t it? It tends to become a massive time sink, the accumulation of which over many years, usually of your youth (notice that older people just lose interest in games, like they suddenly don’t see value in them anymore), will not leave you well-read or physically fit or able to entertain others or even good memories - just precious time committed to the void.
I am not ignorant of video game culture. I’m just honest about the actual quality. I know games have storytelling. For instance, the Marathon series has an excellent story told via text read in terminals, utilising different types of prose and poetry, even concrete poetry, quite creative. The Halo series has something similar, except the primary storytelling mechanism is cinematic cut scenes, which, like 99.99% of such things, are terrible. Like the worst dregs of the sci-fy channel would have more artistic merit.
Some of both - I’m never going to claim that all games are of cultural significance, but I find the assertion that gaming is a passtime devoid of spiritual reward on a par with the idea that reading novels might be devoid of spiritual or intellectual reward - trivially true for a large proportion of the material, perhaps, but no more true for one medium over another.
I get what you're saying, and think you're mostly right.
However, I just booted up Breath of the Wild for the first time in a year (it's the not the first video game I've played in a year -- I just haven't played it in a year) and was absolutely astonished at how beautiful and well-designed it is. "Soul-filling" is a proper adjective for its affect of me.
Some games are obvious dopamine and money pits; some games are art. Those in the latter category are unfortunately few and far between, but I suppose every medium is like that. Some books are just as pointless and trashy as Clash of Clans.
Speaking for myself, I haven't lost interest in games as I grew older. What happened, rather, is that I lost the drive to go through the initial learning pains to get to the point where the game is truly fun and enjoyable - and so I end up mostly playing older games where I already know the ropes, and, occasionally, new games that rehash the old formulas and thus don't require much learning.
Video games probably taught me more than any other activity in my youth. I also played football and was an avid reader of fiction.
I don't really play them anymore because I played competitive games (As opposed to very casual or story driven games), and being good at games is no longer a priority to me. It takes a lot of time and effort to maintain your skill level, let alone increase it.
I definitely still see value in playing competitive games, but I think I've already extracted most of that value.
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 and are much happier doing so. I can't spend a lot of time gaming atm because of personal projects, but the time I spend playing Stardew Valley with my girlfriend or competitive FPS games with my friends is invaluable.
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 mind is relaxing, especially in competitive games you mentioned.
That's a _ridiculously_ reductive view of what games are. Like any form of media they range wildly from simplistic and addictive to rich and artistic and everything in between. Suggesting that all games are built to addict and waste time/money belies an utter lack of understanding of the landscape of games.
I could say the same about novels and be just as correct.
You’ve never made friends through a shared interest in games, or even through the games themselves? You’ve never been enthralled with the story of a game, and been left richer afterwards? You’ve missed out, and you’ve missed out through snobbery.
Like I said, I would be just as correct. There are addictive games and gamers, just as there are trashy novels and people who devour them one after another. I would consider neither more valid than the other.
I have met people I value through games and gaming, just as I have through Internet forums. I have experienced emotional highs and lows through the characters I’ve encountered in games, through the twists and turns of stories.
Like I said, perhaps you’ve missed out.
I’ve also blown off a lot of steam and enjoyed it as frivolous entertainment. I’m not trying to say it’s always worthy, social or a growth experience, that would be as absurd a claim as that it can never be so.
> A novel can make you addicted? Like you have to read it every day?
My wife used to spend multiple hours a day reading Harry Potter fan fiction to the detriment of other aspects of her life. It might not be designed to be addictive (same way HN isn't), but it can definitely have that affect.
>I played a lot with friends, but I never made friends through playing.
I know people who have made lifelong friends through online gaming. I do not know people who have made lifelong friends through reading books.
>I was enthralled by games, but when I was finished I wasn't "richer" in any way, just shorter of time.
What games were you playing? I've definitely felt absolutely floored by the technical achievements, storytelling and genius design in games before; the same way a good book or album leaves you shocked that a human could have created this.
I don’t consider myself a loser, as a successful software consultant with a house, a partner, a lot of travel under my belt and enough cash to basically do what I want. I’m moving to a new continent in a little over a month, to spend more time fishing and exploring the wilds, not lurking in a basement somewhere.
You're getting repeatedly downvoted but I think you have a point here that could have been articulated with less snobbery.
There's many folks here who grew up on videogames and most likely find it to have been a vehicle for meaningful experiences that are to some extent comparable to some of the things you've listed (for example, often videogames have social dimensions to them where lifelong connections are made).
I find you more agreeable with your emphasis on artistic value however towards developing a person. While it is true videogames are an artistic medium as well, the vast breadth of human art and knowledge/ wisdom lie in more established mediums that have been around for longer such as literature and music.
Videogames certainly have the potential to provide artistic value that is comparable to this long accumulated pile, but this is no easy task, pleasure and relaxation aside.
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). None attended the most expensive schools, if they had they certainly wouldn't have chosen to drop out because they got bored or were unfulfilled (see Graham and Zuck). Take a look at the top 10 highest valued YC startups. All their founders came from schools with less than 10% acceptance rates.
Privilege is what I'm getting at. Having an income 300:1 your lowest paid employee is disturbing. Making millions or billions off speculative, debt-fueled VC is disturbing. Proselyting your brand of success is disturbing. Recommendation: every time a founder, investor or businessperson starts to wax poetic on virtue, look for an angle. Why do founders want to appear virtuous and hardworking? Why do we need that from them? How else can they justify making sometimes up to 50% of their companies entire payroll? How emotionally satisfying must it be for Graham and his ilk to tell you why they got what they have?
What if most of serious wealth and success is decided at birth?
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, ran track, skateboarded and played with computers and programming for fun.
I went to Wash U in St Louis on financial scholarship. A great school but not the ones that tech companies recruit aggressively from. My freshman year I bootstrapped a moving company and a custom apparel company, and I worked constantly at both on top of a full course load for a double major and social obligations. I probably couldn't do that today, but it didn't feel like work then. It was fun. Both of those companies did well enough that I got introduced to Joe Lonsdale as he was starting Addepar, and I made enough money from them to pay off all debts and enter adult life with over 150k in savings.
I joined Addepar my sophomore summer. It was me, Joe, a CMU dropout, a Berkeley grad who was working at Yahoo, a snowboard apparel designer, and a santa clara grad. We hacked it out, and now that company is worth over a billion dollars. Joe was a Stanford graduate, the rest of us made it with equity.
While at Addepar in SF I met Keith Rabois, who tried to recruit me to Square. I turned him down because I wanted to graduate school, but we became close friends and eventually started Opendoor together with Eric Wu, the child of immigrants who went to University of Arizona. We recruited a great team, and now Opendoor is a 10 billion dollar public company.
There are a million and one privileges I've enjoyed, but they were mostly people being willing to bet on me. And most of the money I made was in equity. I never had a six figure salary until my last 6 months at Opendoor, and I didn't take any money off the table until year 5.
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.
> 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 [...].
FYI, other countries have effective college/university programmes too :)
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/
It's not even really material inheritance or gifts. It's that successful parents teach their children how to be successful.
When I reflect on my life I realize that pretty much everything went right because my parents had explained all the steps. I followed my parents advice to learn programming, I followed my parents advice on how to get a job, I followed my parents advice on how to negotiate how to negotiate higher pay and when to put the squeeze on management.
And now I'm doing pretty well for myself. I did work hard but I could have worked just as hard in the wrong direction and got nowhere. But I was already shown the path by my parents.
My best advice would be to find a friend who is doing well and learn from them. Chat and meet up often. Ask them about work and stuff. Personally I give out as much advice to my friends as possible and have helped them get started in software development careers.
Knowing what you can and should ask for is so important. Recently management suggested that it would be better if I had a formal certification. I then requested that the company pay for me to go to university. They accepted despite it not being an advertised perk. If I had not seen my parents do the same thing previously I would not have known this is even something you can ask for.
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?
Nobody's to say. For some reason some people think that statistics dictate reality when obviously they just take an average. The zip code thingy is silly, but on average more expensive zip codes produce children with higher incomes.
Yeah because their parents are better educated and pass on their values to their kids. So what?
I am frankly tired of this modern idea that is is somehow unfair if parents pass on their advantages to their kids. That is what nature has always been about. It even starts before people have kids - they seek out partners that maximize the potential for their kids. So if a woman chooses an intelligent (or even just rich) man as a father for her kids, it is somehow unfair because it gives the kids an advantage. Even trying to become attractive (for example to become rich) to make you a good choice for parent is somehow unfair? It should be obvious that all that is some Marxist bullshit, where individuals are not allowed to operate for their personal advantage anymore, and their bodies are being utilized (women are not allowed to choose attractive partners anymore, or have children for their own enjoyment. Everybody has to be dedicated to the benefit of society or "fairness").
Stephen Curry's father was a professional basketball player, and now Curry is one of the best Basketball players. Is that unfair? What would have been fair, to disallow his father to play basketball with his son, and instead mandate he gives free basketball lessons to poor kids?
Maybe it is unfair that Curry's father didn't push for him to become a lawyer or a doctor, "forcing" him into a career as a basketball player. Well his dad knew about the world of basketball, so that is where he was able to help his son. Why shouldn't he do that? I personally will see to it that my kids learn to code, because that is where I am able to help. I don't feel bad about it at all. In fact I wish there were other things I were able to help with, but there are not. Still, they can go out into the world and seek other teachers. Especially with the internet, a lot of things are free to learn. There even is a Masterclass by Stephen Curry about learning to play Basketball.
parents passing on their experience isn't the only part. They also pass on their wealth, their connections, etc. The rich family can send their kids to the top schools. The rich family generally has connections. If your parents are house cleaners or gardeners or plumbers, can they loan you $100-200k to try out your pet startup idea? Can they introduce you to people that as likely to want to invest 5-7 figures in your idea? Are they even likely to know which topics to study or what opportunities exist?
The point is not that any of this is wrong. The point is to recognize all the benefits or luck or privilege or whatever you want to call it that one person might get that another does not and then add that to the sum of things it possibly takes to succeed.
Person A, has taxi drivers for parents, manages to go to a nice school, works hard, maybe has a chance at hitting it big
Person B has rich parents, is sent to the top schools where other top students challenge them, was idea, parents fund it, if not directly at least by knowing that they'll have a fallback should it fail, via top school connections or family connections they are given tutors, advisors, and or access to top talent for their startup, their chances of success are far higher.
Another example: Person A tells parents "I want to make an app". Parents say "that's nice". Person B tells parents "I want to make an app". Parents say "oh, I can introduce you to Ms.X, she designs apps, and Ms.Y, she had a successful startup, on and Mr.Z, he says his daughter just graduated CMU with a CS degree and she might be interested in joining you"
Again, nothing "wrong" with that . Just maybe it would be nice to fine ways to help Person A, not how to hinder Person B.
Success and wealth tend to compound intergenerationally. That can be a good thing. When societies have economic mobility, wealth tends to enter and leave families over a couple generations.
I love music from Drake, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Justin Bieber and the like. Their music and the fact we live in a society where stars are bred for music -- that's incredible. Fair/unfair isn't a very interesting binary. Natural variance and inequity is an important part of healthy competition. How much inequity is too much? That's a very interesting question.
Instead of fretting about people who became successful, we should think about how we can help more people become successful. Which incidentally seems to be a huge part of what PG does.
Even poor people today live better than kings in the past. The things we can afford, microwave dinners, washing machines, were only available to kings with lots of servants in the past. When you consider medicine, it becomes even more obvious that we are better off now than rich people in the past.
> ...we should think about how we can help more people become successful.
It's like you're purposefully missing the point.
What if most of serious wealth and success is decided at birth? What are the logical consequences of that?
Let's go extreme: A rich guy wins the lottery. He then tells everyone in town how they could've won if they bought tickets. What's your reaction?
> Even poor people today live better than kings in the past.
I generally agree with this on quantitative measures of productive or technological progress. Other quantitative measures don't look so great: education, housing and healthcare costs; health (esp. mental health) issues in developed vs developing nations; prison populations in the present vs past.
Michael Foucalt has better arguments to make here than I do [1].
The claim is not that all wealth and success is determined at birth, just that most of it is. This claim can't be disproven by counterexamples.
It's more productive to look at broader trends. The average Chinese factory worker works more hours than the average westerner, yet tends to end up less successful. The difference is that they had the bad luck to be born in a poorer country.
PG talks about that in other essays, on how you should probably move to the right location. He compares Milano to Florence - it is unlikely people in Milano were less intelligent, but all the famous painters emerged in Florence.
Nevertheless I think your claim about the zip codes is too broad. Most people will have average lives. I suspect even in Silicon Valley only a small fraction of kids grow up to be successful entrepreneurs.
Note that everyone on this forum is prima facie remarkably privileged compared to someone in this world.
'We' all went to some kind of school as opposed to no school. 'We' all have amazing technology at our finger tips, as opposed to lacking basic nutrition and sanitation and personal safety.
The difference between 'us' and the abject poor is much greater than the difference between 'us' and PG or Bill Gates. The abject poor can't even post on here to point this out.
My point is that privilege tagging is hypocritical, and not useful. As such, I simply read this essay calmly for what it is, knowing that I too was born with more than enough luck. Yet I constantly fail to honour that most essential fact about my life.
It's an article called "How to Work Hard" that doesn't once mention luck, psychology, or basic human needs.
What do you get from the success how-tos of multi-millionares? Do you really not see it as self-serving? Disclose survivorship bias, incredible privilege, and impossible odds and I'm in... I think? At that point I'm still unclear why the rich have something useful to say here that Maslow or other academics don't.
I've lost track of what your critique actually is. Anyway, I didn't read this essay because PG is rich. I do not in fact know if he is rich or not. His wealth neither increases nor decreases the likelihood that the essay is worthwile. I starting reading PG's essays because he made HN, which I find valuable, his net worth is irrelevant to me. I know about him because of HN, because of something he created, and for no other reason.
I am able to contextualise his essay myself. It is not necessary for him to start the essay with a laundry list of disclaimers (eg I'm a neurotypical rich white guy with good parents, no major medical conditions, good teeth, 4 limbs etc).
You have just become lucky because you stumbled upon the article and can act on it. So it is not necessary to mention luck, because the readership of the article is already selected for luck.
The article also mentions the necessity of talent.
It also doesn't say everybody can become a billionaire by simply working hard.
Also even if you are born in Africa with no access to schools (or in some US ghetto were everything is sooo horrible), you can probably set yourself apart from your peers.
A lot us are able to take pleasure in other people's success and try to learn from them. It isn't very useful to assume the worst about people. The generalizations you are making here about rich people, etc. etc. are honestly ridiculous. Some of the most generous people I've met were filthy rich.
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 that we can be proud of in the same way. That’s who Graham is writing for.
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.
> All their founders came from schools with less than 10% acceptance rates.
This says they were overachievers in prior pursuits too. Universities may not do a perfect job of it, but their admissions is primarily based on merit. In fact the kind of person that will make a big impact on society is precisely what they look for in addition to grades and test scores. Perhaps they are just pretty good at it.
Why are they overachievers though? What factors -- over which they had control -- formed their psychology, intellectual capability, access to resources and education?
I'm guessing zip code predicts "overachiever-dom" depressingly well. I'm also guessing it's not everything, life is noisy.
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.
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 leads to lower velocity of money, which is a factor in consumer spending.
- Economic mobility stalls with decreased consumer spending and concentration of wealth. [3]
- As people lose faith in economic mobility and experience economic hardship, political instability follows. [4]
This cycle is compounding. It's about long-termism and general social welfare.
Economic competition is good. Inequality can be good. Current levels of economic inequality and mobility are concerning. Like pre-Great Depression concerning and it's only getting worse.
Right now we need people, especially wealthy people to be in-touch with how out-of-whack our economy is. The gospel of prosperity is poisonous right now. We need more people to acknowledge luck and to understand the economic suffering of others.
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?
Success has been compounding in fundamentally destructive patterns that are causing serious, unintended economic and societal consequences for 100 years now. If you're benefitting from that, great. I'm genuinely happy for you! But when it comes to policy making and interactions with others, holding onto a sense of personal exceptionalism hurts everyone. It also makes you look like an ass.
Not all hardworking and talented people become successful, but all successful people are talented and hardworking. Some people are born with better chances than others, but we should strive to make a society where at least most people are born with a good chance.
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 and they check out by playing video games, but they don't kill themselves? Would that be success?
Holding up a few spectacular achievements as the paragon of human experience is fucking stupid.
I genuinely think really rich (and smart) people do it to try to salve their guilt and signal for others.
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.
Ahh so "How to Work Hard" is really "How to Work Hard for the Privileged and Unsuffering."
I was confused as there was no mention of privilege, no disclaimer, no recognition of his revelation as an innate human need as fundamental as those for connection or play.
Graham figured out work folks, pack it in. Maslow, step aside.
Well the most important factor of economic mobility has historically been women marrying up. So you might be on to something - it seems doubtful that wives who were able to marry up work that much harder than other wives.
> The major correlates with high economic mobility Chetty identifies are racial segregation, income inequality, school quality, family structure and social capital.
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 bit more before making the claim he does here.
Another ex, Jill Bennett — described as his “first serious girlfriend” — said they split because of Gates’ fixation with working long hours.
“In the end, it was difficult to sustain a relationship with someone who could boast a ‘seven-hour turnaround’ — meaning that from the time he left Microsoft to the time he returned in the morning was a mere seven hours,” she told Wallace.
I don't see that being a "womanizer" is in any way incompatible with being a workaholic.
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.
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?
What an extremely revealing comment on your part. For your sake, I'm sorry the world has moved past your heyday of 'business in strip clubs'. I'm also sorry that your life is such that you can't even enjoy a full day off.
I have two separate threads of response:
1) You think Bill Gates just had friends who he could casually invite over for a naked party? You don't think that he had to invest a significant amount of time into coordinating those parties (read: finding and paying for his guests, since it is also widely reported that most guests were strippers likely under NDA)? I really want to know what world you live in where you can be a semi-famous (at the time) sexual libertine who operates in secret without devoting a lot of time to it. Maybe you pull it off, given the confident tone of your comment, but I'm guessing not.
2) I'm in shock that you can read PG's essay on hard work (Assuming you did), then make a comment that 'maybe the naked pool parties with strippers WAS his work for the day.' Even if that was true, my point about mythologizing 'Bill Gates' hard work' still stands.
EDIT: Tell me you've never been to a strip club without telling me you've never been to a strip club. Maybe they were brighter and quieter in the 1980's, but I somehow doubt it.
> What an extremely revealing comment on your part. For your sake, I'm sorry the world has moved past your heyday of 'business in strip clubs'. I'm also sorry that your life is such that you can't even enjoy a full day off
Revealing on yours as well. You make broad assumptions and put words in peoples mouths. I take plenty of time off. I never glorified the "heyday" (your word not mine), but I am aware of it as fact. I didn't enter the workforce until the 2000s and it was pretty much over so I never even experienced it second hand.
> 1) You think Bill Gates just had friends who he could casually invite over for a naked party? You don't think that he had to invest a significant amount of time into coordinating those parties (read: finding and paying for his guests, since it is also widely reported that most guests were strippers likely under NDA)? I really want to know what world you live in where you can be a semi-famous (at the time) sexual libertine who operates in secret without devoting a lot of time to it. Maybe you pull it off, given the confident tone of your comment, but I'm guessing not.
Bill would pay a party planner. He didn't operate in secret, it was just not as big of a deal back then. There was this thing called the sexual revolution that had just ended but the norms hadn't fully shifted. It wasn't seen as news worthy as it is today. The title of the linked article called him a "womanizer" and I don't think that was even much of a thing at the time it happened. You need to but social norms and actions in context to the time and circumstanced it occurred.
> 2) I'm in shock that you can read PG's essay on hard work (Assuming you did), then make a comment that 'maybe the naked pool parties with strippers WAS his work for the day.' Even if that was true, my point about mythologizing 'Bill Gates' hard work' still stands.
I'm just not ready to myth bust based on a moral difference even if I disagree with it. Where as you seem to prefer to completely ignore his hard work and accomplishments because you think he was a bad person. He still worked hard and accomplished many things by all accounts. Typically if someone says "i didn't take a day off my entire 20s" they aren't being literal or it doesn't mean they didn't take a single moment off (they were on call, or took meetings from family vacation, etc - still working). Others in this thread attribute it to his status at birth ("privilege") and I could see that as a stronger argument to make. But still doesn't prove he didn't work hard; just diminishes the value of his hard work to his ability to succeed. To use an analogy, Keven Spacey was cancelled. But his body of work is still excellent. I refuse to ignore his body of work where as you may feel that it should be stricken from cinematic history.
> EDIT: Tell me you've never been to a strip club without telling me you've never been to a strip club. Maybe they were brighter and quieter in the 1980's, but I somehow doubt it.
What does this have to do with anything? If I've been to a strip club or not has nothing to do with this topic. Strip clubs are legal and people make their living there. You're obviously on some moral high horse where only your view of the world is important.
1) Ok, let's say it's not your heyday, but then what are you basing your claim of 'business done at the strip club' off of? Stories you've heard? You said you didn't even experience it second-hand, so how do you have this information?
2) Did you read the article at all?
a) Operating in secret: "but newspapers like the New York Times hid the unflattering reports to continue getting 'spoon-fed stories" - sounds like he dedicated a fair amount of work-time to otherwise needless PR then.
b) Hiring a party planner: "Gates would visit one of Seattle’s all-nude nightclubs and hire dancers to come to his home and swim naked with his friends in his indoor pool" - sounds like he spent a lot of time in strip clubs & would pick his favorites. How likely do you think it is that all-nude strippers willing to go to a John's house are also on-board with cutting said party short so their John can get back to work? As you state, it was the 80's so I'm sure everyone was sober enough to make that decision every time.
3) The literal quote is "I never took a day off in my twenties, not one." He doubles down IN THE QUOTE. I agree he's a hard worker, but it's not good to tell a generation of up and coming entrepreneurs that they should strive to 'always be on call' when Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Eric Schmidt, etc. etc. all have VIBRANT personal lives that REQUIRE TIME OFF. That's the only point I'm trying to make. Time off is important and even an actual psychotic hard-worker like Len Bosack admits it.
4) Kevin Spacey is an actual pedophile (Anthony Rapp was 14), so EXTREMELY weird example. I don't think people shouldn't watch American Beauty (it's the second-best film set in Sacramento!), but to glorify him the way you do IS kind of sus.
5) I was just making a joke about the 'business in strip clubs' thing. I think sex work is great when done right (Evidenced by the fact that I know what a strip club is like on the inside). It's one of the most innately human things we do. I just think you're out way over your skis.
Feels like I’m an adult arguing with a pre-teen here. The way business was done, first wasn’t the only way business was done, but it wasn’t uncommon either. It still occurs to some degree. Why do you think strip clubs are open for lunch? Second, it’s common knowledge documented throughout pop culture and I’ve spoken boomers and older that remember it well. You might be shocked to know that women weren’t a part of the workforce until this time as well. What do you think happens when it’s all men doing business with all men? The machismo exudes.
Literal quote yes, but it shouldn’t be your literal interpretation because not every statement is literal. If I said my commute today took “forever” how do you interpret that? Am I still commuting? Is that my eternal punishment?
So we’ve established your ok with sex work. Which in gates example was done correctly. He went to professionals and paid them. If you agree with the work, you have to agree with the acts of the clients. So, I guess you just think it’s a horrible thing that he knew it would cause embarrassment and wanted to keep it out of the media. That’s what most people do. Have you ever heard someone tell there mom, I’m going to the prostitute but I’ll call you when I’m done? No that’s embarrassing. People hide their embarrassments but that’s not wrong in of itself.
Kevin spacey was meant to be an extreme example. Yet you agree his work was good. My “ his body of work is still excellent” comment was not glorifying him, you’re really bad at this. Let me say another way, if my dry cleaner turns out to be a serial killer, well he is still the best dry cleaner I’ve ever had.
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 extracurriculars, when you lived in an affluent society, when your parents were well connected, and on and on and on.
Are his contributions to humanity worth 60B+? Scientific discovery springs up in a bunch of places simultaneously and organically. I have to assume his contribution to society would've too, maybe with a smaller amount of value extracted to his personal fortune?
He's a philanthropist now, so that's good. I would be too the way social and political tides are turning. Funny how philanthropic the wealthy become. Even Epstein.
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 same lead time before the 8086. Of course he found some great luck in business, too, well after the company was established and had employees on the payroll.
> 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.
If that’s inaccurate, tell us what gives us more bits of information distinguishing him from the general population born in the same year he is. The smart part puts him in the 0.1%, 10 bits right there, and early access to computers adds another rare multiplier to that.
The difference being that gates was never in any real danger. His credits didn't disappear. He lived in a paid for apartment. He did not have to worry about money, and if he chose, he could've gone back to college at any time. It only puts you at a 'disadvantage' in business circles, because there's a slight chance that people with more experience will not take you as seriously
> Take a look at the top 10 highest valued YC startups. All their founders came from schools with less than 10% acceptance rates.
This is not true. AirBnB is the top valued company that went through YC [1]. AirBnB was founded by Brian Chesky among others. Brian Chesky went to the Rhode Island School of Design [2]. The RISD had an acceptance rate of 20% in 2020.
I'm not going down the list because I don't have time at the moment, but #2 is DoorDash, and the two founders with Wikipedia pages went to Berkeley and Stanford. Both schools with lower acceptance rates.
I am not going to engage with most of this topic, nor am I disputing that Bill Gates had advantages most of the world didn't : mom on numerous boards, dad a successful lawyer, got into Harvard, etc. However, I will dispute that Warren Buffet knew Gates as a child. In a YouTube video Gates describes his first meeting, as an already wildly successful tech entrepreneur. https://youtu.be/VBIiy5CnTiY
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.
Your story doesn't actually demonstrate that you have to know Warren Buffet as a child and attend an expensive school to become successful.
I don't think anybody here claims that working hard automatically makes you successful, either, just that it is difficult to become successful without it.
Also your movers could probably afford to work less if they dropped their drug habits.
> Having an income 300:1 your lowest paid employee is disturbing
I can imagine how and why communist revolutions were so "successful". This ratio simply shows theft from the workers. Probably, if we don't get a regulation in that area, so that let's say the maximum ratio could be no more than 10:1 and heavily tax capital gains, dividends and other means that privilege class use to extract value without having to work for it, this history will repeat itself.
In some western countries, extreme left parties gain huge support, because people are simply fed up of reading that e.g. Amazon got another record year while they themselves have to sleep in a tent because they cannot afford paying rent.
The Russian communist revolution succeeded because Tsarist Russia was brutal and despotic, and the brutal and despotic Bolsheviks were merely the lesser of two evils and better fighters. The Chinese communist revolution succeeded because the Chinese Communist Party waged a guerilla war while the Nationalist army fought the Japanese invasion by themselves. Once the invasion was defeated the Chinese Communist Party fought a brutal conventional war marked by long sieges where 100,000s of city dwellers starved to death.
I think political and military factors are underrated as explanations for the success of communist revolutions compared to social and economic factors.
> 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. They love to promote hard work because that's how they make money. It's just plain silly to attribute Messi's greatness to anything other than luck - both his physical abilities and the environment that taught him how to fine tune his abilities.
Hard work is useless without that special precise knowledge of which work you should be doing. Few young soccer players know how to practice in a way to become Messi, even if they have the right body to do it. It's useless without being in the right environment too.
> 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.
That, my friends, is what a VC would love for you to believe. There's nothing sincere when someone in his position writes something like this. Because hey, if you're the 0.1% of the time that it works out, he gets rich. And if you're the 99.9% that wastes their time (like all the kids that never play soccer at the highest levels) he loses nothing.
I used to enjoy PG's writings. He's crossed a line where he believes that the only thing good in the world is what is best for VCs.
In fact there is a good video from Verassium [1]. One can't discount luck. There is no such thing as hard work. It's just the feeling of being in flow and whatever one does to make you re-live that flow, it's totally worth it.
Instead of working on hard problems, it's best to prioritize on optimum problem and get the best out of your situation. With optimum problem, I mean the problems that allow you to maximize your living, instead of believing on moonshot dream.
It's okay to dream, but putting expectations on dream is losing touch with reality. Sure in an ideal world, essays like this would be perfect motivation, but you are living in a world ruled by billionaires and plutocrats. So, as long as you get enough share of the pie, I don't think one should pursue the moonshot dream.
Rather invest this time on working on job (whole-hardheartedly) only during office hours, and actually try living a life outside of it. You don't have to be a superstar to live a life because humans have already lived for so long.
Stop believing these bullshit VC ideas. The real essence of this essay is understanding the flow and noticing the events that triggers flow. [2]
I’ve been feeling great dread lately with the direction our industry is going (has always been going tbh). This conversation gives me some sort of renewed hope though. Hundreds of people admitted hard work burned them out; seeing VCs ask to sacrifice your life for their bottom line. Realizing the role luck plays in success.
Maybe covid pushed a significant number of people past their breaking point and now their eyes are wide open. I cannot say, but I’m glad to see so many people are speaking the truth.
Check out Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb, it's a great little book that goes over just how much chance goes into one's success (and how oblivious most humans are to detecting this chance).
*Veritasium. His tag line is "An element of truth", since "veritas" is Latin for truth and most element names end in "ium". I recommend the whole channel!
There was a long article linked on HN a while back, about how you can't start a company or invent something unless it's the right time, you can't rush innovation just because you try hard. It was gwern-style detailed and full of references and citations, not just a top of the head opinion piece.
> 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 work hard, or just have natural ability. You need to fully apply yourself aligned with your natural talents.
Hard work is a necessary but not sufficient requirement.
Without luck, you will not get to the level of Messi. Without knowledge, you will not get to the level of Messi. Without living in the right environment, you will not get to the level of Messi.
The "natural ability" thing is just a spin on the same idea. Work hard to recognize your natural ability. Be realistic about it. In that view, natural ability is not a matter of luck. It is still a story about doing the right things so that you deserve all the credit if you are successful, and more importantly, so that you can blame those that didn't.
The issue is that you can't know if you meet the other requirements, so it's easy to think "I'll get lucky by just being persistent" and you never go anywhere.
Without hard work, even lucky Messi would be a nobody.
The ability to do hard work is a worthy personal goal. Not for the sake of a job per say, but for the sake of one's own well-being. You seem to be seeing this exclusively through the lens of predatory capitalism, which might blind you to any valuable insights here.
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
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 nothing all day, and suddenly my doge coin are worth a million bucks. I basically don't know anyone IRL who got mega rich off these things. I know a lot more people IRL who are mega rich because they work hard to this day.
It’s important to recognize physical activity is very different from mental, creative or social activities. If you can convince people of things, you can be wildly successful. They may listen to you because you speak well, they may listen to you because you’re telling them what they want to hear or they may listen to you because you’re rich. None of which require the rigorous practice of a professional athlete.
Same goes for creative endeavors. I can be much more creative (and successful) if I’m well rested vs. grinding.
Contrary to you, the most successful people I know didn’t work hard at all. They either inherited cash and a network or they invented something that got huge and they sold it.
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.
Sure, hard work is often a requisite (unless you luck out in the extreme). But for the most part, it’s not enough, it’s not a guarantee, and it’s not the hardest worker who necessarily becomes the most successful. The point is that you shouldn’t look at the rich and the famous and think ”wow, the reason they’re there and the rest of us aren’t is because they’re so much more virtous and hardworking”.
Obviously it’s all a matter of degree, I’m assuming we’re talking really well off here. A lot of people are in the position where hard work is likely to yield moderate success and a decent life at least.
Messi was one of those kids like Tiger Woods and Steph Curry who had a dedicated parent coach who got them into the game at an extremely young age, and into the hands of the best trainers they could throughout their childhood. Most kids who are born into that situation end up at the tops of their sports.
Putting aside the fact that the article explicitly agrees with you that just hard work isn't enough, here's the part of your comment I don't understand:
> I know the VC thing about the importance of hard work. They love to promote hard work because that's how they make money.
Why would they promote hard work if hard work didn't matter? And if it does matter, then what exactly is your problem with what pg is saying?
Of course hard work matters, but when VC tells you to work hard, take it with the grain of salt, because this is how VC is going to make money off your work. What is missing from this advice is what is sacrificed. If and when 10-20 year later you cash out, what else are you going to have beside money? Family, friends, health? If you can make this trade-off consciously - good for you, but most people just go with the flow and don't think about it until it's too late.
Double irony of this advice is that many VCs are one of the most laid-back people you can meet. Usually they are already rich, so they don't exactly have to hussle anymore, and can choose when to do so.
You are waisting your breath trying to convince the fanboys here. Their brain cannot grasp the concept that the VC just wants to make money.
To the VC, investing in a startup is equivalent to buying a very out of the money call option. Option theory tells us these are ultra low premium but have immensive upside, so the payoff for the VC is ultra convex and non linear: from 1000 startups, 10 get more than 10 mil valuation, and maybe 1 is a unicorn (i’m making the numbers up but u get the idea). So yes Mr Graham would love for all of the fanboys to work hard since they are literally just options to him, and he has nothing to lose apart from small options.
On the flip side, startup owners are then underwriting options in the form of their life and work, so must be short volatility.
Long story short: dont do startups thinking you will win, think the VC will win
I think part of what you're calling luck is what pg calls natural ability and part of it is the idea of "luck favors the prepared". I don't see how you can attribute luck to Lionel Messi's success, with his natural ability+hard work there's no way he wouldn't have been discovered and achieved success.
Hard work is necessary but not sufficient. I agree that the essay glosses over the element of luck that is involved, but I don't think that makes the rest of what Paul is saying wrong. Even if hard work alone doesn't always lead to success, not working hard guarantees that you won't be exceptional.
What about intelligence and being able to notice emerging trends? Do you think Jobs and Gates were simply lucky in the early 80s? Or did they see what was going on at Xerox PARC and the coming PC revolution? Their less lucky colleagues stayed in college and went on to have normal careers.
Those are important, but nearly as much as luck. Without the luck he had in terms of timing and location it is absolutely not clear that Gates (or Jobs) would have been as successful.
This is a simple empirical observation: there are many individuals who are both more intelligent than and harder working (in the sense of this article) than Gates or Jobs and who never come to within a tenth of their success. That’s 100% luck in action.
Could Gates have been a success without intellect and hard work? Probably not. Could a number of others who were more intelligent or harder working have succeeded if they instead were in Gates’ position? Almost certainly.
Technology is littered with failed experiments, not always for hard work or technical reasons. Remember Xanadu? How about Transmeta? For each Jobs or Gates, there's probably 20 of them out there who ended up having more normal careers simply due to luck.
> Do you think Jobs and Gates were simply lucky in the early 80s?
This seems like luck to me[1]:
> [Mary Maxwell Gates'] 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.
Intelligence is genetic, which you have no control over.
Noticing "emerging trends" is also likely to not have been 100% due to Jobs/Gates attentiveness. If you heard about it from a friend of a friend, that's extremely lucky.
This is all also in hindsight. Of course it looks like they knew exactly what they were doing, because they succeeded. Other people were not so lucky.
> Intelligence is genetic, which you have no control over.
So is all of evolution, but then you still have adaptation. There is a skill to noticing opportunities and having the fortitude to take the risk. Not everyone does that.
> Why would they promote hard work if hard work didn't matter? And if it does matter, then what exactly is your problem with what pg is saying?
Hard work doesn’t matter (at least to the extent pg posits) and they promote it because (surprise!) they’re not all knowing entities but humans with flaws (yes even successful people can hold views that are not correct).
Hard work matters exactly as much as the dozen other factors but when you are busy working hard you don't think about those. It goes both ways. If those factors are in your favor you don't talk about them, when they are not, you pretend that they don't matter because hard work is above everything else.
> Why would they promote hard work if hard work didn't matter?
Hard work matters. But it isn't enough. Luck is needed to transform hard work into wealth. Line cooks work very hard.
Incidentally, YC's business model positions it extremely well vs. other VCs to take advantage of this calculus. Fund 1000s of startups full of maniacally hard working kids, and you can expect a few to also get lucky just by sheer volume. Whereas if you're only funding a few startups they may work equally as hard and never run into the luck required to succeed.
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?
If VCs knew what made companies great, they wouldn’t fail 9 out of 10 times. More than any profession I can think of, VC is almost pure luck + how much wealth you already have, which attracts deal flow, which increases your odds to get lucky. PG blogs because he thinks it increases his deal flow (or he wants attention). Just because he’s saying it, it doesn’t make it true, even if he believes his own story.
So they encourage hard work because it makes them money, but not really, because they are only ignorant in thinking that it does, and it's actually entirely luck?
Yeah, this attitude is a mental pretzel more akin to ideology than fact.
> this attitude is a mental pretzel more akin to ideology than fact.
Of course that's the case, because you are baking your own misleading slant into questions and then wondering why the output of the questioning process is not satisfactory
Slant such as:
>"...If hard work had no effect..."
Which is not something that's being argued for. It is just a strawman of your own making to the points raised
Id recommend you to do introspection on manicheist type thinking, and the difference between aggregate results of "Luck+Hard Work" vs the "Luck"/"Hard Work" work binary thinking.
I can't solve your errors of thinking, you'll have to work hard to understand the problem, or maybe you'll be one of the lucky few to understand it with ease :)
The condescending, passive aggressive reply, filled with “you must look within” tropes and topped off with a smiley face. Is there anything more irritating?
Just dont add the slant to the questions next time, it is just ...... not even unnecessary, it is counterproductive for you and everyone, to the other person is just as irritating as what I did to you with the previous reply + smiley
Or alternatively go watch that veritasium video that's being shared over the thread, it is very good
They make money through luck. They speak authoritatively out of ignorance. Monkeys rolling dice could do an equally good job, that doesn’t mean you should take advice from a monkey with a gambling problem.
Why delete the reply? It is an accurate angle, albeit inflamatory, after all that was the outcome of the Buffet bet vs HedgeFunds regarding the ROI of index funds
But yeah, not sure if id say that they make money through luck "alone", more like they make money through "the aggregate of luck" and very deep pockets which themselves are financed through suprasecular low interest rates, or in the same manner that a Casino will always win in the aggregate
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.
I don't think the point is "hard work has no effect on outcome", but rather "for nearly all people who end up successful, luck played a very significant role which is often minimized", and as a corollary "hard work is not a sufficient condition for success, but successful people tend to portray it as such".
For a good summary of this argument, I recommend the (fairly short) Veritasium video that has been posted several times already in this discussion: https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I
Perhaps this point is a bit too anecdotal, but I've certainly encountered the "just work hard and you'll make it" attitude a lot. And its inverse, people assuming that unsuccessful people must be unsuccessful because of their personal flaws.
In any case, that's the corollary, not the main point. Which is:
> I don't think the point is "hard work has no effect on outcome", but rather "for nearly all people who end up successful, luck played a very significant role which is often minimized"
You ever read jwz’s “Watch a VC Use My Name to Sell a Con”?
>
I did make a bunch of money by winning the Netscape Startup Lottery, it's true. So did most of the early engineers. But the people who made 100x as much as the engineers did? I can tell you for a fact that none of them slept under their desk. If you look at a list of financially successful people from the software industry, I'll bet you get a very different view of what kind of sleep habits and office hours are successful than the one presented here.
> So if your goal is to enrich the Arringtons of the world while maybe, if you win the lottery, scooping some of the groundscore that they overlooked, then by all means, bust your ass while the bankers and speculators cheer you on.
The controversy is that while it technically increases your chances, increasing infinitesimal chances to slightly less infinitesimal chances isn’t necessarily worth your health. But if you have a stake in tons of companies hey, one of them will probably pay off if everyone is sacrificing everything for them.
I still don't understand what is so difficult about this. If you work hard, you're more likely to succeed. Not guaranteed to succeed. Luck still matters, although a lot less than people think.
Whether or not VCs are justified in earning their returns is a completely different issue. This has nothing to do with hard work and everything to do with investment and dilution.
The "controversy" is this online meme that everything is just "random" and "luck" and no one, anywhere, can ever do anything to be successful. The entire world is nothing but a Vegas casino.
It's just rationalization for laziness and frankly, it's completely uninteresting. No one who has actual business experience thinks this.
Expand on this and taboo the word 'lazy' or the insult it comes with? "It's a rationalization for understanding that you aren't going to be Jeff Bezos. Unpicking the cultural idea that the more you suffer, the more you gain, and stop ruining your physical and mental health and social connections in a frantic all-out hard work obsession. Rebalance, and learn to be happier with the very ordinary non-millionaire life you will almost certainly get regardless of how hard you work".
> "The "controversy" is this online meme that everything is just "random" and "luck" and no one, anywhere, can ever do anything to be successful."
That is not the point of the meme. The point of the meme is to counter the "you Amazon warehouse worker, fast food worker, retail worker, call center worker, teacher, shouldn't expect a living wage or a pay rise or a better minimum wage, or a home, or medical cover, etc. because you are lazy. We know that because if you were working hard you'd be rich. Since you aren't rich, you must not be working hard. QED." norm.
Jeff Bezos packed boxes by hand using a door as a makeshift table at the start of Amazon! Well, a hundred million factory and warehouse and commercial kitchen and food processing plant workers are looking at that story with annoyance. It's not because they think Bezos didn't work hard. It's that they work equally hard at the same kind of work, for a lot longer, and nothing like the same return. And buried somewhere in the side comments "Jeff Bezos' parents invested $250,000" in mid-90s dollars. Yeah, sure, it was the hard work packing boxes on cheap homemade tables, that's the spin y'all put on the source of his success? It's not luck that he chose to start a company instead of working in a factory, but if a truck driver from Iowa tried to start an online bookstore in 1994 with no computer science background from Princeton, no wealthy parents, no background in a Wall Street firm known for "developing mathematical models to exploit anomalies in the market", no access to a home with a garage to work from, how much value is this "if you don't make it, it proves you're lazy" rhetoric adding to the world?
The meme is unpicking the logical fallacies "if hard work -> success, hard work is inherently virtuous, then success implies moral virtue (regardless of cause of success), and absense of massive success implies moral failure and laziness".
"Lazy" is a cheap dismissive non-explanation insult.
Nothing of what you wrote here relates to this link by PG or to what I wrote. Thinking that hard work is good and should be encouraged does not mean you think working class people shouldn’t have healthcare or that class mobility shouldn’t be easy.
This is really the fundamental issue I alluded to. Long political screeds filled with emotional appeals that have little to nothing to do with the topic.
Do you think "you could be Bill Gates, Lionel Messi or PG Wodehouse or Patrick Collison", "you could do great things!", counts as an emotional appeal? That's the carrot PG is dangling in the essay, and it feels more emotional than logical.
>That is not the point of the meme. The point of the meme is to counter the "you Amazon warehouse worker, fast food worker, retail worker, call center worker, teacher, shouldn't expect a living wage or a pay rise or a better minimum wage, or a home, or medical cover, etc. because you are lazy. We know that because if you were working hard you'd be rich. Since you aren't rich, you must not be working hard. QED.
I think the fundamental confusion is that this meme itself is an misrepresentation and strawman used in the ideological battle between right and left politics in the US. Nobody is claiming that blue collar workers are categorically lazy, especially not populist right politicians courting their votes.
Reasonable people across the political spectrum can agree that financial success is combination of hard work + aptitude + luck. They are likely to differ on the relative impact of each factor, and the degree to which the government should act as a equalizer to correct for aptitude and luck. It is a major problem that both sides choose to fight this issue in the context of extreme outliers and apply the conclusions to everyday situations.
Personally, I think the meme of emphasizing luck to the exclusion of hard work is destructive. When the belief is taken to the extreme and hard work doesn't improve outcomes, the path to improving your situation changes from being more productive and improving yourself. Why bother learning a new trade, relocating for a better job, building something, or taking risks if there is no payoff.
It is as though you are not reading what I'm saying. Let's try analogy. If you work really hard at it you're more likely to become an NFL quarterback. Does that mean it's a good idea to neglect everything else to chase that dream or that Roger Goodell would suggest that to you out of careful consideration of your welfare?
Because most VC founded companies are not about results. They are about virtue signaling to attract even more capital. Profitability has been thrown out of the window long time ago. Success is measured in the stupidest KPIs you can imagine. That's why 9 out of 10 VC founded companies fail. So you need to indoctrinate your minions to make them act accordingly.
You are arguing a completely different point than PG.
PG is talking about the ingredients for "doing great things" and "great work".
You are talking about getting rich. Sometimes these are aligned, and sometimes they aren't.
It seems like you are looking for a predictive model of who succeeds in society and who doesn't, while PG is offering life advice on the value of hard work (something within an individual's control) - a different topic.
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.
He is talking about doing great work, not about becoming rich or successful. You do need luck for your great work to take you places, but your own agency counts for much of your ability to do great work. Plenty of great work will not reap great rewards; it is done because someone feels that it has to be done.
howdy. as someone who has followed his career trajectory for the last 15 yars, I can assure You that "Luck" or serendipity or however You want to normalize his abilities has nothing to do with his abilities. Its Sheer Hard-work and Will to win. Being lucky is scoring 50 goals one season and 10 the second. This guys averages 50+ every season. So You might want to read up on it before You hypothesize. Like Spock famously said, "there is no such thing called miracles".
GP isn't saying that he is lucky each game, he's saying he was lucky to be born with the body he has and he was lucky to get the coaching opportunities that came with that.
But it's not exactly true. His body statistically is not the best for football. In fact he had a growth problem he had to take hormonal treatment for. Initial coaching opportunities are thanks to the parents, but then he had to work hard to qualify for Barcelona youth program. Then he had to move to Spain as young teenager to be able to continue training at the required level. Amount of hard work and sacrifice he invested is way beyond that most other footballers do, and incomparable to normal population at all.
Shorter people have a lower center of gravity which is an advantage for players maneuvering the ball through the midfield. There is certainly a trade off with strength and vision but Messi's body type is hardly unusual in top flight football. Xavi and Iniesta, who played with Messi on Barcelona, were superstars and all three are 5'7".
Messi is 169, average height at the World Cup is 182.4, this is quiet a difference. In fact he is in the lowest percentiles. Ronaldo is 187, Neymar is 175.
why do you care about the average height? - in some positions being taller is better and others being shorter - being an average doesn't mean that it's in any way better.
So he was lucky to go through a system that had him competing against higher level talent while at a physical disadvantage. By far the best way to train at a young age. His statistically good body for football counterparts meanwhile competed at amongst themselves and with lower talent. He was lucky enough to be good enough to push past the barrier of being able to be in a situation of advantageous training. It is a very rare position that often leads to exceptional players.
He also was lucky enough to be born. If you take to absurd, you can attribute anything to luck. A lot of kids where in position like him, and none made it to number one.
In what way did PG work hard? His job seems incredibly cushy to me. He even had the leisure to write his own lisp! VCs don’t work hard. They sit there and watch people grovel.
PG was lucky yes but also prepared to build web apps which nobody was doing at the time. He also had great co-founders/friends. Also the idea that a website could edit itself instead of having to be uploaded etc... And then they did it. So part of it was being there, part of it was building a technology/product that Yahoo needed etc... Part of it is working in computers as the web took off. Nobody at the time really knew what the web was going to be and I think we don't really know the full impact of the internet will be even today.
Take my story as an example. I worked in high school as a web form developer in 1995 and 1996. Lots of demand from professors to build their course websites with forms. I was just happy to have a summer job inside with AC. I had the technical chops to build an MVP of wufoo or surveymonkey etc.. But I didn't because I thought it was trivial and underestimated it. I thought at most I would sign up a few dozen psychology grad students or something. It wouldn't be a proper business etc...
Likewise, sometime in 2005-2007 I was in SF and couldn't get a cab and thought about a mobile app but discounted it as infeasible b/c I thought cities would never legalize it to preserve their taxi medallion scheme etc... That's probably true, they would have liked to do that but the public basically demanded it and Uber moved very fast. I reasoned incorrectly and underestimated the market.
I also underestimated DropBox, AirBnB, Hotmail, even Google, Yahoo and FB. The list goes on and on. Hind sight is 20:20 but I think it is important to figure out why I discounted these ideas at the time and what biases I had etc...
I think though that if you are actually interested in something though that goes a long ways to keeping you engaged. You can see past the discounting and the haters. If you continue to work on that, then by the time the rest of the world catches up, you are way ahead.
You don't even have to be some kind of Jedi who can see the future, if you just work on it because it is interesting. As you do that you will get glimpses as to what the future might look like.
Today, I actually don't think Dropbox is "just a sync or backup feature". It is so much more than that and that market has a lot of potential. GDrive, iCloud, and Microsoft all have big problems and limit themselves which hurts consumers.
"I never took a day off in my twenties" (Bill Gates) quote is a misnomer because what Bill Gates considers a day-off is something where you are just lying around doing nothing, such as lying on the beach. A two week sojourn into a set of books that interested him were not considered "days off". He did such activities yearly.
Bill Gates wasn't in the office working a 7 day schedule for his entire 20s. So that is not the impression we should get from the quote at all. His productive time away has merit, and I have followed that attitude to reading myself, and recommend it to others.
It would have been better if he had said "I never wasted a day in my twenties" which I think would be more accurate.
As someone in their early twenties struggling with burnout post startup failure, these bullshit hustle tropes NEED to end (like the Bill Gates quote).
I'm going to go against everything I was told and say: don't work hard in your early twenties, don't kill yourself over your work, don't fill your life with anxiety.
Phrases like "I wish I was like you in my youth" or keeping young people rolling in their hamster wheels just encourage the worst kind of personality damage in these developing years.
It is bullshit, it is harmful. Stop encouraging the young towards handing away their lives in a silver platter.
PG has turned a good profit selling the same pile of bullshit to two generations of CS grads and wannabe entrepeneurs now. I always thought the subtext was "and if you're really lucky, I can be your mentor/investor/boss and tell you why you're not trying hard enough." Nice to see he's still hustling too.
It always struck me as selfish, pompous and sanctimonious all at the same time.
He silently banned me from this site in 2012 for saying roughly the same thing - basically just made anything I posted invisible to 99% of others, so, yeah. Work harder, slaves!
[edit/addendum] The ban was never told to me. It was a hell ban apparently decided without consultation b/c he felt insulted. So for years I would post stuff and not know why almost no one saw it. Sneaky. As a sysadmin I wouldn't do that. Meanwhile, all his pseudo-self-help motivational speeches added up to one thing: Gaining authority and power over kids who were desperate to get a tiny bit of backing for a great idea. Money played a big role and everyone supposedly knew what they signed up for, but the personal power dynamic and control issues have always been near the surface. PG fronted as the ultimate "angel", but his interest in making money let alone helping anyone always appeared to take a backseat to having power to manipulate children's emotions and form a cult of personality to pander to him and sing his praises. All HN is essentially an outgrown version of his ego.
You have it right. Don't fall for this crap. It's just another iteration of the old company line, retreaded for the renter/gig generation - work hard til you retire, hope for a cash injection, then die early please. Nothing wrong with hard work, but you're right, it's better to spend your 20s living life. And question the source. [/edit /rant]
Every time we read or hear that quote, we have to remember that Gates also lose and win a lot of money playing poker in university, so there was also time for non-work related tasks :-)
Poker can be considered work. If you actually truly learn to play it, it teaches you a lot about people, emotions, thinking ahead several steps, probability, and risk and reward.
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 poignant scene. It's how our culture frames laudable and justified success - of course it's how he will tell his story.
Bill Gates more than most billionaires really wants to be seen as the hero, as a good guy. His charitable giving demonstrates just how much.
There is widespread statistical evidence that wealth is gained through luck. I imagine though that every billionaire thinks they are the one that got there through hard work.
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.
Repeatedly you see "influencers" be overly generous with their own retelling of history. The problem with this style of retelling is there's generally not very much humbleness or self reflection involved - they want you to _believe_ this is how it was, even if it wasn't. You can't really fix it, I don't think. Famous influencers are going to tell their narrative however they want, lots of people are going to say "Well, that's not really true...", and lots of other people are going to just aimlessly believe the influencer in question.
There are plenty of examples, even in this thread. Nobody is saying PG and other various influencers didn't work hard - but the virtue signaling of scale is usually way off. "We worked 100 hours a week at hour desks to launch ___", when in reality they "worked" maybe a half of that, extremely hard, and spent the remaining half thinking about work and/or stressing and/or recovering. If everyone was able to count "Thinking or stressing about work" as "work", I don't think this would be a problem, but people usually omit those parts.
People lie all the time and in the direction that can make them virtuous and a bit contrarian. How come that they all love their wife and family is important thing they have (although work is important along with their sacred responsibility of producing jobs and wealth) and then we find out they either treat their partners as inferiors in the relationship, have affairs, have been living in separate houses for years if not decades?
To me it is all fine since except in case of abuse, people can all choose how to live our life as they please. But isn't all of that taking advantage of credulous people, like entrepreneurial wannabes when the gospel is not "love your kids", but "work hard"?
Looking back I worked quite hard, as I see it, or very hard, as others might see it, at various stages of my life, but I would not write a propagandistic essay about "working hard". And you know why? Because I see life as full of ambiguities, because I have nothing to sell and I have not a public persona that I am trying to build, defend or that I use to generate views.
When I hear or read "work hard", "hard work", "work ethic", "never give up" and similar memorabilia, I immediately judge the speaker and writer negatively. Maybe it is just me, but I don't like to be sold personas.
If you're in a position where you benefit financially from the extra labor of others, you would probably be incentivized to proselytize the value of "hard work".
I think he has money for multiple generations of do-nothing at this point. But I also think he likes to be at the center of attention and a north star for ambitious nerds, and that's whey he proposes essays that are clearly propagandistic (but not for money). That's fine, I like people rooting for themselves.
The problem is the outsized reward relative to the effort.
It shows a broken system and should not be celebrated, if for no other reason than the opportunity cost of elevating such a small percentage of humanity to such wealthy heights while letting 1/3 of humanity live crippled lives with no access to clean water.
Whereas Bezos goes the other way. He wants to claim that he was lucky at Amazon, not that he foresaw the chokehold he would be able to put suppliers in, built a company that encouraged people to burn out and ruthlessly pushed employees and partners.
There's always a blend of work, intelligence and luck that goes into success, so it's nice to have anyone emphasizing luck. But it's definitely supposed to distract from how he kept long term deferring returns on investment to go all tentacley into every business line.
(I should point out that however hard he pushed his employees, he seems to compensate them for it. If you worked in one of his warehouses from the jump his RSU-distributions would have netted you enough for a downpayment.)
> 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'd like to add that it is more than fine to not do great work. If you like to spend a lot of time with your kids and tend to your vegetable patch, by all means only try hard enough to keep the job that pays for that lifestyle.
So, no dig on the author, but there is more than maximizing for great work. Try for a while to instead maximize for life happiness and experience how that feels for you.
Playing as Devil's advocate here. I think that "good work" is much wider that you are considering.
Having quality time off with your partner is "good work"
Raising your children is "good work"
In a more philosophical way. "Work" could be defined as trying to make a change in your reality. So yeah, that life discovering the arts, eating tasteful and healthy food, and spending time with your beloved ones is "good work" and requires ability, practice, and time to do it well.
This, exactly. It takes a lot of hard work to raise children and have a good relationship with your partner. I consider taking vacations to lay on the beach with my partner or children a part of that hard work. The definitions in the essay seem a bit short-sighted to me.
PG never said you should maximize for great work. The essay is about "how to work hard", not "work hard is the only purpose of your life". You are missing the point here.
In addition, you mistakenly exclude great work / achievement from happiness. Spending time with your kids is great, tending your vegetable patch is great, doing great work is also great. Life is not a single purpose process. Happiness is not a single threat process either.
Currently all the critics on the essay are terrible, but you are better at least know to keep it civil.
My reply was based on the interpretation that the author defined work as "doing your job". That interpretation was mainly based on him mentioning Bill Gates not taking a day off from Microsoft (his company and job) in his twenties, and the writer Wodehouse spending so much effort on his livelihood, writing. So I think my interpretation is correct.
The article strongly correlates this interpretation of "working" with "being happy". Two quotes:
> When I asked Patrick Collison when he started to find idleness distasteful, he said
>> I think around age 13 or 14. I have a clear memory from around then of sitting in the sitting room, staring outside, and wondering why I was wasting my summer holiday.
And
> 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.
My point to the above is: if you feel awful when you don't work hard on a job, by all means work hard on a job.
But if you feel fine only working moderately hard, and that is enough to fund your true passions, pleasures and happiness, do not feel bad for not wanting to work hard on a job.
And the reason I felt the need to say that, is that "hustle culture" [1], which this essay is not far away from in my opinion, might make people believe (incorrectly) that only people who work hard at a job are valuable and worthy human beings.
I don't think the person you're responding to is missing the point. Rather, they are making another, adjacent point. Our culture glorifies hard work and financial success (and excess) to what some believe is an unhealthy degree. It's worth noting almost anywhere hard work is brought up that it should be within the context of the values you hold for the other aspects of your life.
I will say that it is better to do great work than good work all other things being equal. But other things aren't necessarily equal. I would not want to have the discomfort with idleness that the author of this blog post lauds, for example. Although, if you do have that and are pleased to, then good for you!
I wonder how much of the criticism is skewed by the Western notion of “work”. I.e., we tend to view a vocation as the most legitimate definition of work.
If we take a different perspective, I think the author is much less likely to be the target of ire.
>working hard means aiming toward the center — toward the most ambitious problems.
To those in a society hyper-focused on productivity, this can certainly rub people the wrong way because so few are able to dedicate themselves to super ambitious vocations. As the saying goes, the world needs ditch diggers too.
But if your ambition is to cultivate a meaningful, verdant life I don’t see why the author's statement is incompatible with the GP comment. Maybe we just need to broaden our definition about what is worthwhile “work”. It’s certainly possible to do great work cultivating relationships if that is your goal rather than, say, creating a new field of mathematics.
I don’t think you’re wrong, that’s the same impression I got as well. But I suppose that is to be expected in a society that tends to consider one’s vocation as the height of personal ambition.
I would also suspect the author scores highly in the conscientious personality trait. So it would follow they have high levels of discipline, derive pleasure from achievement etc. Maybe the title should be changed to “How to Work Hard (and why that matters to people like me)”
Agreed, but I also found that 3-ingredient formula to be one of the more insightful things he says in this essay. It's a good way to understand what it takes to be successful at anything.
Including, by the way, being a parent. Many of us aren't born with (or have a sufficiently healthy childhood) to have naturally great parenting abilities. But hard work and practice sure do go a long way.
Anecdotally, from years at the playground, the attitude of trying to maximize the quality of your parenting is however a killer impediment to being a good parent. Parenting is challenging and a lot of time, but works a lot better when you are doing it in the moment rather than to achieve some agenda.
Of course one of the great things about parenting is that mostly you get to have the same situations over and over again, and get to change your approaches (including consistency) to see what happens with different approaches. So you get practiced at each thing. And the talent needed for parenting is more intimate that for writing software - it's the talent to make your toddlers laugh, to make your 4 year old confident enough to try something they want to try. It's a set of skills for doing stuff between a particular parent/child system. My tricks might not work for you; my tricks for my first born did not work for my second born.
PG essays are written for an audience of startup founders and prospective startup founders. When he says "doing your best work" he doesn't exactly have a guy pouring concrete sidewalks in mind. Theoretically, a founder who works harder can make 10,000 as much as if they slacked off. That will never be true for basically any other profession.
There's a lot of spectrum between "only try hard enough to keep the job" and PG described "great work" in many tech jobs, and indeed most tech people are somewhere in the middle.
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 the time. At least for the three years I did it; if I'd kept going much longer, I'd probably have needed to take occasional vacations. [5]
Most programmers don't have the ability or scope to be engaged in the way that he's talking about wrt his startup, so most programmers should stop working as soon as they're at their "productivity threshold" throughout the day and have fulfilled their remaining busywork duties. I really wish tech "influencers" like PG would post more about that - when to put the mouse down and go for a walk or watch a movie.
I actually think the "best" take would be "Every individual should work exactly as hard as they believe they should". I think it's a reality, in that most people are unwilling to work any harder than they want to, but also I think context is probably the most important factor in terms of "work", "output" and "success". If you don't feel like you should work hard, or don't need to, you're either working on something that isn't worth your time, or you don't feel engaged at all. Both are fine, but both also signal you should move on.
This post turned into kind of a ramble. Apologies.
Just quoting Gates as model is swallowing gallons of the "Koolaid" in my opinion. Other have gone into that in more detail here.
When asked the secret of his success, An insider who leveraged a monopoly position to get more of a monopoly position, said "hard work, relentless hard work, nothing but hard work!"
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.
This is a beautifully written post and definitely not a ramble, thanks for sharing this.
I would take this a bit further that being happy or feeling fulfilled is really the best way to have an open mind to do things differently. If you're stressed out from working all the time, you have little chance of appreciating "problems" as more than things that must be dealt with rather than as opportunities for learning.
I took the approach that in your 20s you are still forming, still growing, still malleable. The experiences you have in your 20s will have a disproportionate effect on the kind of person you end up being. Therefore, you have to think about what environment, what experiences you want to foster that growth in. I would suggest optimizing for variety and new experiences is a better idea that working 80 hours weeks throughout your 20s.
In your 20s, don't just work hard, work hard at becoming the person you want to be.
I love this advice. I started working remotely in my 20s and negotiated to work 4 days a week, while traveling the world and deciding where I wanted to call home. I'd never trade that time spent growing up and finding myself, learning about other cultures and places, for any level of start-up monetary success.
Everyone is different and obviously has different priorities, ambitions, ideas of success, but that time spent not working my ass off has made me a more well-rounded person and I believe has contributed to a different kind of success and confidence now in my 30s.
It’s always a trade off and there’s no right answer for everyone.
I spent my twenties roughly as you advise, and i definitely grew and learned from it. But some of my counterparts focused on career and have achieved more on that front and have been able to have more freedom in their thirties as a result. It’s not obvious that either path is better. There is no optimal
The issue, of course, is that we seldom have the luxury of this, unless we are willing to make sacrifices, or do a heck of a lot of extracurricular work.
In my own development, I never had the advantage of a fancy sheepskin, so I wasn't really paid that much, compared to a lot of folks, and my employers didn't have much of an issue, when it came to throwing me at experimental stuff. It wasn't much of a risk, for them.
Meant that I learned a lot. I was also given a disproportionate amount of architectural responsibility. I learned how to design systems, and complete stuff, early in my career.
But it also meant that I have spent my entire career, looking up a lot of noses. I've usually been a "n00b," in most of my endeavors, and geeks tend to treat neophytes pretty badly (maybe because of all the atomic wedgies we got in grade school?). It drove me to do a much higher-quality job than what might have been considered acceptable. I developed a "screw you, I'll show you" attitude, and I've habitually produced highly-polished work, from the very beginning[0].
Didn't always win me friends. No one likes it when the chav kid shows up the toffs (but the bosses liked it, and really, they were the ones that mattered).
I'd say that the humility taught by that treatment was as valuable as the book-larnin'. It forced me to solve my own problems, find information, develop a thick skin, and not rely on "magic answers from the sky." I was never able to throw the problem over the fence, so someone else could address it. I always had to clean up my own messes.
I also practiced a very good team ethic, with a great deal of kindness towards teammates that were struggling or being marginalized. I figured out how to support and mentor people without making it seem as if that was what I was doing (the trick is to lead by example). I used the cruelty that I experienced from other geeks, and from awful managers, as an antipattern, in my own dealings with others. I think it helped me to be a fairly good manager.
It's always a very good idea to help out folks that are not that high in the food chain. They are likely to return the favor, sooner or later, and they often have their fingers on the real pulse of things. They can be quite helpful.
It hasn't been that much fun, and I haven't lived high on the hog.
But I am pretty good at what I do, and, in this phase of my life, it's paid off in spades.
When I saw the title, and who wrote it, I said to myself "This should be fun."
Yes. And "learning" shouldn't just be measured in PhDs or being an expert at one thing. I think the "work hard" advice can be interpreted as "focussed, tunnel vision, excelling in one area to the exclusion of everything else" when there is great benefit of aiming for a wider range of experiences in your 20s.
I took extra classes and worked hard in college to get a CS degree because I loved it. I was so excited to start a career because the internships were fun and exciting. I graduated in 2001 right after everything dried up. The only place hiring was Raytheon, there was no way I'd step foot back in that place to work on weapons. I asked a friend what to do, "Why don't you move to MT and snowboard", so I did. Seven years of my 20's in MT, the first five snowboarding and climbing, the last two figuring out how to get back into tech while snowboarding and climbing. I'm now in my 40's married to someone I met in MT with two beautiful kids and good career in tech. I don't spend much time thinking about what I might've been able to achieve had I spent those years in my 20's working hard in tech. I'm just very grateful things ended up the way they did. We need people who want to achieve great things, especially now with the urgent problems we've created for ourselves. But it's just fine to not be one of those people.
Reminds me of my intern at Google. PhD CS, had been an intern at Google 9 summers in a row. Spent remainder of year skiing. Smart and contributed a lot, also seemed happy.
Stories like your intern skiing for 9 years or the GP ‘5 years snowboarding’ usually omit describing rich parents in the background picking all sort of tabs.
I won't fault you for the not unreasonable assumption but not the case for me. I have fond memories of sleeping behind a friends couch while securing a job at the ski resort. Initially working at the resort from 4 to midnight so I could ride every day. Sleeping in dorm style housing slightly worse than freshman year of college. Working my way up to running the ticket office. Somehow not blowing all my money on new gear, saving just enough to buy a $59k condo at the base of the resort which I still have. No financial safety net, no savings, but also no dependents and nothing to lose living in one of the greatest areas of the country.
One of my greatest regrets is how much time I wasted on 'work' in my 20s and 30s. I was an engineer, I made a comfortable salary, but I rarely took a vacation, I never traveled outside the UI, I took days off reluctantly with a vague feeling that I was letting someone down.
"Later", I told myself. When I'm successful, when I'm stable, when I have the money to travel in style and not backpack around and stay at hostels. Then I can take a break and have the adventures I want.
My in-laws confirmed this attitude for me - they retired in their 50s and traveled the world. What a great life goal!
Guess what, life happened. Health issues. I'm never going to travel the world. All that time in my 20s in 30s - I was healthy, I was happy, I was carefree, and I didn't appreciate it and threw all that time away sitting at a desk looking at a screen. Today, now, that's about the only thing I'm fit to do.
Don't listen to PG, kids. Live the life you want to have now, not the life you think you'll want to have several decades out.
PG briefly touches on it here, but one of the biggest factors on being able to consistently work hard is reward.
PG mostly talks about intrinsic reward in this article. We should work on stuff that is interesting to us, and brings us fulfillment. However, I believe that Paul is missing a huge component here, and that is extrinsic reward.
Extrinsic reward complements intrinsic reward. Extrinsic reward allows us to push through the hard, difficult work that we might not be interested in, because we know the work will be rewarded. It is the light at the end of the tunnel for difficult work. PG, and Bill Gates were able to work so hard because they had internal belief that there was an extrinsic reward for all the work they were doing.
In a perfect world, we would all be completely self motivated to work on every task, but this just isn't realistic. Especially in today's working work. People like PG, and Bill Gates are able to fully credit intrinsic reward, but fail to mention that the extrinsic reward ($$) validated the hard, gritty work they put in.
This is something I struggle with, as someone who worked really hard in school but has become less productive as a professional. In school there are well-defined deadlines and discrete tasks with extrinsic rewards in the form of grades. Even though the rewards were "fake" in a sense, people cared about them so I was motivated to earn those rewards, partially due to competitive drive.
In my professional life, that motivation has all but disappeared for me. I already have the comfortable salary I hoped for, and individual achievements aren't directly rewarded with more money in the short. So what else is left as an extrinsic reward that can provide that drive on a daily basis?
I haven't found the answer to that yet myself. Sometimes I feel like I've been given too much too soon and that's removed my hunger to work. That plus existing in a collaborative environment instead of a competitive one.
> when I have the money to travel in style and not backpack around and stay at hostels
I think that's where you went wrong. The backpacking at hostels is the best (as long as you pick hostels and fellow travelers that do not look like your typical backpacker haha). The thing is, now that I'm 30, I feel it's probably out of fashion. But these nights I spent in big-city hostels had the most fun, stories and affairs.
> Don't listen to PG, kids. Live the life you want to have now, not the life you think you'll want to have several decades out.
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.
> 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 went out 1 night every 2 weeks. If you had kids, I'd understand but for someone in their youth - that is nearly shut-in status.
What you're thinking about doing over the period of 15 years, I've done in about the span of a year. Life is too short to spend it inside working. You won't get your youth back - once it's gone, it's gone.
> Wat. 300 nights over 15 years is way too much? That is utterly insane to me. That means on average, you only went out 1 night every 2 weeks. If you had kids, I'd understand but for someone in their youth - that is nearly shut-in status.
I think we need to agree on what's a night out. If you come back at home around 3AM and sleep at 5AM; I find it hard that you can work the next morning and keep at it everyday. It's possible to do that at weekends, but then you probably have errands to run at that. A month in another country avoids any onshore errands and also brings adventure.
Sure you can go out every-night for 1-2 hours at your local pub/coffee. But these hardly bring any adventure or novelty; they are just part of the routine and honestly now, I couldn't care less about them. They are forgettable events: irrelevant. I'd rather be doing interesting work, or just sit down in front of Netflix.
This might be a bit of a niche version of a night out that might only fit well with Berlin. I was usually out for 3-6 hours/day (go out around 7-9PM, come home 12-2AM). Varied on how much I enjoyed what I was doing wildly. Not every night out was great but neither was every night out when I'm traveling either. (Nor is every night memorable)
If you do things enough - the memories aren't likely to last. Things that are novel are what create memories. For you - you were visiting countries and seeing things you'd never seen. Unrealistic for regular 9-5 life. Doesn't mean that you still can't have a good time in a non-novel thing though. I had plenty of good nights that I don't really remember but I enjoyed them still.
Travel enough - and you might find out... the novelty wears off there too.
But novelty shouldn't be the only pursuit in life.
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.
Ah. If you're using "going out" to mean literally any activity outside the home that is not work, then sure, "going out" a lot wouldn't be not hard. Someone with a reasonable amount of disposable income could probably eat out at a restaurant five days a week, if they wanted to.
30 is the next 20 :) I've started seriously backpacking when 27 and 29 (2x3 months in india&nepal) and continued till current age of 40. Life changing experiences.
The only thing that stopped me was having kids, so the best reason possible. Corona would just mean closer travels and more mountains rather than people if we didn't have them.
I see no reason to stop unless your body or mind can't handle it anymore. Which with taking good care of oneself (and a bit of luck) can be easily 75, met quite a few of those.
I understand what you mean by health problems, because I too have health problems that limit my ability to work and play the way I dreamed of.
But Paul Graham never recommends mindlessly working on things that don't interest you for the sake of some imagined tomorrow.
He even recommends not to do it:
"...if you think there's something admirable about working too hard, get that idea out of your head. You're not merely getting worse results, but getting them because you're showing off — if not to other people, then to yourself."
That's a strawman version of what Paul is suggesting.
" Are you really interested in x, or do you want to work on it because you'll make a lot of money, or because other people will be impressed with you, or because your parents want you to?"
"The best test of whether it's worthwhile to work on something is whether you find it interesting"
"Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It's a complicated, dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point. You have to understand the shape of real work, see clearly what kind you're best suited for, aim as close to the true core of it as you can, accurately judge at each moment both what you're capable of and how you're doing, and put in as many hours each day as you can without harming the quality of the result. This network is too complicated to trick. But if you're consistently honest and clear-sighted, it will automatically assume an optimal shape, and you'll be productive in a way few people are."
"It's good to go on vacation occasionally, but when I go on vacation, I like to learn new things. I wouldn't like just sitting on a beach."
Listen to PG kids. Not some misinterpretation of what he's saying.
But I hope you can find the peace you're searching for. I really do.
I understand the agony of not being able to get what you want.
> "It's good to go on vacation occasionally, but when I go on vacation, I like to learn new things. I wouldn't like just sitting on a beach."
There are few things I enjoy more than just sitting on a beach. When you go on vacation, actually go on vacation. Turn off your phone. Leave your laptop behind. Bring some fiction, or maybe select non-fiction (biographies are great). Put sunscreen on. Get a cold beverage. Fall asleep with the book on you.
I recommend learning new things while you're on vacation! But learn about the place you're vacationing at. Learn about the culture, the people, the history, the geography. Expand your horizons and waste time.
This exactly. Vacations are an amazing time, and the only real time I can dig deep into places. Going to places like Philippines, I didn't have much of a plan, only return ticket and vague concept from Lonely planet.
Those books actually contain tons of useful information apart from their main focus (accommodation & restaurants). History of a state and its various parts, culture, mindset, local quirks, food. And then you actually mingle with people, ask for directions, look for accommodation, trying to get last bus to some other place, start a chat with a stranger going same direction.
This are one of the most rewarding experiences in my life. Constant discovery of how amazing our world actually is and people inhabiting it. I've met the utmost kindness from the poorest of this world like Dalits in India who have nothing and shared everything with a lost traveler.
I come back from such trips richer and more experienced than ever. But yeah just sitting mindlessly on the beach, which I think not many people do actually might be a cure for near or complete burnout, otherwise just a waste of precious time off.
> One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you'll have to work very hard
This is such a narrow definition of "great things" that it is useless. Great things in PG's eyes maybe, but I hope no one's life goal is to impress him.
> "I never took a day off in my twenties," he said. "Not one."
I still think you're strawmanning the essay (and I'm sorry you didn't figure out sooner what you wanted to do with your life - that really sucks!).
Bill Gates knew what he really wanted to do and what interested him so not taking a day off was probably a no-brainer.
If you had been able to realize earlier that travelling the world was what you wanted to do, then you could have put all your efforts into making that happen.
I think the essay is suggesting that merely working hard without enough of that effort spent on the directional problem won't yield the results you want, ultimately. So I think the suggestions here taken holistically are useful to a theoretical-younger version of you.
I have to echo this. I know HN is full of people obsessed with a very different lifestyle but frankly... I think this piece misses the mark entirely.
PG I suspect and many others derive intrinsic happiness from the grind. From achievement. Yet this is a very myopic way to live that for the vast majority of people will result in a fair amount of unhappiness.
A far healthier and happier way to live is to live a balanced life. Work efficiently when you need to work, and be focused on your objectives. Don't waste time on stuff that doesn't matter. You can still be successful, grow yourself, etc. but without killing yourself in the process.
And for the love of god... take time for yourself to enjoy the finer things in life. Take a walk and try to find the beauty in things. Go travel somewhere new! Enjoy some you time and treat yourself.
I cannot disagree more with PG here, sadly. But that's all it is... a disagreement. Everyone gets to choose what life they want to live.
I think on some level, barring the "stuck-in-bed depression" cases, we all work hard, but the work is nothing like a startup or a coding challenge.
It's more often things like going on a walk and identifying the birds, going to the bar and getting better at telling stories or playing pool, seeing patterns in watching daily traffic or weather. Things you absolutely could go deep on, but just can't justify as "character building exercise" because they won't directly lead to you acquiring property or power.
And that's where the alarm bells start to come in; if you get anxious about that, you can get stuck on the idea of work and cut yourself off from a balanced set of interests, and this hits young people especially hard because they don't know what the balance could look like, or they observe media(including HN) where the balance is clearly defined towards one extreme, think "I will become that" and treat it as a masochistic exercise. I believe this to be a deep affliction of the online world particularly since, without trying you can stumble into media containing the "best" of everything.
He's got an audience that he is writting too. He's talking about building great things, not how to live a full and happy life.
While working at Tesla, we definitely all built great things but that's all we did. I left, took a 70% paycut to start my own consulting business and work 4-5 hours a week while being a 'Digital Nomad'. I've never been happier and guess what, that nagging feeling of 'I'm not doing real work' or finding 'idleness distasteful' goes away when you don't feel like the whole team has a gun to your head.
Bingo. Author is writing for his audience. On one hand I don’t care how his followers are following his words. On the other hand, I’m concerned that few years down the road, these founders/leaders will end up imposing these expectations on their employers.
How many of those founders will actually do something great, and how many will do the supposedly “great work” of building something designed to siphon off as much of people’s money and attention as possible in the pursuit of getting rich?
> Don't listen to PG, kids. Live the life you want to have now, not the life you think you'll want to have several decades out.
Isn't there an in-between? My wife and I both delay a little bit of gratification with the expectation that we'll have a better life in our mid-30's or early 40's. In other words, we're choosing not to live the life we want to have right now, because we're trading that off for a potentially better life X years from now (where in our case, X = 5-10 years).
X can be whatever you want, and it's up to individuals (or families) to decide that for themselves. But once you do, delayed gratification is an important social concept; as evidenced by the marshmallow test administered in children. For adults, "rejecting the marshmallow" can mean working a little harder in your '20s, so that you may get 2 marshmallows when you're in your '30s — which for a lot of people is important as that's the age when they have children.
Having children means sharing your marshmallows. It’s also a lot easier to chase a kid in your 20s than your 30s. It’s also maturing, enjoyable, and spending time with them is the best part of the day.
Not something many people say about work! Maybe when the work is truly meaningful (I wouldn’t know).
The notion that people need to work through their 20s for this unknown future prize is silly and wasteful. Spending the prime years of your life slaving to a computer is something I think a lot of people will regret.
So, no, I won’t listen to PG. My most fulfilling work is being a dad.
I want to make it very clear that I do not expect everyone to want kids, and I'm never ever one to say "oh you'll love kids once you have your own!" to anyone, but...
I cannot understate for me personally how much having my own kids over the past few years has shifted my priorities. The best parts of my weeks are when I'm with my family all doing something fun together. Work is now only a means to provide and is not a source of personal fulfillment anymore (again, YMMV!!!!)
It's hard to stay "extra motivated" at work now, though. I went from being willing to put in the long hours and weekends to barely being able to get 30-40 hours a week.
But you know what? There are plenty of perfectly great jobs that allow for that. The place I'm currently working told me in the interview loop they can't compete with FAANG salary ranges, but they promised me total autonomy on when/where I work as well as great work-life balance, which has proven to be true.
I worked very hard in my 20s and I'm extremely glad I did. The work was interesting, engaging, maturing, and super valuable for society. It also set me up with an extremely valuable skill set, of hard and soft skills, that are useful in both my professional and personal lives.
This trend of saying you enjoyed your life and therefore yours was the only correct choice is extremely closed-minded, and tends to come from parents in particular a lot. What if instead you solicited the opinions of people whose life you clearly don't understand? Are you so scared of the idea that other choices made other people happy?
I also totally understand being single, childless, and driven to a career. I’m happier now. Who is the one not listening to other’s opinions? You sure you understand?
> Not something many people say about work! Maybe when the work is truly meaningful (I wouldn’t know).
The vagueness of "work" in this article is (IMO) a feature, and not a bug. Raising your children can be great work, to your own point. You can't half-ass raising your kids, as you well know, and it sounds like you get the most purpose and fulfillment from doing that. What PG appears to be arguing is that, whether you're doing a "great" job of it depends on: 1) how hard you work on raising your kids, 2) your natural ability, and 3) effort — and I trust that you satisfy all 3 of those preconditions, as a dad.
> The notion that people need to work through their 20s for this unknown future prize is silly and wasteful
First of all, to call it an "unknown future prize" is a bit of a mischaracterization. If someone were to argue that one ought to spill their lives into their career with no well-defined end goal, then I'd agree that it's silly and wasteful. But if you actually have a clear view of what a desired end goal looks like (it could be anything: a house with a yard in the Bay Area, enough money to retire early, etc etc), it can be entirely reasonable to defer gratification. Keep in mind that in the experiment, the child knows that there's a second marshmallow coming if they wait. Adults need to know what their second marshmallow is before delaying the first one.
Second of all, I don't think it's fair to make such a sweeping generalization for how other people ought to live their lives. The neat thing about PG's post is that it's sufficiently abstract that it can apply to anyone, regardless of what they consider "great work".
> But if you actually have a clear view of what a desired end goal looks like (it could be anything: a house with a yard in the Bay Area, enough money to retire early, etc etc), it can be entirely reasonable to defer gratification.
The one thing I often don't find people discussing is that you may actually achieve your goals and find them not at all worth the effort.
I'd put a lower bound of at least 50% likelihood that the goal you seek is not the goal you'll be happy with if you achieve it. Of course, you won't know until you get there.
I have goals - I hope I attain them and I do work towards them. But keeping the above in mind, I will try to ensure that my present life is also on the positive. Even if I attain my goal and find it worthless, my time/life would not have been wasted.
But is _is_ an unknown future prize, and countless stories prove that. Pension funds go belly up, whole industries made obsolete, an accident/injury disrupts everything, etc.
I think your premise of “telling people how to live their life” falls more on the popular notion that investment early in career, rather than family or life experience, is more important. I believe this is wrong and it’s repeated more frequently than my counterpoint!
> But is _is_ an unknown future prize, and countless stories prove that. Pension funds go belly up, whole industries made obsolete, an accident/injury disrupts everything, etc.
This is only an "unknown future prize" if the defined goal is very specifically to have a successful pension fund, or to
thrive in a specific industry.
Using the example of what makes you, personally, feel the most fulfilled: children die prematurely (disrupts everything), or they have developmental challenges that make it difficult to do much else in life. None of that changes the fact that you're probably still better off devoting your life right now to rearing children.
You're absolutely correct that there's uncertainty in the future, but none of that refutes any of what I said in my comments, or PG wrote in his article. It's a "yes, and" addition, rather than a "no, but" refutation.
YES, there's significant entropy in life, AND given that, the most reliable way to do "great work" is still <dot dot dot> (as laid out in PG's blog post).
> I think your premise of “telling people how to live their life” falls more on the popular notion that investment early in career, rather than family or life experience, is more important. I believe this is wrong and it’s repeated more frequently than my counterpoint!
I argued no such thing. It clearly bears repeating that the more abstract notion is that investment in XYZ early in your life, rather than ABC is more important. XYZ and ABC can be the exact same thing, if your circumstances permit; there's no requirement that they be different things. If you find the most fulfillment and joy in life raising children resources notwithstanding, then you can certainly start doing that early in your life. If you think that raising children will only be more fulfilling if you have some baseline threshold of wealth, then you may have to defer that in favor of a career. Again, it all depends on how you, as an individual (or as a family), defines XYZ and ABC.
I have no problem with how people define XYZ and ABC. What I have a problem with is in telling people how they ought to define XYZ and ABC. Neither PG's post nor my comment did the latter.
It's not about YOLO, it's about looking at your life though a lens besides "work,work,work,save,save,save"
When I was 25 I had the time and the money to take a couple of weeks off and travel. I wouldn't have stayed in the nicest hotels or eaten in fancy restaurants, but I could have done it. It would have had no negative impact on my career and my current financial status.
What kept me from doing it wasn't a careful look at my life goals and the cost/benefits ratio, but a mental model that stopped at "Work hard now and you'll be rewarded I promise"
I didn't see any accounting for that in PG's essay. "Great Men Work Hard And Succeed" is the only message I got.
I don't think we disagree here; my point is that there is a broad spectrum between "YOLO" and "work,work,work,save,save,save"; and that it's up to you to decide where on that spectrum you want to be.
From PG's article, he acknowledges that the hard work is a necessary but not sufficient condition to do "great work" (in his words).
"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"
The vagueness of "great work" means that it can apply to any kind of work. Raising children can be "great work". Writing a book can be "great work". Learning something new can be "great work". Traveling can be "great work", etc.
> When I was 25 I had the time and the money to take a couple of weeks off and travel. I wouldn't have stayed in the nicest hotels or eaten in fancy restaurants, but I could have done it. It would have had no negative impact on my career and my current financial status.
Great! And for you, forgoing a marshmallow means something very different from someone else. The advice in this article is sufficiently abstract, that when applied to the circumstances of your life, should still track consistently.
If a middle school student was to come to me, a hypothetical English teacher, with an essay including the following:
"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",
I would tell them, my friend, come back with some ideas of yours, please do not list simplistic views just to get the nod of approval of your audience of middle-school students/ bored teachers/programmers.
PS. We all have seen plenty of people who did great work with top natural abilities, little effort and little practice. Such is life. I had a similar reaction of disbelief when at a work-sponsored leadership development program, the instructor told us that one of the special traits of Fortune 500 CEOs (they all like to talk about CEOs) is empathy. It sounds good, yes it does; the only problem is that it contradicts what one can see with their own eyes every single day.
If you get used to looking 5-10 years ahead are you sure you'll stop and starting living that better life? Or will there just be more goals another 5-10 years ahead?
I lost a whole bunch of friends in my 30s and nearly died myself a few weeks ago. Later on doesn't arrive for everyone.
I don't think that means you should never delay gratification but just don't put all your eggs in the future basket.
Yeah, we don't disagree. Like I said, there's an "in-between".
Always "living in the moment" can be bad, depending on what you want out of life. Always "living in the future" can also be bad, depending on what you want out of life.
Ultimately, they both depend on the same thing: what you want out of life. The key is for everyone to define that goal for themselves; an exercise which is possibly the single hardest part of the human condition.
"No answer" can be a perfectly acceptable answer to "what do I want out of life?"
It can be a great way to live a life, and once you've decided that that's your answer, you'd obviously spend more of your mental capacity in the "living in the moment" side of the spectrum.
That being said, it's an answer that has the possibility (though not a guarantee) of having very real negative consequences to one's future well-being. Individuals that choose to go that route should be responsible for those consequences, if any.
Not thinking about it isn’t the same as deciding that there isn’t an answer. Nor does it preclude planning. It’s just not something that bothers me or seems important. I have more interesting existential thoughts when I think about the enormity of the universe.
I also don’t see why you think there is risk in it. After all you can have a long term plan to do extremely dangerous things to self actualise. Both routes (a false dichotomy in itself) in fact have a possibility of having very real negative consequences even if your plans are dull.
> One of my greatest regrets is how much time I wasted on 'work' in my 20s and 30s.
In my 20s I was similar. A 'long' vacation was a long weekend in Vegas with friends. Fun, but not much of a vacation. I was fortunate to meet my wife in my early 30s who pushed me to slow down a bit and take at least 2 consecutive weeks off a year (sometimes even twice) in a time zone that made work near impossible. We've been to many places across Europe spending 3-4-5 days in a single location, which is long by American standards.
> when I have the money to travel in style and not backpack around and stay at hostels
There is a lot of room between staying in hostels and traveling in style. It's possible to travel relatively cheaply and still be comfortable. I know some hostels are nicer than others, but tbh nothing about staying in a hostel sounds vacation like to me.
> Don't listen to PG, kids. Live the life you want to have now, not the life you think you'll want to have several decades out.
It's hard to know. If I didn't work as hard in my 20s would I be in the position to take off 2-4 weeks/year since then? IDK. Hindsight and all that...
Finally, I think the most important thing people can do is learn to enjoy the day to day. Even if you're working hard, learn to appreciate those fun moments with your co-workers or those moments with your dog when you come home. Not everything has to be about the big adventure. As I get older I'm learning to find happiness in all sorts of mundane things, even something as simple as sitting the backyard with the sun on my face.
In most countries in Europe everyone gets 5-6 weeks a year plus public holidays and often flexible days off. You don’t have to “work hard“, just work. I spent my twenties learning skills and working well but not too much. Could have gone a bit further in my career by working harder but not that much further. Looking back I think that was the right compromise. As developers we are fortunate to have a lot of choice for interesting and well paid jobs, so there should be space for an interesting life besides that.
> Don't listen to PG, kids. Live the life you want to have now, not the life you think you'll want to have several decades out.
It really depends on what you're working for. If your goal is retire in 50s that's pretty achievable without working terribly hard (for most engineers).
If your goal is to be as good at soccer as Lionel Messi probably not so much.
Define what your goals are really well, then you can figure out what level of work is required to get there, then decide if that's a sacrifice worth making to you or if you want to adjust your goals.
Of course, there's some unknown in there, but if you don't want to be incredibly rich and change the world it doesn't take the same inputs.
SAME exact experience. I wish I wouldnt have been so driven in my 20s/30s.
I made many millions *for other people* -- and as luck would have it, I left several companies a month or so before big aquisitions.
SI spent years as a consultant, where I was brought in to focus on a specific project and get-it-built - so I never got stock in those companies - just had a high paying hourly rate... which obviously life happens, and all the material bullshit I acquired meant nothing and is now all gone and I am pretty minimalist.
I worked with a guy once who would work for six months, then take six month off to travel - every single year. That was a good model...
Also, I became a manager WAY too early in my career - so I had to focus on people/people-skills, which actually took time away from me going deeper on some of my technical skills/creative interests.
There is room in the world for all kinds of people. If you love going to work every day, do that. If you love making something great happen, do that. If you love backpacking around the world, do that. Only two rules: don't let anyone tell you that your choice is wrong and don't second guess the decisions that you made in the past.
Time off from work is no fun when all your friends have glued themselves to a monitor. It's impossible to even convince my most sun-loving friends with secure jobs to take a beach day.
I don't find meaning in traveling alone so... drown myself in work it is.
Find some new friends. Seriously. I know that sounds hard but your friendship choices always end up aligning with your work as you get older and that's not healthy. Literally you work to the work calendar. Eventually you get to the point that the first calendar you look at is the work one every time. At that point you are owned. Been there. Was stuck in the rut for about 4 years.
Meetup is a great place to do that. Just turn up at random events outside of your usual comfort zone outside of your usual calendar cycle. Amazing the variety of people out there who are interesting and friendly.
YES! I was terrified to do anything alone before my mid-life divorce, but now I realize that traveling alone is absolutely amazing. Seeing movies alone is fantastic.
Doing things alone is a radically different experience than doing them with other people, and I love both, for different reasons.
This is physically unsustainable. Our bodies and our minds are not built to sit at a desk and work 60 ours a week.
Ignore that and you'll get all sort of issue ranging from back pain to mental illness.
We don't need lavish vacations in fancy places. We need to stretch every hour, go for a walk in the park every other day, some hours for cultural and social life every day.
I feel for you there as I’m sick myself in a way that means even working is a challenge.
My suggestion for you and possibly advice for myself is if you can’t “travel” then move.
For me I imagine working 2 years from New Zealand outside of a city, somewhere beautiful to be a cool thing to do. You need to travel to get there but then you can stay put for the most part, doing short trips when it suits.
I think world trips are overrated. I did some backpacking in SE Asia and in some ways it feels like IKEA: a bunch of sheep following the same path around doing the same things trading money for a buzz. It’s interesting to see places but boring at the same time, everyone wants to “party”
If I had the time again I’d trade those 3 months travelling for a year in NZ, Tasmania, some parts of Eastern Europe or US and very slowly travel while working remote. Really wish I could have had that idea planted in my head.
Final thought: if you are a coder it can feel quite bad looking back on your years because most of the code you write has probably been replaced! So I cope with this by thinking of it like I am a gardener and most of my veggies have been eaten. So what? My work was useful and helped people.
Investing your time is just like any other kind of investment; you are taking a variety of risks which have a variety of rewards. Pick the ones which line up best with your preferred balance of risk tolerance and goals.
Don't over index on high-consequence/low-likelyhood risks, but keep them in mind as part of your overall strategy.
Time is what you are made of. Money is a number in a database. Your sentence makes no sense to me. You have no idea what will happen because you almost touched the butterfly in your garden, or struck up a conversation with a stranger at the cafe. Your life is just process, just pure flow. Each moment lives on its own.
Then your best bet is most likely to adjust your expectations. Otherwise there's a good chance you will never have enough to live the life you want until it's too late to enjoy it. Figure out how to live happily now, is my advice.
You don't have to be rich to enjoy your life while you're young. Not every experience worth having is expensive!
Sage advice, thank you so much. I have actually been trying to apply it in my life in everything (with success thankfully), but I hit a wall lately when it came to marriage and relationships in general. I admit that this isn't just a me thing though, it's actually something that most of the youth in my country face.
My brother in law said: I have two feet and they are working now, not sure about later. Quit his job, and my sister did the same. They sold their house and staring working at a wildlife refuge in Alaska in summers and traveling by camper in the lower 48 in winter.
If you build your life around this assumption, you're going to be unpleasantly surprised when you see how easy it is to get a job in your 40's. I was hired by a FAANG at 43 with a high school diploma, quit and hired on again non-FAANG (at 45!) and have since nearly doubled my TC in that role over the past five years. In that time I've applied to three jobs just to keep fresh, two FAANG and one at a specialist company in my domain and got offers for two of the roles.
If you face obvious age discrimination, put them on blast and keep looking.
I've heard this trope for decades, but the only time I've seen it manifest is when the 40+ people haven't learned anything in 20 years. Are there people in their 40s who've kept their skills up and still aren't getting hired?
Ok but how common is this? Can the average old developer expect to have "kept their skills up" to some arbitrary standard even though we know humans tend to calcify in their thinking, have lower risk appetite and worse memory as they get older? If my cohort consisted of John Carmack and Jeff Dean type outliers, I could also claim that they have no trouble getting jobs in their older age but it wouldn't be a particularly helpful observation for most developers. IMO it's a very realistic & plausible scenario for many to not have kept their skills up and end up unhireable as they get older.
In my experience, it's the norm. I'm pushing 50, and I'm more in demand every year than I was before. I have dozens of friends my age in tech, and it's the same for all of them. I don't keep my skills up to an "arbitrary standard;" I've learned continuously throughout my career. I haven't tried to keep up with modern technology, I've just done it. I'm always learning, I change jobs every few years to follow my interests, I look for challenging things because I'm motivated by the same quest for knowledge and enjoyment that got me started in my career in the first place. I think you have to go out of your way to stagnate, or at least be so passive that you probably picked the wrong career in the first place. This isn't just an issue with IT jobs; you can be a skilled laborer in any trade, and if you don't learn along the way, you'll become obsolete. But if you're not learning along the way, what are you doing it for?
Honestly I hope you're right. I think many people (especially nowadays) pick SWE as a well-paying stable profession without being motivated by a noble quest for knowledge and enjoyment. And even though I personally may have passion now, I think it's possible that I may lose it later as I run into negative experiences like burnout.
I wouldn't say it's a noble quest; it's just what I like to do. I agree, there are a lot of people who now get into SWE because they want a stable, high-paying job, and not because they actually want to do it. If they can't get hired in their 40s, I say good riddance. People who are only in it for the money--and do the minimum to get by--aren't good coworkers. I hope they find a career they enjoy.
It's unfortunate that tech eats so many people who would rather be academics, researchers, artists, craftsmen. I get it; tech pays stupid high salaries to smart people who can do it, but want to do something else. I've run into a lot of PhD physicists who are coders because there are only so many jobs for a physicist, and they invariably pay less than entry-level web coding jobs. Many of them find they enjoy software, and make for great coworkers. But there are a lot of people who only do it for the money, and science, art, and other fields are worse for it. Tech eats everything.
I'm fortunate, I guess, in that I started in a tech career because it was what I enjoyed as a hobby. When I started out, it wasn't the best way to make a buck. My first few jobs paid less than I was making working in construction, and far less than a teacher made. I got lucky, financially.
Up work sucks, don't waste your time. Start by moonlighting.
I started by creating a one person llc and a business account, and moving over my expenses. Even before making money the fees are offset by tax writeoffs. My first client was a friend that wanted some help w/ his startup, then my first big client was a former employer. The first quarter you make money you start filing a 1040.
Did you read the whole essay? He writes about finding out what's important. That doesn't have to mean (and probably doesn't mean) some mindless job. He also talks about constantly re-evaluating what the correct time commitment is for the given work, and that it's not the same for everyone nor for every task. Bill Gates not taking a vacation day wasn't trying to communicate that we all should be this way; it was evidence of the fact that big success requires hard work.
True he doesn't talk much about leisure and retirement, because that's not what this essay is about.
Your resonse is valid and interesting, even moreso without the first sentence!
I think one thing that could be added is that the metric of success is not necessarily monetary. Financial success often depends more on socioeconomic conditions, rather than hard work. But intrinsic satisfaction seems to be based on truly earned achievement.
I feel like you could be talking about me. I'm 37, and I worked very hard through my twenties and thirties. I kept telling myself there was time to live later, when it accomplished my goal of starting a software company. That still hasn't worked out, although I haven't given up.
> When I'm successful, when I'm stable, when I have the money to travel in style and not backpack around and stay at hostels.
That's the exact line I've been telling myself.
My wife and I want to travel for a couple years before we have kids (and it's getting to the point where we have to stop delaying that.) We've set a year from now as the hard deadline to start. Because otherwise we'll just keep pushing it back until we're too old to enjoy it or something happens and the dream becomes impossible.
Perhaps you'd like to elaborate? I find the experience enormously enriching: learning new languages, making friends, gaining a new perspective. It's very valuable to me and I'd be curious to understand your position more, because right now it just comes across as sour grapes.
You don’t read a book by reading the first 10 pages. You don’t learn a culture by visiting a place for a week. You don’t make real friends in a weekend. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 4 years and I still feel like I don’t quite understand the culture here, feel like I haven’t quite experienced the city. I don’t understand how anyone could visit here on a vacation and think they’ve really “experienced” LA. This is even more true for foreign countries. There’s also something weird to me about going to a place with lots of poor people, “helping” them for a weekend, taking a picture, posting it on Instagram, leaving, and somehow getting a warm feeling from that. The common denominator is a shallowness- none of these experiences are as deep or meaningful as the people who do it claim to themselves and others.
I don't mean to come across as rude, but maybe the LA influencer culture has you jaded? I can guarantee that not everyone wants to travel the world just for some instagram photos.
I do agree with some of your main points. You can't learn a culture in a week, and "helping" poor people for an instagram post is definitely problematic.
However being exposed to the different types of cultures around the world can be extremely valuable and eye opening. The world is a beautiful place with lots of interesting places to explore.
LA is not influencer culture. It’s first and second gen Latino immigrants. It’s Armenians. It’s white Protestants from OC. It’s a major industrial port. It’s a real estate scam. And yes, the entertainment business is here. Thinking that LA is it’s influencer culture is SO SHALLOW.
Yes, that’s fair. My only exposure to LA culture is the entertainment industry and the large amount of influencers that are based in LA. So I’ll be the first to admit my understanding is shallow. I was just curious why you are so jaded to travelling.
My point still stands that travelling the world is not a completely shallow endeavour. However you seem obsessed with labelling people as shallow, which ironically comes across as pretty shallow in itself.
Some books you learn 80% of the new-to-you concepts in the first 2 chapters. For sure living some place for 10 years you will know different things from someone that stayed for a few months, but travel is an incredibly efficient way to get new stuff you wouldn't have thought of in front of you to pay attention to. It's not to master all the variety in the world, it's to bring your experience outside of the little ruts that you can fall into. You have to travel with a certain attitude of openness, curiosity and respect. And the knowledge that your own ways aren't special, but just your own ways.
You know that when people say they want to travel the world, that doesn't always mean they want to to pose briefly in instagram-hot tourist spots, right?
One could make a case for breadth or depth when it comes to world travel, but so far you're not doing that, you're just sniffing dismissively at a stereotype.
I'm a fan of spending weeks or months in a place, rather than days, but spending years in any one place necessarily means seeing far fewer places. Breadth vs depth.
haha - I've visited LA and also thought it was a shallow experience ;) Also, sounds like you haven't traveled much.
And yes, I do read a books first 10 pages and stop reading it. Sometimes i read the first couple pages of each chapter and stop reading it. I never claim i read the whole book, or understand every nook and cranny of the rhetoric, but that book will still shape my subconscious going forward.
I feel travel is the same. As you go around the world you learn that no one has the answers, each place is entirely based on your experience of that city and everyone has different philosophies in life. It provides a sense of empathy to ideas. Meeting people who worked at hostels or people who bought a sailing boat, some fishing poles and some rice and traveled vastly changed the way i look at the world. Life is really easy in actuality, we as a species seem to complicate it.
Travel has brought me a vast amount of serenity and peacefulness in my normal life, because normal life can never be as hard as traveling.
Unlike the books, traveling has a clear curve of diminishing returns. Sure, you don't understand the culture by spending a week in Japan, but get a glimpse of it. It's a good ROI.
Since you have a contrarian view I'd be curious to hear your take on some reasons I like to travel:
- Get a feel for life in a place. How do people live? Where do people eat? How do people move around? Where do people congregate? How does life ebb and flow throughout the day and week? Obviously each one can be expanded to more questions, but I like to experience these things and then compare and contrast. What do I like? Is this better or worse or just different?
- Try new cuisines. It can be really hard to get an "authentic" experience outside of a country for a variety of reasons
- Activities. Skiing can't be done everywhere
- Natural wonders. I find viewing certain nature scenes in person very satisfying
You read a well-written, multi-paragraph comment with an astute, on-topic point, and decided the best thing you could bring to the conversation was a vacuous put-down. All things considered, you're not making a good case for yourself as an expert on what's "deep."
I admire pg; I don't admire his essays, even though in broad strokes I agree with them. I feel his choice of style works against him; that's where I disagree.
Write like you talk, but if you talk like pg writes you lose your audience. His essays check out line by line, paragraph by paragraph, but they fail to drive at some deeper, more subtle point that can capture the imagination of an audience. I'm sure pg is nothing if not imaginative, but his essays aren't.
Another comment criticizes this essay as just another pg stream of consciousness; I feel it's the opposite: short on many of the details, digressions and emotions that can make an essay come alive, that can give you sense of the author and his world. Often when I read an essay that's what I'm interested in most and I don't think I'm alone in this.
I think I understand why pg has chosen his style; the principles and aesthetic sensibilities that went into his choice and I agree with them. Nevertheless I think it's a poor choice. I hope pg reads this and reconsiders. Innovate!
In the past I read a lot of his essays but I can no longer stomach his obsession with (high) school. He overanalyzes it and relates almost every essay to how things are in school and I'm certain someone has made it into a drinking game by now. Sadly, my tolerance for that kind of game is quite low these days.
Due to having enjoyed his essays 5+ years ago, I still open the new ones and start reading them but I can't help but preface that desire by skimming them for school references now. Additionally, if they're congratulatory of people similar to himself - which they often are - then I also have to say 'no, thanks'.
In the last 20-30 years, American parents and adults have put an enormous amount of focus and pressure on students for educational achievements as indicators for future successes. It's likely because of inequalities in the quality of education between schools, and inequalities of opportunities from schools. Get to a good school -> get good job because went to good school-> get good life. Otherwise, you're a failure. Education is seen as the lynchpin in social mobility.
The lack of social safety net, and a desire for their children to become successful, creates an all or nothing focus on educational achievement.
if you or your parents dedicated a large chunk of resources on said asset (education) it's hard to be detached from it... Ancient China achieved relative stability by pretending thus coercing intellects of the society that the only way out is by studying and become part of government. So yeah, it's quite a sound crowd control mechanism.
Eh, I don't know. I came from a lower middle class background, but am now top 1% for my age and income + I probably have more wealth at this stage of my life than PG did.
I love idleness and leisure. I only work to get more of it in the future. I do have a drive to do a job well, but not for the sake of achievement itself shudder.
The idea of saying at age 13 "I hate leisure activities, its not productive" is really unsettling to me.
It’s just not written for you. There’s a small percentage of people with whom this attitude resonates. This essay is advice on how to harness these personal tendencies in an effective manner, so it’s natural that it seems foreign to you if you don’t have this deep seated need to not be idle.
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 instead of the how, I was expecting something about the why, a reflection on the bad aspects of working hard too, and its associated costs on other parts of one's life, whether it's Paul, Patrick or Bill.
pg hasn't been running Y Combinator for over 7 years!
You've got your causality reversed. It's not that this essay exists because of YC, it's that YC exists because PG is obsessed with the idea of doing great work. (There are other reasons too, of course, but that was one vector.) He was that way long before YC.
This is clearly true looking from the outside, but people seem so eager to attribute motivations to greed or self interest, and success to luck, inherited wealth, and connections for any famous and successful person.
Is it just jealously and pettiness? Do people downplay the achievements of others to make themselves feel better about achieving nothing remarkable?
There is a rarely used English word I learned for the first time the other day - compersion - which is the opposite of jealousy. When you take joy in other people's success. Let's do more of that as a community and as human beings.
It’s not clearly true at all. Please tell me what was “great” about Viaweb (how pg got where he is today). It was literally about being at the right place at the right time. I think you’d also be hard pressed to find someone who would call Arc great.
> Is it just jealously and pettiness?
It’s neither, it’s people seeing who gets rewarded, how and why.
> think you’d also be hard pressed to find someone who would call Arc great.
I would call Arc great! It's one of my favorite things about my job that I get to work in it every day...though not nearly enough every day.
As for Viaweb, are you sure you're not looking at this through hindsight? Those guys were among the first to invent what we now call web apps, years before AJAX. In an era of internet startups coasting on hype, they built a real business - basically what is now called Shopify today. They also did it with a shockingly small team. All that seems pretty great to me.
I guess I don’t find an online store interesting or innovative. It’s hardly the Apple II or Linux. I also wonder if a sub 100M acquisition would be considered a success by pg himself on a YC company.
Have you ever heard of WebObjects? It was light years ahead of what Viaweb was doing at the time.
An online store generator is not an online store. To do that with Lisp macros in 1995 seemed crazily innovative to me when I first read about it in 2001 or so.
Honestly I’m not trying to be rude, sorry if it came off like that. That’s cool you like Arc, I’m a lisp fan myself (mainly Clojure).
I’m just pointing out that there was a lot of innovation happening at the time and what pg did wasn’t really lasting or that innovative. I don’t have a problem with it, until he espouses what I consider toxic work habits as advice. Too many people listen to him uncritically, it’s not good for our industry.
Just because something makes money, that doesn’t make it great. MS is a perfect example. Made a ton of money with products and predatory business practices so bad they held back innovation for years until Linux gave people an alternative and created the foundation for the modern internet. That was great tech from the time period.
It was great compared to what else was available at the time. Yes, it was about being in the right place at the right time - a place and time where three guys could build something that was better than anything out there, that people actually used.
Yes, there's an element of "the right place at the right time". And there's working very hard to make the most of it.
Or look at it this way: That opportunity was there for multiple millions of people who could code at the time. It was Viaweb that took advantage of it, though.
Regardless, the point is that we should not be listening to a guy who got lucky with mediocre software sold to a mediocre (at best) company in the middle of a bubble about how to duplicate his success.
> Regardless, the point is that we should not be listening to a guy who got lucky with mediocre software sold to a mediocre (at best) company in the middle of a bubble about how to duplicate his success.
You're doing exactly what I was taking about. Downplaying his success. Spinning a narrative that makes it look like he just got lucky. Why?
What have you accomplished with your life? Are you bitter about something? Because if we're really honest here, your opinion of Paul Graham seems to have more to do with you than with him.
My beef is that a lot of ignorant people are going to cargo cult this nonsense and create a toxic work environment for everyone. I also have an issue with hero worship, I didn’t become a technologist to prop up billionaires.
> My beef is that a lot of ignorant people are going to cargo cult this nonsense and create a toxic work environment for everyone.
Very little of Paul Graham's essays are written for people in the workplace. When he says work hard, he's not talking about work hard at a 9-5 job to make your employer rich. He's talking to people who found companies. Everyone else would do well to focus on work life balance. I take it you're not one of those people with ambitions to found a large successful company. Most people aren't. There nothing wrong with that, just that these essays are not really aimed at you. Paul Graham is one of those people. So am I, although I'm not successful (yet anyway.)
> I also have an issue with hero worship, I didn’t become a technologist to prop up billionaires.
Because jealously? Why does his wealth enter into this equation at all? Why is it relevant to you? It's fine to be inspired by people who achieve things. It can be taken too far, but you can say that about anything.
You shouldn’t make assumptions. I’ve been a senior leader at multiple very high profile and successful startups. I’ve also founded several VC backed startups. The problem is founders absolutely read stuff like this then create toxic work environments. I say it’s nonsense because I’ve succeeded without working myself or others to the bone.
> Because jealously?
No. Because I think celebrity culture is toxic. It induces the cargo culting effect I’m talking about. I also don’t think wealth inequality is a good thing for society. I would include myself as someone who should not be worshipped. I accurately attribute a lot of my success to luck (including being born at the right time with the right skills). I think you’d find my attitude more prevalent in the early tech industry. I didn’t invent the term “kill your idols” but it’s a good one. If you succeed enough you cross the line from disruptor to disruptee.
You do realize not everyone in our industry agrees on everything right? Tbh you seem pretty junior. PG isn’t some universally loved figure. A lot of people (successful) don’t like YC at all and think they pump out lame ideas. I’ll coach you a bit here and challenge you to go find a senior person in our industry that doesn’t agree with pg. There’s a lot of them out there and you’d definitely expand your horizons.
As to my background, I’d prefer to stay anonymous so I can freely speak my mind. You don’t have to believe me, but it would probably be helpful if you admitted that there are many philosophies on leadership and it’s worth exploring more than one.
Software engineer is a much more common job title now than back then. Back then IT people or developers did a good amount of building & coding, and many would be called software engineers nowadays.
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.
- Working on a computer all day, from the comfort of my house
- Being able to tend to work issues from my phone
- Getting intellectual stimulation from my work
- Getting to work with really really smart people
- Getting to see the joy customers get from using a product you helped build
These may not seem like much. They might even seem like a burden to some. But I've worked horrendous jobs in the past. Not just brutal manual labor, but mindless factory jobs that practically turn your brain into mush.
Working on things I actually enjoy, in an enjoyable environment, for 12-16 hours per day is a life I'd take any day of the week over life's I've lived in the past.
I'd say overall, working hard pays off if you have a strong impact on the business and own a good chunk of it. If you're working at BigTechCoFaang I'd slack absolutely as much as possible. Just riding the border between hired and fired.
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.
I know this is somewhat of a false dichotomy, but at some point I think PG's essays started to shift from being directed at startup founders to giving advice to his children that they can read when they grow older.
There probably is some tethering to whatever his perspective is at the time. At some point, YC was a relatively new idea coming to life and he was probably constantly thinking a certain way. Now, it's something that he's been up to for decades.
That said, I think there's more of a zeitgeist change than actual change in pg's content. Things sound different 10-15 years apart. A lot of things age poorly, often: idealism, stand up comedy... most anything avante garde-ish.
Clever people spoke highly of agile,for example, when it was manifestos and such circa 2005.
Ok I just looked up the phrase false dichotomy, apparently doesn't mean what I thought it meant, probably would have been better said as "the two are not mutually exclusive", still point holds.
"False dichotomy" implies more than just the fact that "the two are not mutually exclusive". It further implies that the speaker in question has implied that the two are mutually exclusive, when they are in fact not.
I feel like a lot of it is the same stuff that you get in generic self help books, but explained in contemporary techie language and cultural references.
Not that that is necessarily bad per se, there can be a lot lot of value to reminding people of things that may seem obvious. But it's annoying when people treat him like a genius for saying fairly standard platitudes in a clever way
I hate the whole "hard work," but not "long hours" sort of discussion. Basically, if you work hard, but not long and succeed, then your hard work was "valid", if you work "long hours", which by some definition is "hard work" but don't succeed then it was just "long hours" and not "hard work."
In other words, as long as you succeed whatever work you did is considered "hard work" or "working smart", etc. etc.
Hard work can be good, but only if you own a substantial capital interest in the company/result. But if you can hire people to do it for you, then you can reap the benefits and live a life worth living. If you are just part of the labor and not the capital, then there really isn't an incentive to work harder than necessary to keep you job or earn a measly raise.
If you tell people that if they work 12+ hours a day in their 20s that they would be multi-millionaires or billionaires, then almost everyone would accept that position. The real world doesn't work that way and using statistical outliers like Gates is disingenuous to the discussion about hard work and how it applies to normal people.
> If you tell people that if they work 12+ hours a day in their 20s that they would be millionaires or billionaires
Billionaire isn’t a realistic goal, but millionaire is a common outcome for software developers who work hard through their 20s and 30s now. It doesn’t even require a FAANG job or living in a super expensive city any more, just wise job selection, a reasonable amount of financial savvy and budget adherence, and a deliberate effort to work on your career path.
You don’t need to own substantial equity in a company in your 20s to have a reason to work hard, as long as you’re doing work that builds your skill set, reputation, and network. Everything you do (or don’t do) has some impact on your persona capital over time.
Working hard in the mailroom or stocking shelves at a grocery store isn’t going to translate into a successful software career, but making an impact and helping people get things done at several companies through your 20s is the easiest way to build a strong network that opens doors in your 30s and beyond
> millionaire is a common outcome for software developers who work hard through their 20s and 30s now.
No, it's not. It's common for some FAANG engineers. It's not common at all for the industry as a whole.
Look at all these comments doubling-down on the "7%/$10k-per-year" arithmetic, as if the only thing that affects savings rates is knowledge of this basic math. For a data driven community there sure are a lot of people ignoring the data.
The Millionaire Next Door concepts are still as relevant as ever, albeit the specifics are a bit dated. Millionaire status is reasonably achievable for someone whose income and cost of basics allow for modest discretionary income. This is certainly the case for the majority of software developers
It’s so hard to get $1MM that only about 19% of people age 65 or over ever reach it. Is software overrepresented in that group? Probably. But not to the extent that it’s reasonable to make the claim that it’s common for software developers to reach it in their 20s and 30s.
I think you misread the comment. Or at least read it differently than I did. I read that most software engineers who work hard in their 20s and 30s can become millionaires at some point. You seem to have read it that they will become millionaires in their 20s or 30s, which I don't think is what it says. My reading is more that putting hard work in early in the career sets you on a path to pay off debts and start saving and also have the experience to get good jobs later, which allow you to save more. This meshes with my experience of the industry.
Not that they _do_ reach it, but that they can. I think the general argument is that most people are not sufficiently financially literate to appreciate that the path to a million dollars is paved with consistent savings and reasonable budgets.
It's a bad argument, though. Financial literacy isn't even necessary, though it may help. Life happens, things occur that make sustained savings impractical or impossible, and so on.
> How do we factor in retirement needs and inflation?
Use inflation-adjusted calculators. Any good savings and retirement calculator will have an option for this.
Inflation is commonly misunderstood in long-term financial planning. It’s important to consider inflation for expenses and future savings amount, but many people don’t realize that inflation will also life their investments to some degree.
For example, if a common house costs $5,000,000 on your future retirement date and you’ve been saving your money in cash this whole time, you’re in a bad spot. However, if you buy a house in your 30s that meets your needs, the value of your house will also rise with inflation. Inflation is also loosely coupled to rising stock prices (except for hyper-inflation or other economic catastrophes) and asset prices. Just don’t keep your money all in cash, because that’s the only guaranteed way to lose out to inflation.
Yes, because despite being _insanely_ intelligent he was _also_ insanely hard working. Its questionable whether aiming to be an outlier is reasonable, but it was a revelation to me that most of the wildly successful outliers I knew of growing up were also harder working than anyone I'd ever met. Yet no one ever talked about that, only how lucky it would be to be "born with" X. From there I realized that most people have this fallacy where they discount what they can achieve because they don't see how hard others work to get to whatever level they are at. Aiming for Bill Gates would be foolish, but understanding the recipe is not.
So why not showcase the data that supports the point rather than pick an outlier and have people question if the recipe really works?
The successful people I know mostly got there by luck. Sure hard work and intelligence played a role, but I know people who were smarter and worked harder and didn't get half as far.
I'm arguing that working hard is not the main goal. PG completely misses how you need to be in a position to benefit from that hard work. Without that positioning it will be pointless/useless.
Gates was also extremely lucky and in the right place at the right time born to the right parents. Gladwell covers this in one of his books. As a 13 year old he got access to a time share computer. His school even bought hours on one and the school was only able to do that via the PTO which was wealthy and run by his mother etc...
Yes he was interested and worked hard but there's a lot more to it.
Is "financially independent by 30, or even 40" the definition of "being a millionaire"? Or does it count if you save up a million dollars by some point in time? I'm honestly asking what we're discussing here, because they seem like very different things.
The whole point of this comment thread is that it wasn't appropriate to use a statistical outlier like Gates to represent that hard work for normal people leads to his level of success (financially independent, multimillionaire in his 30s).
The Millionaire Next Door is about as misleading as it gets, at least for today. Let's not forget that $1M in the mid 1990's is about the same as $2M today, at least in terms of terms of CPI. Even then, that is after 20+ years of housing prices outpacing inflation by 2x or more.
In the mid 1990's, the top 20% could get to $1M with some good financial discipline and hard work. Today? Maybe the top 1% could save $1M, and unless you inherited the family home, you're still living a lifestyle that is somewhat median in 1995 terms.
The fact that $1M is still some kind of mental benchmark that we hold up for being "rich" tells us everything we need to know about today's economic conditions.
So the principles of the book may still apply, but the outcomes are worlds away from reality.
I can't speak to the book, but I would say that you should examine your thinking regarding the top 1% saving $1mm. While it might be that only the top 1% can save an actual million dollars in cash, saving about $10,000/year with somewhat conservative estimates will get somebody to around $900,000 over 30 years. Granted, that's still not most people, but it's a much larger group than the top 1%. I made a separate comment here with the same OP if you'd like to run some numbers yourself. Compound interest is crazy.
> The fact that $1M is still some kind of mental benchmark that we hold up for being "rich" tells us everything we need to know about today's economic conditions.
This is a very interesting comment. I wonder why the mentality of this benchmark amount hasn't changed. Economic conditions certainly have, $1mm isn't the same now as it would have been in 1970. Maybe it's a financial independence thing? At $1mm you really are independently wealthy in most cases.
Using the standard definition of "independently wealthy" as "no longer needs to work to cover living expenses", I would say that $1MM is nowhere enough to do that in almost any place in the US, especially if you have kids. I'd say at least $3MM in cash and as much as $5-6MM in higher cost-of-living areas would be required to maintain an upper middle class standard of living.
On $1MM, one can almost certainly safely take out $35k/year (after taxes on any gains) and still grow the portfolio (so as to offset inflation). That's definitely sufficient to support the barest minimum of "lower middle class" living expenses. Without kids. Add a kid and it blows right up.
But, yes, to support an upper middle class style of living one would certainly need more.
If you had $1mm today you for sure no longer need to work to cover living expenses in most places in America. I guess healthcare is a question, but even then your annual income rate will probably qualify you for Obamacare subsidies.
Even with kids. Though that makes the budgeting a little more tight.
> At $1mm you really are independently wealthy in most cases.
This doesn't strike me as true. A big facet to consider also is liquidity. Are you talking about $1M in net worth? If so, I disagree with you: a big chunk of that $1M is likely very illiquid for a younger person, tied up in a house and retirement accounts with penalties for withdrawal. But sure, if you have managed to save $1M above and beyond equity in your home and tax advantaged retirement accounts, then you are probably independently wealthy (but your actual net worth is probably significantly higher than $1M).
Well, I'd say if you look at what I wrote it was a savings rate of $10,000/year so my underlying assumption is that goes into the market, which will be liquid. You could choose to do a Traditional 401k or Roth 401k. Both are liquid enough.
My point wasn't to really give a breakdown of all savings forms, but just to show that saving $10,000/year with historical returns will net you close to $900,000. You don't even have to put it in a tax-advantaged account. Though you should.
And that amount is plenty to retire on and be independently wealthy at least today and for the next 5 or so years. Though I guess maybe that's not the best choice of words since what I mean to say is that you can just live pretty comfortably without working - more financially independent than "wealthy".
Certainly economic conditions can change, so the more the better.
And just to be clear, you could take $1mm right now with 0 assets and buy a decent enough house for <$200,000 and pay pretty low taxes. You'd still have $800,000 left over to appreciate with low cost of living in the vast majority of America.
Retirement accounts aren't liquid at all if what we're talking about is reaching financial independence and retiring really early (in your 30s or 40s say), which is what I thought we were talking about. But if you're strictly talking about being financially independent enough to retire at the normal time (when you can access retirement accounts), then I agree with you.
On the house point, people always seem to forget that people already live someplace and also often have families. No, it is not possible to find a house for a family of four where I live for less than $200k.
Sure they are. For example your Roth IRA contributions can be taken out at any time. You’ve already paid taxes on them. The interest though has to wait until I believe 55 years old. You should do your own research (you as in anyone reading this) to see what investment options are right for your personal goals.
> No, it is not possible to find a house for a family of four where I live for less than $200k
Well we weren’t talking about you specifically, but Americans in general. If you need $10mm retire in the Bay Area or something g ya know that’s just what you’ll personally have to work on. I don’t have an answer for you. You can buy affordable houses and live comfortably in almost anywhere in America. In fact there are people who retire and move to other countries, or live very frugally on much less, like $400,000.
You're right about the principal in Roth accounts, but most people (especially high earners at time of contribution) put their savings in traditional retirement accounts, for good reason. The age to withdraw without penalty (for both types of accounts) is 59.5.
200k is unrealistic in most population centers in the country, not just the Bay Area (I don't live there).
Why are you shifting goalposts? You don’t need to live near a population center. Even so, it depends on what you mean by population centers. If you’ve got a million dollars you don’t need to work, so you don’t have to incur the higher expenses. You can live 30 minutes or so outside of MCOL cities like Columbus and get houses for $200,000 or $300,000. That might be unrealistic for you but that doesn’t generalize to the vast majority of people in America.
> but most people (especially high earners at time of contribution) put their savings in traditional retirement accounts, for good reason.
Not so clear cut. So first if you’re a high enough earner you’re adjusted family income is >$200,000 or so before the Roth IRA starts being phased out for you. So we’re already talking about the top 10% or so of all income earners in the U.S.
Second, you tend to put the money in a traditional IRA, but you might withdraw (probably actually) less than you were making with your income. So if you’ve been phased out and can only contribute to a Traditional IRA, depending on when you want to retire you might withdraw $100,000/year (or less) and potentially pay a lower tax rate on that income then your marginal contribution rate on a Roth.
Lastly, you can still contribute $19,000 to a Roth 401k which doesn’t have contribution challenges related to income (at least for the income the vast majority of people would ever make - idk what happens if you make $1mm or something).
I don't think I am shifting goal posts? Most people don't have enough of their savings in liquid assets to retire early was, I think, the original goal posts. You haven't convinced me that this isn't true...
Your point about housing (and mine) would benefit from actual data. My contention is that for greater than 50% of people in the US, that they cannot, without moving (say the concrete metric here is a move that doesn't require children to switch schools), purchase a home for $200k or less. This is my intuition based on experience with housing markets and a general sense for how the population is distributed in the country, but it may well be wrong.
On the retirement account front, what I'm saying is that most professionals in their 40s will have a large amount in traditional 401k/IRA accounts, and much less in Roth or non-tax advantaged accounts. I believe this is accurate.
I think the confusion in our conversation is that you seem to be talking about what people can do, if they're focused from an early age on accumulating liquid savings, whereas I'm making a descriptive point that most people, even with large net worth, do not have most of it in liquid assets.
> Most people don't have enough of their savings in liquid assets to retire early was, I think, the original goal posts.
This must be a misunderstanding. I never made this claim so now this wasn't the original goal posts. Apologies if I somehow gave off that interpretation. I actually was pretty explicit I think when saying you could save $10,000 (this is cash) via a 401k or other investment vehicle and the math works out to be around $900,000 saved.
> Your point about housing (and mine) would benefit from actual data. My contention is that for greater than 50% of people in the US, that they cannot, without moving (say the concrete metric here is a move that doesn't require children to switch schools), purchase a home for $200k or less. This is my intuition based on experience with housing markets and a general sense for how the population is distributed in the country, but it may well be wrong.
Again, not a claim I've made. I've simply stated that you can buy a house for less than $200,000 and live just fine (this was based on accumulating a million dollars and that there was an assertion that you couldn't live off of that). It's trivially easy to see for yourself on Zillow or via another product that you can buy an affordable enough house and live just fine in most of the U.S..
> I think the confusion in our conversation is that you seem to be talking about what people can do, if they're focused from an early age on accumulating liquid savings, whereas I'm making a descriptive point that most people, even with large net worth, do not have most of it in liquid assets.
Yea that about sums it up. So I'm not sure where you're really going with any of this. I guess it's cool as a general assertion (and I think it would be interesting to discuss) but I'm bewildered as to why it would used as a rebuttal to something I've said. That's why I asked why you were shifting goalposts.
I understood your claim to be that most people on a typical salary in our industry can be financially independent prior to retirement age. My point was merely that this may seem true on paper if just looking at net worth, but that liquidity is important if you actually want to live off savings (ie. be financially independent).
So in my original post I said you could save $10,000/year. That savings can be liquid if you do choose, and even 401ks can be liquid. If you are a typical software engineer in America you can contribute to a Roth 401k and withdraw contributions penalty free. You’re liquid if you want to be.
Then on top of that $10,000 maybe you buy a house or something. You have the rest of your money to do stuff with too.
The financially independent thing really depends on individual circumstances and desires. For some, $1mm isn’t enough. For others it’s more money than they can spend for the rest of their lives.
I went back to my very first comment in the thread. I quoted this:
> > At $1mm you really are independently wealthy in most cases.
Firstly, my working definition of "independently wealthy" is when you can stop working and keep living. I think this is the common definition, but it's possible you're using a different one.
So from that quote and that definition, what I have been saying is that I don't think it is true that "in most cases" people with $1m are independently wealthy. I think that in most cases, those people have most of that $1m net worth tied up in their house and in illiquid traditional retirement accounts, and could not actually live off of just the remaining liquid wealth once those are subtracted. That's really all I've been saying. It's based on just that one quote that hinges on "independently wealthy" and "in most cases".
> Firstly, my working definition of "independently wealthy" is when you can stop working and keep living. I think this is the common definition, but it's possible you're using a different one.
You are independently wealthy in America at $1mm and do not need to work. It takes very little time to see that hit is the general case. You can buy a cheap house, and buy groceries and probably actually grow the principle amount.
Now from here you can say like it’s not enough money for you, or you don’t want to leave California (or wherever) but you can easily live off of that amount of money in the vast majority of America. You can also say that people accumulated that money in some distribution and all of that too. But even if you had that amount in a house + retirement you can sell the house and move to a different location or downsize or something. If you have a million in assets you’re making a choice to work. Period. There might be some thing you don’t want to give up, or some place you want to live. That’s fine, but you’re making a choice after you’ve become independently wealthy.
At this point you are willfully failing to understand my point. It's extremely simple, many mid career people with $1M dollars in net worth are not able to retire, because their net worth is not liquid, and liquidity is necessary to pay for things. If you do not understand the concept of liquidity, then I really can't help you out. Cheers.
> many mid career people with $1M dollars in net worth are not able to retire, because their net worth is not liquid
It really depends on the assets and the choices you want to make. Generally speaking, if you have $1mm worth of assets, you do not need to work. That's it. Period.
If you find that you need to work, you're making some other choice to work because of some factor that's overriding your desire to not work.
The liquidity of the assets is only relevant if you want to talk about specific cases, and even then it's likely not an issue. You can sell your house. You can withdraw from an IRA or 401k. Etc.
The key factor in being able to do so is to have money to save early in your career. The median household may have 10k/year to spend, but the median household is already 10-15 years into their career, and thus 10-15 years behind on that compound interest.
And nobody really has that kind of money early in their career, except maybe the top 1%. You either make a lot of money and spend most of it on housing, or you make a little bit of money and spend most of it on housing.
All I’m doing is providing information. Saving $10,000 is very achievable. Some people get higher paying jobs by the time they are 30 and save $15,000/year instead. Some buy a house and save some. There are lots of paths. I completely disagree that saving $10,000/year is only something the 1% can do. I started my first job at a salary of $60,000 and was able to save $10,000/year via my 401K + 6% matching. I lived in a MCOL city, drove a Honda Civic, and traveled a little bit but not much. That’s not a 1% lifestyle. It’s better than average no doubt, but it’s accessible to many Americans.
We should talk more about how people can do it and how we can help those who don’t make enough money instead. Maybe instead of paying into Social Security we could develop a different savings plan?
Okay, but you have to understand that you're exceptional...at least top 1% in terms of capability. Only 88% of teenagers graduate high school. Some 60% of those will go to college, and only 46% of those will eventually graduate. Of those that eventually graduate, on average they will earn an average $50k starting salary, which takes your savings rate down to zero. 17% might get a salary of $85k. [Too lazy to cite the Google results, I'm on mobile].
So at least from my napkin math plus estimates, you've probably got less than a 10% chance of making enough to save any money at all for your first job out of college.
And I don't know about you, but I spent the first 5 years out of college paying off student loans...and I had a pretty low student loan burden compared to most. And many others might start families sooner than you've chosen to, which is expensive as well...and half of them will get divorced which is even more expensive.
I don't have anything against teaching people to do the best they can with the shit hand they've been dealt in life. But selling that by claiming that average people can be millionaires (even in today's terms, let alone 1990's terms) is selling an expectation that will never pan out for the vast majority of them. Any belief in the truth of that claim inherently relies on a very privileged view of the world, either because they were born with a silver spoon, or because they don't truly understand the scope of expenses that other people face, or because they think that average people are even capable of the kinds of jobs that they hold. It is flat out irresponsible to peddle this fantasy.
Please tone down the hyperbole. I'm not "peddling a fantasy" but looking at numbers and giving my best guess to speak of generalities with these numbers. Initially we were talking about software engineers. Now we're talking about the general population. Even in the initial estimate for software engineers you wouldn't reach $1mm with a 6.7 average return (it could be more, it could be less).
The person making $50,000 may have other benefits. Items like social security and a lower cost lifestyle in the first place. So maybe for them saving $5,000 is doable, and so they wind up with $500,000 and social security. Maybe that person marries someone and combined they make $90,000 and can save $8,000. I don't know. Y
> And I don't know about you, but I spent the first 5 years out of college paying off student loans...and I had a pretty low student loan burden compared to most.
Yes. I joined the Army to pay for college. Nobody in my family has ever attended. I didn't know what the SAT was. That took up 4 years, and I had no savings (obviously never learned what stocks were or anything like that, though there was some government program called the TSP but I was taught to be weary of the government of course so I didn't invest), and then I spent 3 years getting my undergraduate degree so I was around 25 when I started working. So about the same age, at least investing-wise.
> And many others might start families sooner than you've chosen to, which is expensive as well...and half of them will get divorced which is even more expensive.
Sure. Plenty of things that could happen. They could also choose to start a business, or marry a spouse that makes significantly more than they do. Idk. All kinds of things happen.
> Okay, but you have to understand that you're exceptional...at least top 1% in terms of capability.
Ha. I appreciate the accolades but promise that this is certainly not the case. I'm opinionated, and I'm no dummy, but I wouldn't consider myself exceptional in any meaningful sense to me personally. Maybe statistically.
The data indicate that it is quite rare to have $1MM at (roughly) the retirement age (fewer than 20% of those aged 65 have that amount[1]). It may seem like 20% is "common" or even "infrequent," but it's not: it's rare.
Moreover, the median SE salary is just below $100k/year[2]. It's uncommon (certainly not rare but uncommon) for a SE to be able to have a sustained savings rate necessary to achieve $1MM by retirement.
So maybe "peddling a fantasy" is a bit strong, but it's not exactly wrong. For most software engineers (over 50%) it simply is not a realistic scenario.
Yes, absolutely people don’t save like this. That $10,000/year can buy a boat, or maybe a bigger house. But most don’t do that, especially the Boomer generation.
And it’s even worse because if they actually retire at 65 they had like a good 40 years of compound interest too, 10 years is a big difference versus the 30 we were talking about.
The median US household has ~$12k/year available to save/invest after all ordinary living expenses, per the US government (BLS), and that number goes up very rapidly for people above the median.
Americans are notoriously poor savers, also per the US government, but a large percentage of all households -- at least 40% -- could fairly easily accumulate $1M if they were diligent about saving and investing a decent fraction of that surplus income. The surplus income is available but Americans choose to use that income for things other than saving and investing.
That surplus income is only surplus until you have medical event, catastrophic loss, or need a major repair (roof). Ot to mention the need to save for retirement. It's those extraordinary living expenses that kneecap you.
Whiler I agree with the thrust of your comment, your committing an error: the distribution of incomes isn't uniform across time/age. That is, the set of under 30 and under 40 household with 12k/ year is lower than 40%. If you look at not the median household at this moment, but the lifecycle of the median household from when it started to when, it probably couldn't save 10k/yr until recently.
I think it's common when compared to other industries, though maybe not generally common. Admittedly I have no data to back up this hunch.
If I'm wrong, please correct me, but my interpretation of what the person you're replying to was trying to get at was that modest savings from a 23+ year old software engineer, to the tune of $800/month or $10,000/year (this could be 401k match and contributions) will get you pretty close to a million.
Using this calculator[1] with an assumed rate of 6.7%, $0 initial investment, $800/month, compounded semi-annually and a variance of 1 netted $891,000 within 30 years.
I think $800/month for nearly all software engineers is doable.
Exactly. The math is easy, but convincing people that becoming a millionaire is a matter of consistent moderate savings is still hard.
$800/month is $9.6K per year. Approximately half of the maximum 401K contribution limit, so it can be tax-advantaged as well. If you can swing the full 401K maximum, you’ll hit the millionaire status even faster. Add some taxable savings and it can be done in a decade without getting too extreme. A married couple doing this together makes it even more achievable.
Unless someone has maxed out their career options (unlikely) almost everyone in software could get a $10-20K bump in the coming year through negotiation or changing jobs. Allocate that raise entirely to tax-advantaged savings and stay consistent for a few decades and it will add up to a million dollars.
It doesn’t require FAANG compensation or extreme frugality. It just requires consistency over 20-30 years.
> The math is easy, but convincing people that becoming a millionaire is a matter of consistent moderate savings is still hard.
Consistent moderate savings on top tier income, sure.
> $800/month is $9.6K per year. Approximately half of the maximum 401K contribution limit,
Also, approximately 1/3 of national median household disposable income after taxes and transfers (NB: not essential expenses, just taxes and transfers) in the United States.
> A married couple doing this together makes it even more achievable.
Yes, you can become a half-millionaire much faster than a millionaire—brilliant observation.
> Unless someone has maxed out their career options (unlikely) almost everyone in software could get a $10-20K bump in the coming year through negotiation or changing jobs.
“Software” includes a lot of different occupations, but most of the nob-management ones have median compensation around or substantially below $100K; so you are suggesting most people are leaving upward of 10-20% on the table. That's...unlikely.
> It just requires consistency over 20-30 years.
Asserting that that is easy in software would be more convincing if we were more than 20-30 years from a major industry crash, or had some structural guarantee of it not happening again.
Not completely convincing even then, but more convincing...
> Consistent moderate savings on top tier income, sure.
Do keep in mind that the context for this thread was software engineers. The median pay makes saving $10,000/year very, very achievable.
> “Software” includes a lot of different occupations, but most of the non-management ones have median compensation around or substantially below $100K; so you are suggesting most people are leaving upward of 10-20% on the table. That's...unlikely.
Below $100k sure, but closer to $60,000 or so which again makes this amount of savings very achievable. My first job out of college was exactly this amount and I was saving about $1,000/month in a MCOL city. And if you're making that amount and living in a HCOL of city you may need to consider changing your location. You might not like it, but that's reality.
> Asserting that that is easy in software would be more convincing if we were more than 20-30 years from a major industry crash, or had some structural guarantee of it not happening again.
This is only a problem if you happen to retire right when a market collapse happens. Even then you adjust your withdrawal rate or try to put retirement off a bit. For those saving 20-30 years, those market dips are buying opportunities as the ROI of the market compounds over time. Given what we know, there's no reason to assume things won't just keep chugging along, at least for the purposes of general discussion. You can say that it won't and give great reasons for that, but I think it's fair to state those up-front.
If you want to discuss specifics I think that would make sense, but given that the person your responding to and myself were speaking generally about the software engineering profession (sure maybe there's some confusion there but for my part I was speaking about software engineers) so obviously there's some generalizations and built-in assumptions that are pretty common in the finance space.
Aren’t 401k taxed? Can you write down the math how a police officer can do this easily (get to 1m purchasing power of today’s value in 10 years) please? I cannot figure it out how to even get a quarter of that
401ks are taxed (either a Roth or Traditional 401k) but are tax advantaged.
Please feel free to contact me directly. Happy to help. It'll be difficult to get to $1mm in purchasing power of today's value in 10 years without saving around $50,000/year or getting extremely lucky.
No doubt. People usually assume 2% inflation/year since that is what the Federal Reserve targets (and the 6.7% is a little conservative) but that amount of money also continues to grow over time, so depending on your expenses you may never touch the principal at that point with a 4% withdrawal rate.
There are a lot of variables too. $800,000 with a paid off house is different than $800,000 and still renting, for example. Depends on your country of residence too, etc.
But you can get to that point by saving, using common assumptions.
In that time period the cost of your house went from 100k to 700k. You aren’t a millionaire anymore. You are poor. Getting to a million dollars with the same purchasing power (make sure your inflation basked is properly chosen) as of today outside of metro area (as a million in sf isn’t much)
No, it is. If you don't retire (at 65~) with 2+ million in the bank you did something wrong (or had a rare cataclysmic event that drains your financial resource). I have a modest salary in the Midwest and should retire with $3m+ making reasonable contributions to a 401k, and that's if I don't change anything.
> Or you could be served divorce papers from your partner and lose a substantial fraction of your net-worth and future income.
This definitely implies a questionable decision.
> Or you ( or a member of your family) could have a debilitating/rare disease and your insurance does not cover all the treatments for it
Sure, there could be rare cataclysmic events that drain you of your financial resources. That's not really on-topic to what the discussion is about though.
> Or you could have been fired and opened your own business and your partners fleeced you out (ask me how I know)
This is 100% a bad decision. Do not take money out of your 401k to start a business.
> Or you live in a country where salaries are below 45 k /y.
Then you likely live in a country where the CoL is significantly lower than in the US and the dynamics of retirement are very different. I'm speaking 100% from an American-centric point of view.
> You have a very naive, simplistic and privileged worldview so I hope for your own sake you never have to leave that cocoon.
I'm sorry my short internet comment on a technology forum is not comprehensive enough to account for all potential scenarios and nuance. I grew up in poverty, and I'm going to do everything I can to prevent myself from ending back up in that situation.
I grew up in poverty, too. Not the caricature "TV in every room" "fake-poverty" nonsense some use to try to "prove" poor Americans aren't poor, but actual poverty. Like, almost homeless, single-mom skipping meals so me and my brother could eat, exposed to drugs and gun violence, pest-infested inadequate housing, style poverty. In America. I can do the poverty olympics all damn day with anyone here, even those from so-called under-developed nations.
I am...skeptical...of your statement. I'm rich now thanks to an IPO--and my hard work in being in a position to be employed at a successful company. But I recognize that a lot of what you've written there is just...wrong. It's "right" enough in some respects, but just so very wrong in so many ways.
There's definitely different levels of poverty. Rural American poverty is different from urban American poverty, there's different problems. We didn't have pest problems, but one of the houses we lived in had severe mold that caused health problems (so we had to move). We didn't have gun violence or drugs, but we chopped and burned wood from the area to heat our house through the cold winters because we couldn't afford fuel. We didn't go hungry, but only because we got heavily subsidized or free lunches from the school. We had our electricity shut off on several occasions. I was lucky in the sense that we lived within the territory of a decent school district, so I was able to dig a computer out of the school dumpster that only had a failed hard drive, which I fixed and used to teach myself programming (by this point, we could at least afford internet service). It wasn't consistently like that, and not as bad as what you described, but it was absolutely still poverty.
According to him if your partner divorces you it is always a bad decision of yours. If people betrays you it is a bad decision if you get sick it is a bad decision, if you live in Haiti earning 300 USD/month it is fine because COL is lower. Living in hindsight-land, but it is OK since he grew up in "poverty". Totally absent of any sense of perspective of what a normal human life consists of, typical of an upper-middle class able, white, male in IT.
All these replies with the typical 7% return for 20-30 years calculations are missing the point. I know what the arithmetic is. It is not common to be in a position to do that, even in the software industry.
If you start maxing out retirements in your first job and continue to do so throughout your career, raises will be raises and you'll continue to save. If you tap into your max savings per year in start of your career, you'll have trouble pairing that income back and putting it away for savings. Max out your retirement funds early and never look back.
The fact that over 80% of individuals don’t even have $1MM in assets certainly is a basis to dismiss the point. “It’s possible” is technically correct (no, that’s not the best kind of correct), but leaves out just a ton of context. “It’s possible” for a Boltzmann brain to form. Doesn’t mean it’s likely, common, or that people who don’t achieve it have somehow done something wrong.
How does the percentage of those with 1MM in assets relate to whether or not you should prioritize savings?
Are you suggesting individuals should not be saving for retirement or long term financial well being? If so I'm not sure I have anything to offer to you.
I can only speak for myself. I do and I know lots of friends who do as well. I made 42k when I finished undergrad and have always maxed out my available tax beneficial savings (401k/403b/IRAs). Doing anything else would be negligent on my ability to prepare for my future where I would like to retire and not rely on social security, children or other programs.
Where were you living and when was that? My starting salary about $15k higher than that, but I still couldn't max out. Rent, insurances, car payment (eventually), food, taxes, etc really eat a big chunk. I always tried to save a lot, but it was probably only $14k per year (IRA + 401k). I'd say I'm still only around that because I now have a family to support and medical bills.
With a $100,000 salary, $50,000 expenses, 30% tax rate, and 5% real returns you could put away $20,000 a year and have a million (2021) dollars in 26 years.
Hardly easy but not out of the realm of possibility for a persistent and highly paid software developer.
I’m glad you phrased it like that, because I think it explains a lot of the talking past each other that’s going on here.
The article is not titled “How to be rich af”. It’s How to do Great Work.
So Gates is the example here because he built a huge company that made software used by almost every human on earth, and because every reader will know who he is.
I guess the author could have used RMS, or John Carmack, or Bill Joy, but that would have excluded people who aren’t into free software or gaming or Unix etc.
If you use his definition of working hard, by the time you are 30-year old software developer you'll have valuable skills and a valuable network in addition to a solid amount of money. You may be unable to _retire_ at 30 but you will, generally speaking, be setup for success for the rest of your life.
How did you work hard? What kind of career did you choose? What was your budget like? Did you have any bad luck re health or family? There's many possible reasons, many under your control, some not. Should I assume based on your response and the original article, by hard work you mean not just effort on the job, but also effort in finding work you align with, explored other job types, spent real effort networking, studied for job skills a bunch, and didn't have any bad luck to explain it?
Good grades, got a job I thought was good at the time, great grades in a masters program (expanded network outside the company), became an expert at my company, filled a role on the team 1-2 levels above mine. Then got denied promotions based on political games and contrary to policy, more ignored policy to my detriment, even worked a second job for a while, outsourced my team, forced to switch to even less known tech, etc etc. Got AWS and financial certs, filled a role above my grade (again), more politics, more violation of policy to my detriment, etc etc. No other good job options in this area, wife won't relocate, multiple family health issues in the past year and family commitments (ie my wife walks all over me now that we have a kid) that prevent me from throwing in extra hours, not that I feel much reason to based on past treatment when I used to do that.
Budget has always been very frugal. I make my own cheap beer/wine, make soap, grow food in a garden, almost never take vacations (honeymoon was the only expensive one), cook 99% of the time at home, etc.
You can't trust companies to keep their word. Working hard gets you no where. The greedy people at the top are the ones who get everything and will screw you over constantly. And I'm not even talking about success in terms of $200k+ salary and fancy titles like CTO etc. I'm just talking about success as making it to the natural progression of senior dev and techlead with a salary over $100k.
But I must be a loser who didn't work hard since other people made it.
But even that isn't necessarily true. I know of several managers who didn't work hard to get there. Theh were just in the right place at the right time, or in some cases the right gender.
We can abstract this a little. You don't have to work hard. You just have to appear useful to the people in power.
I worked hard in the past. I'm not working hard now - I'm really slacking now that I know I'm screwed. I'm still getting paid the same.
Anyone making high 5 or low 6 figures will be a millionaire at the start retirement if they can save a modest amount from a reasonably early start, say 30 years old.
While technically correct, this doesn't square with most people's intuitive sense of what "being a millionaire" means. It's not having a solid retirement nest egg, it is being able to jet off to your yacht in St. Tropez on a private jet.
I think this is largely due to inflation. A million dollars in the 50s or 60s would be around 10 million today, while at the turn of the 20th century when the term really became popular it would be worth 30 million today. A "millionaire" of the time is really living a different lifestyle and can likely afford a very extravagant upper class lifestyle purely on interest of their wealth.
With housing costs having risen so much faster still beyond inflation, today you can easily be "a millionaire" simply by having a bit of equity in a modest home in a costal city.
yeah well that's true about people's intuition but it hasn't been the case for a long time. to "jet off on a private jet" anywhere regularly probably requires a salary on the order of a million per year.
10% of Americans are millionaires. I would say that 90% of full time software engineers will end up becoming millionaires. FAANG engineers become millionaires in their 20s. For others it will take longer.
It seems like $100k is conservatively a pretty typical salary these days even outside the big companies. That is $4M after a 40 year career, which makes you a millionaire when you retire if you can save 25%, even if the savings appreciate 0%. This seems pretty accomplishable.
But perhaps the idea of "being a millionaire" you're thinking of is not that you slowly manage it over a long career, but that it happens more quickly?
It's not about eventually becoming a millionaire. It's about using Gates and other successful outliers as a pattern for normal people. There are tons of smart and hardworking people out there who are not very successful. There's a lot more going on than just hard work.
> Working hard in the mailroom or stocking shelves at a grocery store isn’t going to translate into a successful software career
Equally, working hard as a software engineer isn't going to translate into the "uncapped salary" class of employment like CEO/CTO, VP, Founder, etc. There's a class ceiling where only a certain type of person gains entry. You can hard-work yourself to the bone writing code, but that "VP of Engineering" role is going to go to the external candidate who is already "VP of Engineering" somewhere else, and who has been some flavor of Director or VP his whole career. Jobs are a lot more class-stratified and career immobile than we like to think they are. This reminds me of a previous "hard work" discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27517158
This has nothing to do with class, similar to how declining a junior engineer for an architect role is not classist. A VP Engineering role is a senior management position, and being a fantastic programmer is not a reasonable transition point. It's a lot more reasonable to either make a lateral hire or promote internally from a lower level (say, Director). Tiny startups take more chances with whom they place into these positions out of necessity. At the end of the day though, vast majority of coders don't have the right set of skills to be a successful VP right there and then, as their day-to-day responsibilities do not meaningfully overlap. Doesn't mean they can't get there, but there's a career progression aspect to it which is certainly within their grasp. Vast majority of Directors and VPs work their way up, just like everyone else.
But that is not argument against what he said. All software engineers cant be VPs. It is not possible - there are not enough positions and many people are not suitable for that role.
If everyone worked super hard, still only minority would got these positions.
That was not the main argument of the parent comment, this was:
> There's a class ceiling where only a certain type of person gains entry
It is true that working hard alone is not going to get you into a VP role, but working hard on the right things has a much higher likelihood of accomplishing that. Impact != hours put in, and vice versa, and frankly this is where a lot of the hard working people find themselves. Doing a difficult, but low leverage activity (relatively speaking) really well does not automatically entitle one to a role that is intended to be high leverage, all the time.
I think my use of the word "class" was problematic. The word doesn't really capture what I mean, and I struggled to find the right description. Those people who always seem to end up SVPs and CEOs and Founders all seem to be cut from a certain cloth. Not a "class" in the literal sense of English aristocracy, but it's always the same "Ivy Leaguer" type of person. Smooth talker, big smile, outgoing, and credentialed up the wazoo. Like a game show host but with a business degree. Look at all the CxO folks at your company and tell me they are not all basically cut from this same fabric.
It's almost never the smart, hard working kid whose parents were factory workers in Pittsburgh, who hard-worked their way up from the mail room.
EDIT: Maybe not a perfect comparison, but how many current active duty 4 star military officers started out their careers as enlisted grunts rather than as officers?
That's nonsense. Look at the "about us" pages for tech companies and startups. You'll see a huge diversity of backgrounds among SVPs of engineering, including many first generation immigrants.
There are also a lot of senior military officers at the O-5 to O-6 level who started out enlisted. The relative lack at the O-7 level and above is due more to retirement age limits than anything else. If a service member did a couple enlisted tours, then went to college and OCS, they usually just run out of time.
> Working hard in the mailroom or stocking shelves at a grocery store isn’t going to translate into a successful software career
Right, but it might lead to satisfaction regardless. Even the most menial positions are often rewarded. I have worked a few menial jobs, and effort is even more important. When I worked hard and went the extra mile when required, I got rewarded with better shifts, more flexibility and more respect. It also personally felt good.
I find that people who don't work hard and are apathetic about the work they do are often deeply unhappy, while people that take pride in their work and work hard are satisfied. The best feeling I get in the day is after a grueling workout. There are health benefits sure, but its not worth the amount of discomfort and suffering I have to endure. If there were a pill that gave me the same benefits, I would be less satisfied than putting in the work. But maybe that's just me.
People who work hard often have better personal circumstances as well. Who would want to be with a partner that just spends their life going through the motions with no real purpose or drive?
> Putting the extra effort into a menial job isn't "a grueling workout", it's mortgaging your body and health for a price you'll regret in 20 years.
Maybe if you're working grueling construction jobs or consuming fast food and soda for 3 meals a day because you're too busy for anything else.
However, having worked in an industry with a lot of people who are on their feet and doing physical work throughout the day, I've come to realize that sedentary jobs like programming are a huge risk to long-term health. Sitting at a desk all day every day takes a toll on the body. The people who were active and moving about every day for decades are still in good physical health years later. The people who sit at desks all day (without compensating with exercise) accumulate a lot of health problems and weight gain if they're not careful.
I don't know what to tell you if you think that. I guess don't put in effort in a menial job? Just quit, slack off and post on HN instead?
I don't think menial work leads to "mortgaging your body". Some jobs sure, but those very physically demanding jobs pay well because the alternative would be a job that pays equally as poorly and is not physically demanding. You can always default to working at a grocer or fast food job.
Those factory jobs at Amazon that are fairly grueling pay a lot better than similar jobs in those areas w/ that skill set. People don't really work them very long either due to the demands. So you can do that for a few years, make more money and hopefully invest it in building out a more valuable skill-set or give better opportunities to your children.
That's honestly the only thing you can optimize for: do the very best you can at what you are doing. Take care of what is right in front of you. You'll be fulfilled, and in many world-lines you will also be successful. But also, when you are resting, rest thoroughly. Don't just rest to work more later or try to scheme this or that in your day dreams. Just let go of the effort and relax.
Great point. I've actually done some of my hardest work for hobbies, volunteer positions, or just helping friends with huge projects. And I loved every minute of it. There's a lot to be said for being able to appreciate accomplishing things and working together with other people.
I've had good success hiring some bootcamp grads for this reason. Some of them may not have the years of experience that senior candidates or even college grads might have, but you can find a lot of hard working and highly motivated people among bootcamp grads.
This is especially true for those who came from careers that involved a lot of hard work or manual labor. It's refreshing to work with people who enjoy getting things done and can appreciate how lucky we all are to be able to sit in air conditioned offices and type on computers all day. Contrast this with some of the perpetually disgruntled college grads I've seen lately who think we're taking advantage of them unless we pay them Google L6 compensation that they saw on levels.fyi .
> just wise job selection, a reasonable amount of financial savvy and budget adherence, and a deliberate effort to work on your career path.
None of that requires working 12+ hours a day. I am one employee out of x,000 at my company. The difference between me giving 75% and me giving 150% (hours) seems very unlikely to affect the stock price in any meaningful way.
Do you think your colleagues can distinguish between someone who excel's and someone who does not? Do you think when they find some lucky opportunity, they would be more likely to reach out to the harder working colleagues they know or the lazier ones? It doesn't require 12 hour work days and we could exagerate ad nauseum, but generally speaking working hard and working smart earns you more than just a marginal impact on your current business -- it earns you a reputation that you can leverage towards greater opportunity.
Sure. There are definitely colleagues I would recommend over others if I had to only choose one, but I don't. Bouncing between large companies means "sure, I'll refer you and get $5k for doing so" as long as I think you can pass the interview.
I updated to multi-millionaire. The idea was that people would have enough money to quit their job and live very comfortably.
I think the network effect is highly overblown for the average person. Sure, networks can be good for the people in the top 10%, but I don't see it really helping most of us because what are the chances our average friends will be in a position to hire us to a high position.
I don't see an average developer being even a millionaire after a decade. Average salary is about $100k, but might be skewed due to the high cost areas. That's $1M before tax, living expenses, etc. Maybe you could hit $1M after 2 decades if lucky.
Is the average for a developer really that low (in the US)? In the Boston-area market (now remote, but same pay scale), we're paying more than that for fresh college hires.
Get hired, contribute to your 401(k), buy a house, and do that for 15 years and in most markets I think your change in net worth over the 15 years is more likely to be >$1MM than less.
According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Stats May 2018 for the job category "Software Developers, Applications" mean salary is $108K. They provide percentiles 10% at 66K and 90% at 161K.
Well, I have to support a family on it. I dont get time to do anything enjoyable. I don't have any upward mobility. All with no end in sight for when I'll be able to quit this job I hate.
Start working some l33tcode problems and applying to other jobs. If you hate your job, it pays poorly, you have no upward mobility, and you don't get to do anything enjoyable, get another job. The companies on levels.fyi are all hiring, go do what it takes to get hired by them.
There really aren't any job options in my area. I don't consider remote an option for a new job since it's much more difficult to onboard virtually. I dont have time to LeetCode due to family constraints.
> buy a house
In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY, a 1 bedroom is approximately a million dollars. COL in the area where your job is is critically important as well.
> I think the network effect is highly overblown for the average person. Sure, networks can be good for the people in the top 10%, but I don't see it really helping most of us because what are the chances our average friends will be in a position to hire us to a high position.
Your friends don't need to be in a position to hire you into a high position. They just need to be in a position to recommend you for a good job that might be a step up. Or put in a good word for you when you apply at their company.
They don't even need to be friends. In fact, most of the time I get my back-channel references from people who simply worked at a company at the same time as another person.
Network effects aren't always obvious. I can't tell you how many times I've changed my mind on a candidate (in either direction) due to a friend of a friend giving me some more info about their experience working with the candidate.
Allow yourself to be exploited by capital in exchange for experience and you'll probably be rewarded later when you get to exploit inexperienced people? Sounds like a big risk for labor and a big win for capital.
Strange framing. Working very hard in the US has made my compensation increase 7X in 9 years. I’m not capital (this isn’t a static group, btw), I don’t feel exploited, and I don’t exploit anyone - I invested in myself and successfully optimized for long-run outcomes.
I’m in the midst of people who essentially have had the same career trajectory, while starting in this country with debt and zero social capital. It’s not applicable to everyone, but it’s also pretty darn attainable - unless you’re convinced that it’s not/
Well said. That's why capital has to write essays like this to make it seem like a better deal than it is, lest the rest of us figure it out and organize.
I.e. choosing companies that have (or eventually get) publicly traded stock that goes up a bunch.
There are whole classes of people who sit around all day trying to figure out which companies will grow and succeed and which ones won't. They aren't really that good at it.
There's a certain point of working hard enough to clear the interview bar of the FAANG companies or similar, but beyond that your financial success is largely tied to a favorable roll of the dice.
What you said is simply not true. There are countless people work on different positions in different fields are enjoying hard work as part of their life.
If you read the essay through, he never said "hard work == long hours of work". He explicitly wrote "Trying hard doesn't mean constantly pushing yourself to work, though."
And the Bill Gates thing? PLEASE. Yeah, I agree with the previous comment. A horrible example.
Bill Gates was one of the most lucky sons of bitches in the history of the planet. Born to wealthy parents, he was impossible to deal with, so they took him to a therapist (again, a lucky pick) that advised them to set Gates free. They put him in this prep school with other privileged kids, and like a meteor made of pure gold, by luck, it had a computer. Almost no schools had a computer at the time.
Hard work is only part of the equation. You have to be at the right place, at the right time. Most people never are.
Might as well read the next article on "Ten morning habits of billionaires". Luck. Is. A. Factor.
also it was his mom's connection with IBM that made him a billionaire, but the rest helped as well. Bill was also able to secure a contract because a competitor Gary Kildall did not show up. Luck is the factor.
Well said! I came here to say this. Founders of successful businesses usually are not exceptional geniuses. They often happen to be in the right place at the right time, or they steal ideas from other people when the business is too young to be worth litigating over. See, e.g., Microsoft, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. Or they get government assistance at a critical time. E.g., Elon Musk. There are so many species of selection bias at work here; I totally agree with your comment about reading "Ten morning habits of billionaires."
Also, the idea that one should be "constantly judging both how hard you're trying and how well you're doing," _while_ trying to try hard and trying to do well, is insane. You can't be the CEO and the ditch-digger at the same time. You have to be able to inhabit both perspectives as _separate_.
That said, it was an interesting read, albeit a self-consciously unhelpful one. It was helpful and humbling to read that you just think some things are easy for you because they were taught at a low level in school. I can adapt that same logic to suggest that this author isn't imparting serious, deep knowledge about the true nature of hard work and success.
It's necessary but not sufficient. What if you work hard all through your 20s, not a day off, and it doesn't work out (which it doesn't, in the billionaire sense, for most people)? How do you get back the first flush of youth?
This essay from Paul reminded me once again how relatively blinkered he is. He has his mental model of a good life - for obvious reasons, it's one which is somewhat similar to his own - and he doesn't question his assumptions. What is his utility function? Is it a universal utility function, or is it actually just his preferred, locally, personally optimal way of increasing its value?
Dismissing whole departments at college is part of that. You might not see value in the philosophy - PG is on record as dismissing it - but philosophy has changed the world more than almost anything else. It's at the foundation of science, law, government and politics, and most of the wars of the 20th century were fought, ultimately, over philosophy. PG knows this, maybe he views it differently - he studied it in college after all - but in his shoes, I wouldn't be so dismissive.
In my opinion, no, not really. Hard work could be necessary but not sufficient, or contingently necessary. Or the success criterion could be defined in a way that obscures the link to hard work. This is from a review of Taleb's The Black Swan:
As Cicero pointed out, we all suffer from 'survivorship bias': that is, we confine our evidence to that adduced from those few who succeed or survive, and ignore the silent evidence of all those who didn't make it. The graveyard is silent, the awards ceremony is noisy.
I've heard hard work described as increasing your luck "surface area". So imagine you're trying to catch luck "raindrops" and you're Bill Gates - sure you're busting your ass but you're starting off with a football stadium sized bucket in monsoon season. A poor kid from Baltimore with divorced parents could work as hard and end up with the analogy-equivalent of a coffee cup in Death Valley
Why? Unless you are working so hard that it drains you outside of office hours, what's wrong with it? I just feel plain worse when I slack off at work, and feel accomplished and valued when I work hard. I work the same number of hours either way.
Yeah, people like having purpose and feel good contributing to a shared goal.
If the work is stimulating, and the company is doing something you find valuable (or it’s your own company) then that’s very fulfilling.
There’s some cultural trope that everything is zero sum and that people can’t possibly enjoy their work or get value from it. I think this is just empirically wrong. People don’t just “think” they enjoy hard work, many actually do - and feel worse when they’re having trouble doing it.
I like the essay a lot, but I’m not sure it meets its title How to work hard. It lays out that to do great work you must and that it often feels good to do so. John Carmack proofread the essay and is probably one of the hardest working programmers alive (in addition to massive natural ability).
I think a more common problem is people that want to work hard, feel good when they do so, but have a hard time getting themselves to do so. Strategies around getting better at this (the “how”) are difficult. He touches on it a bit with how goals must be set once out of school and no one will set them for you. Interest helps, but is often not enough.
There’s of course also the group of people that don’t value hard work and don’t feel bad from not working hard/meeting potential, but I actually suspect this group is smaller than most think (and less interesting to discuss given the topic).
I accepted a job at a startup not too long ago. They offered a pretty good salary, but no equity. Shame on me for not doing better research. As soon as I got in the role, they made it clear they expected 70 hours a week, oh and by the way, the CEO is really excited about the prospect of selling the company, and how rich he's going to get. He's going to mention potential valuations all the time, and he's also "really depending on me" to shape up core business functions to make the company sale-ready. LOL! Fuck that, I left within 3 months.
> then you can reap the benefits and live a life worth living
I wish we could make the "inequality" point without resorting to hyperbole like this. The median American lives a life that is the envy of 99.9% percent of people who have ever walked this earth including most monarchs and emperors, and certainly >90% of people alive today.
I do agree that something needs to be done to keep inequality in check; I just happen to think that hyperbole and dishonesty create more problems than they solve.
Like causing people to lose trust in the "anti-inequality" message. If we need to lie or exaggerate to persuade then we may rightly lose credibility. Pro-inequality folks can even deflect the conversation to our own exaggeration. I didn't mean to imply that hyperbole is comparable to inequality in scale or severity, but rather that any gains afforded by hyperbole tend to be short-sighted.
I don't feel it was a lie or exaggeration. Many people do not feel like their life is worth living when they work a job they hate just to pay the bills, get no time to enjoy life, etc. It shouldn't be a surprise when the general trend is for highly industrialized countries to experience higher suicide rates.
Whether or not we are happy, the fact remains that the median American lifestyle is positively luxurious by world standards and “America is a third world country” rhetoric is hyperbole. Most everyone today or throughout history has had to work far harder than our median American to secure much less. That we are unhappy only indicates that wealth isn’t the major factor in happiness.
Personally, for causes of declining happiness, I would look at rampant social media and technology addiction, falling-sky media narratives, rapidly increasing political division (itself a product of the traditional and social media), decreasing religious participation, weaker family/community ties, and good ole fashioned keeping up with the Jones’s.
I really don’t think 99.9% of people want to pay 1K /month for health insurance or be a missed paycheck away from living on the street. Americans make a lot of money but the cost of living is through the roof and there is practically no safety net. That’s not even touching on our complete lack of social and family support structures.
Again with the wild hyperbole. The American safety net may not be the absolute best in the world but it is still far better than what is available to the overwhelming majority of people. Indeed, a huge swath of the world is far below the American poverty line. Why do you suppose so many millions of people risk their lives to get into America in the first place?
Come on. We can advocate for better healthcare and social services without going full “AmErIcA iS a ThIrD wOrLd CoUnTrY”.
It’s not hyperbole it’s reality. The US has the largest prison population in the world. It has massive problems with homelessness and violent crime. It has extreme wealth inequality. We have the most expensive healthcare and education in the world.
The reality is that the US is a harsh place to live. Yes there are upsides but the hyperbole is that there aren’t significant downsides.
> Yes there are upsides but the hyperbole is that there aren’t significant downsides.
The original claim was that the median American’s lifestyle is enviable to the overwhelming majority of people on Earth today or at any other point. In other words, the downsides are few and far less significant than the upsides for most people today or at any time in the past.
It’s so exhausting to transparently argue that relative to the world, the US is a very nice place and suffer responses like “but there is lots of violent crime!” Of course there is always some referand for which the US has “lots of violent crime” but by world standards it does not. The US homicide rate for example is something like 30% below the global homicide rate. The poverty rate in the US is pretty comparable to European countries (bit worse than western Europe, bit better than eastern Europe) and far, far better than Asia, Africa, or South America. Even our wealth inequality is not “extreme” by global standards.
There is no truth whatsoever to claims that the US is a harsh place to live. According to the quality of life index which does not cherry pick metrics, the US is 15th globally (lower is better). https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.j...
- Why is wealth inequality a problem? If average people is relatively wealthy (which i think is the case for USA), why does it matter that some people are very wealthy? This is different than some 3rd world countries where average people is poor and some very small percentage have wealth (and mostly due to corruption / crime / political influence)
- Rate of incarceration may also mean that USA does a good job of imparting justice / catch criminals.
- Healthcare costs looks like an issue, but socialized systems also have their problems (bad quality, wrong economic incentives for doctors to improve their practice, etc.)
Wealth inequality is bad in part because the wealthy then control policy and have wide ranging impact in the day to day lives of those who are not wealthy. It’s a centralization of control.
The rate of incarceration is largely due to the war on drugs. There’s nothing just about it.
I’d take NHS (despite its flaws) over my >2k /month health insurance any day of the week.
> I’d take NHS (despite its flaws) over my >2k /month health insurance any day of the week.
Would you also take the 40% reduction in post-tax, post-healthcare, post-retirement pay?
I actually favor a stronger social safety net and I agree that we need to reign in inequality (because an egalitarian society of very wealthy people and very poor people strikes me as completely infeasible in the same way that a prosperous socialist or communist country is completely infeasible), but that will almost certainly mean the professional class is worse-off. Reasoning soberly about tradeoffs is imperative IMO.
> Would you also take the 40% reduction in post-tax, post-healthcare, post-retirement pay?
Yes, and I have! What I missed most when not living in the US:
* variety of everything
* large appliances
What I missed least:
* driving/car culture
* overwork
So sadly I found I was actually a typical “consumer” who wants things that are pretty crappy for the environment (except for the car thing). I was fine with getting paid less than I would in the US because as a senior technologist, I was making way more than most of the locals and the economy was tuned to their pay.
Again, I'm not glossing over problems, I'm contextualizing them. I've been very clear about that in this entire thread. Cherry picking individual metrics doesn't present a clear picture, and I'm striving for a clear (not distorted) picture. Notably, healthcare costs don't mean much on their own, you have to adjust for per-capita wealth as well. With respect to wealth inequality, would you rather live in a country where almost everyone is below the poverty line or one in which almost everyone is above the poverty line but some moreso than others? Again, I want to reign in inequality in the US, but I don't need to invoke hyperbole to get there.
You aren't going to get a clear picture by cherry picking statistics that support your conclusion. You need to contextualize. Of course, if your goal isn't to get a clear, honest picture then we're aiming for different things and we may as well part ways now.
EDIT: From wikipedia, regarding measures of inequality:
> Gini coefficients are simple, and this simplicity can lead to oversights and can confuse the comparison of different populations; for example, while both Bangladesh (per capita income of $1,693) and the Netherlands (per capita income of $42,183) had an income Gini coefficient of 0.31 in 2010,[53] the quality of life, economic opportunity and absolute income in these countries are very different, i.e. countries may have identical Gini coefficients, but differ greatly in wealth.
Your original argument is flawed. You actually have no way of knowing if most people are “envious” of the US. That’s pure speculation on your part. We can look at numbers, if we do we see some where the US looks really good and some where it looks really bad. That’s not even touching less tangible things like culture, community and family values (all of which are extremely subjective). The US is definitely a harsh place to live in many ways. And yes, I’ve lived in other countries and traveled extensively. I’ve seen plenty of poor (by American standards) families living happily together in ways that would make many Americans envious.
In short, your claim is too subjective to be useful and is directly contradicted by multiple metrics.
The context of the thread assumes that we're talking about wealth. The original claim was something like, "in the US you must be in the management class in order to have a life worth living". I.e., we're talking specifically about wealth and not other subjective factors. To be perfectly clear, there are no metrics that contradict that the median American is wealthy by world or historic standards.
Maybe you're arguing that I have no way of knowing that poorer people would be envious of richer people; fair enough, "envious" was figurative language on my part.
Working hard is an attitude, not just hours. The Gates example is more approachable as we’ve all heard of them.
I’ll use myself as an example both ways. You don’t know who I am, and you never will, I’m just a cog in the wheels of society. I was a shitty student, always interested in whatever wasn’t being taught. I became good at working the system instead of working.
When I started working in high school at farms and later in sales, it clicked that the people who worked harder and did a better job… did better. That didn’t always mean money, but it meant respect, better shifts, etc. It was more real to me than academics.
Later on in my professional life, working really hard and delivering more, whatever more was, paid off in innumerable ways. It turns out the way to know what you’re talking about is to do stuff. Now I’m a midcareer director level person and that hard work means when I pick up the phone, someone answers. When there’s a problem or a solution, people listen.
That said, there’s lines I won’t or can’t cross. I won’t sacrifice my family’s life, which is a career ceiling. My mediocre performance as a student effectively locked me out of high end schools and the jobs that follow.
Instead of worshipping hard work, maybe we should be promoting "smart work". As a society, we don't need a bunch of overworked and burnt out people in their late twenties. That's not good for anyone.
To add to this: there are people who earn minimum wage doing what some might call menial jobs (or 3 jobs back to back) and they work 10x harder than the average startup programmer or founder.
They might not have gone to school at all. Or they might have a PhD from country most Americans couldn't find on a map but still end up cleaning the offices of startups.
As someone who has gone from being poor to being upper middle class via the tech industry, I can say without exception hard work had nothing to do with it. Every quantum leap in my career came from convincing some rich guy to allow me to bask in the mist of the cash firehose being directed at them.
I would say working hard is actually negatively associated with success. Once you get branded a “worker bee”, your chances for high level advancement quickly bottom out.
If you really want to get ahead go to the right parties. The VP no one can ever get a hold of is making an order of magnitude more money then the middle manager putting in 80 hours a week. That person will correctly have been identified by the execs as not belonging to the upper class.
That being said, once you see how the game is played it can be hard to stomach. It is reality though.
That's not what I'm getting at. You can accumulate >1M net worth just by being an engineer/contractor - no need to get into upper management or socialise with rich people.
Working on acquiring experience early on in your career will accelerate the point where you're making decent money where you're able to save/invest a decent portion of your income.
You don’t need to work hard to acquire that much money as an engineer. You can totally coast and make market salary. The hard part is going to be having the discipline to save and live beneath your means.
You have to work hard to get the job in the first place. A large majority of people can't even get through the basics of learning to code so can't even get a degree or do the basics to get a job as a self learner. To them getting a software engineering job is too much hard work and they instead just continue earning their poor salaries.
I love programming and know a dozen languages. I learned them for fun and didn’t consider it work.
I also know people who know a little Python or JS and can make >$100k a year.
You may have to learn a bare minimum to get in the door, you may consider that hard work or not, but once in, you no longer need to work hard. Sweet talking your boss or jumping jobs will get you way more bang for your buck.
You got downvoted not because you are wrong but because you are right.
Some people would rather hear they have no power and no chance because it takes away the bad feeling for their own agency in their situation. Others are empowered by their agency and act on it.
I totally agree. If you want to get ahead, you need to “hack” the system by convincing people in the upper class that you belong there too. Working hard is a great way to signal that you’re middle class labor.
I think this is a great argument for a decentralized economy for creatives (and anyone else who wants it). Society would be more productive. People would see the products of their effort, share in the rewards. Even if the rewards are small it is still nice to see a direct effect between your work and the results.
I guess it depends on what we're calling "hard work". I think most software devs have already done lots of different types of hard work to get where they are. Going to school, doing intern work, finding a job and learning new languages, etc. It gets easier once you've established a career, but it takes significant work to get there.
But if we're defining it as "working lots of hours," then yeah, I agree, don't do that.
Working 12+ hours a day isn't necessarily working hard. It may be physically and mentally draining, but people can do that by just grinding rather than challenging yourself. Working hard is more about the relentless drive towards self improvement rather than your economic output.
I think you are using a narrow definition of hard work.
Doing "actual work" is hard. Figuring out what your business is and who you need to hire is also hard work. Hard in a different ways but perhaps also harder in that fewer people are capable of doing it and it's less obvious.
if you are actually doing software 12+ hours a day for a decade, I find it hard you wouldn't find great success.
unless you spend none of that time improving and just doing the same thing you learned in the first year, you will become an expert. Experts are well rewarded for their skills
My personal experience was that once I became an expert the company wouldn't promote me and then outsourced the team. It was obscure tech, so it was basically a dead end.
That seems to conflict with the preface that you are constantly learning and improving, which should include changing jobs when you have become stagnant. you can make absurd money working in finance with java programming.
People doing CRUD apps at Google makes lots of money and Google still hires everyone who pass their general tests afaik. Not everyone can work at Google, but if all software engineers were great we would have way more well run tech companies and therefore more companies paying similar to Google. So that argument doesn't really makes sense, software demand is still far from being met so all value any programmer can be delivered will be used up. Unlike for example cleaners, if every cleaner did 2x the work then we would just hire half as many cleaners.
the ability to work hard(defined as continuous focus, improvement, work ethic) with reasonable intelligence as a trait follows a Gaussian. I am not going to sugar coat the fact that that will naturally create a hierarchy of success
>The real world doesn't work that way and using statistical outliers like Gates is disingenuous to the discussion about hard work and how it applies to normal people.
Exactly. This is the central lie that sustains capitalism. Wealthy C-level executives get rich when the rest of us work hard, which is why they harp on "working hard" so much. There's no reason to work hard when all the benefits go to the already-wealthy above you, which is why they try to obscure that fact in as many ways as possible.
// There's no reason to work hard when all the benefits go to the already-wealthy above you, which is why they try to obscure that fact in as many ways as possible
I have always been an employee and yet I am thrilled and thankful for the financial returns.
Looking around my neighborhood, the same is true for most folks around me.
There are not guarantees in life but if you have the combination of luck, skill and hard work, you can land in a place where you and employer are mutually benefited.
I am lucky enough that this has been the case for my 18 year career so far and not uncommon.
What you are saying on the other hand is a dead end. If you don't believe good employer/employee relationship is possible, you won't do your part and it will be a self fulfilling prophecy. I feel bad for people who think like this.
Honestly it reminds me of the incel movement. Someone somewhere owes you something and you have no agency on how it shapes out. I fundamentally disagree.
"If you don't believe good employer/employee relationship is possible, you won't do your part and it will be a self fulfilling prophecy."
I agree that it can become self-fulfilling. However, there are some of us who started out believing the best and changed their minds after being repeatedly screwed over.
>> and changed their minds after being repeatedly screwed over.
I both sympathize for you and still don't think the "changing your mind" is helpful here. My personal example here is in my dating life. I only got married at 38. Before that I had probably 15 semi serious or serious relationships that ultimately didn't work out. Each one of them would have been a good reason to say "oh, well, it's not for me to find love" or "I am doomed because my parents divorce messed me up" or "everyone out there's not good enough for me" or whatever.
But while I would be "justified" in thinking that way, I'd also actually doom myself by thinking that way. Instead I kept looking for changes I can make (mainly in how I feel about and value others in this case) that eventually allowed me to meet an amazing woman and start a family together.
The paint I am making is - we have agency. Whatever shitty work situation you have, do you have some room to find a better employer? To beef up your skills so you're more valuable? To contribute more to the org and be deeply recognized? To build such a network that if something ever happened you can find another job in a matter of weeks? In my experience, almost everyone has SOME leverage they can use to improve their situation. If they continuously use it, their situation is statistically likely to iteratively improve (and give you bigger levers over time.) If you get jaded and give up, nothing will magically improve and just get worse.
So no matter how much you may justify jadedness, it's not a thing worth accepting because it will just kill you.
The question isn't whether a good employer-employee relationship is possible. the question is whether a horrible employee-employer relationship, one that has significant butterfly effects, is possible. More pertinently, the question is whether it's possible for someone to be in such complex circumstances that finding a good employer, or even job opportunity, is possible for that person.
The incel community isn't the right comparison maybe? A more apt comparison might be domestic abuse worldwide.
Sometimes I'm amazed at the assumptions being made here and elsewhere that what applies to one person's life applies at large. It's not just survivorship bias, it's some kind of egocentrism (in a perceptual sense) bias.
You yourself say you consider yourself lucky. Do you really? What about the unlucky ones?
It's easy to say "well for two decades it's worked out for me and hundreds of neighbors" forgetting that there's many more decades in a life, and billions of people.
The main point is - you can't control your luck. you can control what you do. For some reason, there's an attitude that "because you can't control your luck, you shouldn't control what you actually can control" which is dumb.
You can acknowledge both. But you need to maximize that which is under your control (and if you don't do that you have no room to complain about anything else.)
>I am lucky enough that this has been the case for my 18 year career so far and not uncommon.
You shouldn't need luck to get food and shelter, which is how our current economic system works and the fact that it works this way upsets me greatly.
>What you are saying on the other hand is a dead end. If you don't believe good employer/employee relationship is possible, you won't do your part and it will be a self fulfilling prophecy. I feel bad for people who think like this.
Why is change always demanded from those without power by those with power? The employers are the ones ruining the relationship and I think the employer side of the relationship needs to change. One way of changing that is through labor unions.
// You shouldn't need luck to get food and shelter
Most people in the US have both, but that's also irrelevant to the point I responded to - his claim was that you can't do well by being an employee which is untrue.
// Why is change always demanded from those without power by those with power?
I am not demanding any change. However, if you are not happy with your situation, the most actionable place for you to change it is with yourself. Start with yourself FIRST.
Jeff Bezos could bankrupt himself giving each of his current employees $200K (one time only, after 25+ years of work, not per year).
And that's by far the most extremely case.
You can argue that it's exploitative or that no one should be as rich as he is, but you can't say that working hard to do better for yourself as an employee is useless just because that small amount gets skimmed off.
>you can't say that working hard to do better for yourself as an employee is useless just because that small amount gets skimmed off.
I like this argument, but for higher taxes on the wealthy instead. Taxes benefit everybody, but my surplus labor value goes only to Jeff Bezos and his substantial money hoard.
I second this. Each and every time I met someone who lives by the motto "I work smart not hard" or a version of that, they ended up being lazy, or stupid, or - most often - both.
We live in a world where the "average" is actually very high, so working hard, really gets us right around average; in order to break that barrier, in order to be >1 standard deviation from mean, we need to work hard and smart; and the road to >2 standard deviation is brutally hard.
This falls into the Malcolm Gladwell genre of arguments made on top of specious anecdotal data. Paul's not wrong, per se, but it's not a well-formed argument.
Bill Gates made his fortune by being in the right place at the right time with connections from his wealthy family, and software that he first sold and then went out and bought. If hard work helped him grow his empire, great, but I wouldn't use him as a great example of what hard work can bring you.
PG Wodehouse is considered by most to be a great "fun commercial fiction" writer. Comparing him to, say, Joyce, says more about Paul than about either of these writers.
For me, I prefer this quote by Calvin Coolidge: "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."
> This falls into the Malcolm Gladwell genre of arguments made on top of specious anecdotal data. Paul's not wrong, per se, but it's not a well-formed argument.
That pretty much describes anything that he writes on his blog.
Carrots are good for you. I had a friend who ate a carrots as a kid. He's a doctor now.
I wouldn't have even written my comment but this was just a big talking point after Gladwell's 10,000 hours book a few years ago (which also speciously and strangely used Bill Gates as an example of effort).
That Coolidge quote is 100 years old. I like us talking about things but let's endeavor to make it new things.
And I think a strong argument can be made that if Bill Gates had taken a little time to look at the big picture in his early days, Microsoft might have had a more positive effect on the world, rather than become a company that valued crushing opponents over technical quality or real innovation. Imagine the quality of Linux with 10% of the money of Microsoft.
Another strong argument is that, if you showed the place where Bill Gates actually worked hard, it was in crushing every single competitor in sight in such vicious terms that not only did those competitors shut down but none sprang up in their absence. Those small competitors were often wildly innovative. That all went away.
One often-cited reason why Europe did so well in the last half millennium, when it was far behind the Islamic world and the Far East, was not just the printing press but also that the various powers had reached a detente. There was not a single dominating, controlling power, and this spurred innovation.
Anyway, this whole argument Paul is proffering here is because people, especially the youngest generation, are seeing behind the curtain and realizing that their sweat drives the engines, and yet they're not benefiting from that the same way the wealthiest are. They're not going to "hustle" for a remote shot at millions. It's a crooked game and they don't want to play it. Good for them.
Reading about Bill Gates not taking a day off in his 20s doesn’t inspire me to work harder at all. If anything, it’s a miscalculation on Gates’s part, assuming he’d actually enjoy a day off. Would he have been materially less successful if he took a single day off in his 20s? Probably not. How about a week, or a week a year? Two weeks?
Good point. Gates isn't really even a good example because luck and happenstance played a big role. Possibly it's the same to some degree for most "outliers." People seem to minimize the effect of chance when writing how-to's, probably because "be lucky" isn't helpful advice, luck isn't something you control, and in some cases they might want to believe they themselves had a bigger role in their success than they did. Although hard work seems to be table stakes nonetheless.
I don't think this is it - he is an obsessive person. He was working that hard because he wanted to. I mean look at him now, he isn't exactly playing golf or swanning about on yachts.
I meant to allow for that with the ‘assuming he’d actually enjoy a day off’ caveat, but even so, there’s this, from Walter Isaacson:
“Every spring, as they have for more than a decade, Gates spends a long weekend with Winblad at her beach cottage on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where they ride dune buggies, hang-glide and walk on the beach.”
He might have meant something like “never took a day off beyond the usual weekend/holiday”. Or “even on vacation, I did things like exercise and reading books, so it doesn’t count as taking a day off”. Who knows.
This only barely glances the number one way I’ve found to work hard: to work for yourself. Working on things other people want is, for me, more difficult than working on things I want. Working at someone else’s company is more difficult than working at my company. With my own company, when things were going relatively well, it was easy to spend every waking minute working. At other companies, putting in overtime is more draining, especially if the reasons for it are because things are late or something broke. I’ve put in a lot of overtime in my life, I tend to work hard, but there’s really no comparison between hard work with a boss and hard work as the boss.
It's the old joke isn't it. A boss is out with one of his employees when they see a Ferrari drive past. The boss turns to his employee and says if you put in the hours and work really hard then one day I'll be able to afford one of those.
In my experience "working for yourself" means in practice "working for your clients." You still need an external party willing to give you money for your work. And they will have requirements about how it is done and when it is delivered that you won't necessarily like
The difference is that you have multiple clients but only one boss. So saying no to a client doesn't mean you lose all your business, but not wanting to do what your boss tells you to means you need to change to a new job.
Very true, being the boss is no panacea in terms of having to do work, it’s usually more work. But the intrinsic motivations really are very different when you are the one on the hook, when you decide which clients to take on, when you are building the company or deciding the dev or research directions, when you decide what happens with the revenue. I mean, for me anyway, but I know it’s true for at least some others too since many books have been written about this. It’s one of the reasons that a mentality of ownership is advocated even when you’re not the boss.
Yet another Paul Graham stream of consciousness. He presents a thesis but forgets to support it as he streams out another essay. I take issue with this fundamental thesis: "There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort."
He doesn't distinguish between practice and effort. In my view, practice takes effort and effort occurs during practice, they are two dimensions of the same thing, which is really just "experience." You don't gain experience without effortful practice.
Furthermore, where is his mention of accountability to a team? One of the greatest motivators is having helpful allies who tell you what they want from you, provide tips how to do it (leveraging their experience), and then give you the keys you need to work hard and get great things done.
Another lackluster article from PG that rockets to the top of HN within an hour. There are much better writers out there, I'm not sure why his work is so lauded.
> Yet another Paul Graham stream of consciousness.
Absurd to expect anything else. I missed the part of the essay where it pretended to be... whatever you seem to think it should.
You're not sure why it's popular and here you are responding to it, attaching to it and reacting, building on it. It sounds like you did in fact get a lot out of the essay, just like the rest of the peanut gallery.
Doesn't it all depend what you want out of life? And is the hard work even guaranteed to provide you what you want out of life? Hard work, desired outcomes, and goals are not in alignment.
What's the point of this essay, to convince people who don't want to work hard to work hard? Is this meant to chastise people? Motivate? Demoralize? Self-congratulate?
To identify that for people who succeed, hard work is often required, and most people aren’t born with the ability to do really hard work. That takes conscious effort and an uncanny ability to stay on task.
ADHD makes this hard, fwiw, and PG is not saying this mode is right for everyone. But I would agree with that idea: working hard isn’t natural, at least for some people, but it is a requirement for attaining success. If you’re going to work hard, it makes sense to do it on something you love. And there are people who thrive on hard work.
There are a bunch of prerequisites, some of which he explicitly states (find something you love, eg) and some implicit (sometimes you have to take the job you don’t like, because circumstances dictate that; families, eg).
This is absolutely insane XD I had so much fun and got into so much trouble in my late teens and twenties. I would be weeping into my scrooge money if I had worked like this essay advocates. I've also always had enough money and I've always had a little more than enough fun.
No mention of the near slave labor in our agriculture system. No mention of the parents working two custodial jobs to provide for their children. No mention of the vast quantity of individuals working hard every day who don't get to become billionaires.
Exactly. There are millions of people that work hard to provide their family a roof over their heads, food on the table, and a chance to go to school. Perhaps PG's article wasn't meant for those people, but it's so incredibly tone deaf.
Has hard work burned anyone else out? I spent my 20s working my ass off as an employee, and while it helped my career a lot, I am completely burned out now. All that creative work and effort which didn't end up amounting to much personally. Maybe the caveat to working hard is you should work hard for yourself and not others.
I see a very common arch of "I want to achieve" -> "Okay, life is about more than that, I'm going to practice balance" in these comments. I have also gone through it.
Around 19-24 years old I was working like a dog and making some great career progress. That helped me today, like you said, but I'm now the happiest I've ever been by enjoying this fine summer and working when I feel like working.
I look back on those years and truly wish I saw the other things life has to offer at the time.
Doesn't this sound shit though? If Bill Gates is so smart why did he have to work so much? Did he like coding and management more than days off?
If a life of hard work is needed to get you into heaven that's fine. Or if anything less would mean you and your dependants going hungry. But once your basic needs are met then it's irrational not to start spending time on all of the other things that life has to offer.
I feel like drive and energy and work-ethic are great, and you're useless without them. All the same if you have nothing else then you just become enslaved by your need to output more or increase your wealth or whatever, without connecting that to any healthy goal like health or happiness or wellbeing. It's like a cognitive defect, a disability except you're unable to not-do.
> It's like a cognitive defect, a disability except you're unable to not-do.
He specifically trained himself to have leisure anxiety and advises other people to do this as well:
>> The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working without anyone telling you to. Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off.
It's certainly effective, but as you say, effective to what end?
I tend to agree, but I guess it depends on what you're replacing with work, and how you feel about the work. If you're replacing idle TV watching with a form of work you enjoy, great. If it's replacing time you might be watching specific shows with your partner/kids and with get-head-of-the-pack projects that stress you out, the trade-off will be far from universal.
But as usual, he's writing for a very specific group of people - young people with a strong urge to do late nights building something.
There’s also a conflation of working hard and working really long hours. Plus some cherry picked examples. Basically if you only need to find five or six examples of success you could probably defend any lifestyle to get there. For example if I didn’t have kids or need to coordinate with the west coast of the US this mode from Haruki Murakami sounds lovely.
> When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m.
> I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.
> But to hold to such repetition for so long — six months to a year — requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.
I read a book on authors work habits and this pattern seems very common. Work for a relatively short period in the morning (by modern work standards) then spend the rest of the day at leisure.
Yeah I think for the sort of creative work I find myself doing that I don't really have more than 5-6 hours a day of it in me. Having the afternoon to recuperate and spend time idly thinking about the thing I'm trying to make would be great.
He probably didn't treat those as "work" as we laymen understand. We just work for bread and butter and most of the time workis kind of boring. But if you happen to work for yourself or enjoy your work for whatever the reason, you don't treat it as "work" and it's all about achieving the maximum happiness as you can.
I expereinced this a few times in my life and I never regretted about working hard on it. Why would I regret about playing hard and achieving what I can? But sadly due to my shortcomings these events are short and far between.
This is it. When you’re working on things you love, it’s hard, and can be lots of hours, but it doesn’t feel like work.
Speaking from my own experience of founding a startup. There are also times it was absolutely miserable. But it’s true: I wasn’t beholden to my VCs or angels. I could have quit. I just enjoyed the work so much, so deeply, that I didn’t want to quit.
The challenge was not burning out: I needed to take more vacation, because it not feeling like work didn’t mean it wasn’t, still, hard work which people need a respite from.
Yeah exactly. The trick is to not burn out early. I usually got burned out when I figured out the core (perhaps 20% of the work) and needed many days to grind out the final results, which I did not have the perserverance to complete. This is probably my worst shortcoming of life and I still can't get rid of it when I'm approaching 40.
It seems that the only way for me to finish something is to have the task coming from _someone else_, from a friend or from work.
I resonate with this completely. For me, it’s largely a result of ADHD. My solution has always been to partner with “finishers.”
I’m a spectacular starter, prototyper, and builder. But I cannot complete the damn project for the life of me. My best friend and first employee though? Thrives on that.
I'd go a step further and it sounds woefully disconnected from the joys of culture and life. For those it works for, I imagine that this seems satisfying but for the rest who work hard and don't hit acclaim and fortune (or at least not wild acclaim and fortune), they're going to have midlife crises when they realized they itemized away their youth... I'd guess.
The thing that most people seem to be missing is PG isn’t advocating for working hard just to work hard. He’s advocating for working hard at things that you love, because then it doesn’t feel like work.
He is also glorifying anxiety, which is unfortunate, and I think this essay stands stronger without those particular points.
But "working hard at things that you love" isn't much of a challenge. Your motivation is already there, and your simply overcoming a lack of skills or knowledge.
What's difficult, and more common amongst mere mortals is twofold; trying to find motivation to overcome difficult things, and learning the skills and expertise to accomplish these things. Love for those things isn't really a factor.
Graham really is trying to simplify things a bit too much, and recycling the tropes of natural ability, practice and effort.
Rationality really only makes sense in relation to goals, as far as I can see. If your goal is to meet your basic needs, then it’s irrational to work all day. If your goal is market domination, then I’d say working all day is a very rational thing to do
If Bill Gates was so smart why did he have to screw so many people over? Remember how many other smart people and other companies he eat for breakfast? If Bill Gates had the right work ethic would he still be so rich?
Further, the thing about Bill Gates is that he can't not be Bill Gates. Whatever drove Bill Gates to work as hard as he did, he probably had no real choice. If you have the drive of Bill Gates, then you'll work with the drive of Bill Gates. Simple!
Because he was trying to build one of the biggest/most successful companies ever? Some things are just hard regardless of how smart you are, building a mega company is one of those.
This rhetoric furthered by Elon, Jack Ma and several others where working 7 days a week for 18 hours is "ideal" and that rest and relaxation are had at the expense of productivity/success is a real dangerous position.
You know what happens to the majority of people when they get to a state of anxiety when relaxing and not working? Stress and burnout.
Let's acknowledge that it may have been the path to success for SOME of the 0.1% who can work 18 hours a day nonstop for a decade with extreme natural ability and a fair amount of chance (confirmation bias aside) and not the end-all of being successful that everyone should strive for. Yes, there is certainly a correlation between working hard and being successful - regardless of your natural ability. Don't do it at the expense of living.
Take it to the extreme: what happens when EVERYONE works that hard? You're back at your normal level of relative productivity.
Some people do enjoy their work and can be said to live for it. Marissa Mayer had an interesting take that burnout wasn't necessarily about working too much but resentment that they'd rather be spending more time on something else (like family). To paraphrase a similar view someone once told me: there's no such thing as work/life balance, it's all just life.
That being said I think it's easier to live to work if you feel that your efforts are going to yield greater results. Putting time into study to get good grades and learn new skills, anticipating that this will yield better job opportunities? Sure! Working long hours on my startup that is taking off and could make me rich? Great! Having to work long hours and skip vacations to finish a project in a salaried corporate job? That'll burn you out because you're not directly benefitting from the sacrifice, which probably leads to some resentment towards your employer.
Yeah, that's the thing. It can be good to work hard, but not necessarily long hours, or long stretches without breaks. I never feel more productive than when I just got back from a vacation.
This is discussed in the article closer to the end, when it explains the balancing act of continuously recognizing the difference of productive, interesting work and tired, harmful work for the sake of work and showing off.
PG also uses himself as an example of how the type of work can impact actual productive hours: about 5 for programming/engineering and almost a full day for coordination and communication.
> SOME of the 0.1% who can work 18 hours a day nonstop for a decade with extreme natural ability
I'm sceptical of whether they actually exist as described tbh. There's an obvious incentive for rich business people to emphasize the amount of work they put in, and I've not seen any independent verification of their supposedly high output
Yeah, get back to me when someone is willing to put those claims to the most minimal of tests. It should be as simple as verifying claims of breatharianism, and the video evidence should be as entertaining, too.
I really don't lije these "work hard in all your 20s" advice because I'm at nearing the end of my 20s with great results but I feel like I want to save what's left of my 20s instead of chasing more cash. I haven't personally met people who worked hard until 40s and felt like it was worth it for them. Being a successful person personally has always been way more than just having a successful career and money.
I am always amazed at how well-received Paul Graham's blog entries are here on Hacker News, despite their thinly veilled
underlying message: "Start a company, work hard, get rich". All of his writings center around this topic in one way or another and glorify it in various way.
I always take his writings with a big grain of salt, because I know that his sweet message might not be right for me.
I gotta be honest, I hate working hard. At least for money anyway. I hate the amount of time and mindshare it takes and the way it's looked up to as some virtue by the rest of society; the hallmark of some truly good person.
I'm sure there will be knee jerk reactions to downvote this just because of how programmed it is into society that hard work is a noble endeavor, and perhaps it is, for a certain class of problems that humanity occasionally faces where there is no easy way to solve them except by working hard. But making money and living a good life should not be one of those problems.
You really don't know how pointless it is to work hard until you make easy money. It's not uncommon for my investment portfolio to have a gain or loss of $20-30k in a day, I've made over $200k in the past two months, not really doing anything. My job itself pays close to $200k a year, but I justify working it by the fact that it's fairly easy and really I only put in about 4 hours of solid work per day.
I feel fairly secure in not being a very ambitious person anymore. I used to be, back when I was young and hopeful and immersed in the whole startup scene with hopes of making it big and changing the world for the better. But no startup I was ever part of ever made it big. Worse, as I got to know the world I didn't see the point in trying to change it. It is what it is and that's all it will ever be.
So yea, I've accepted I'm not one of those people destined to save the world through hard work. Instead I'm here to savor the fruits of their hard labor, and my goal now is to live as richly as possible with the least amount of effort. There is so much to enjoy in life and not enough time to enjoy it if you spend all your time working hard.
Nothing makes me feel as good as working smart, or even not working at all, and yet still producing the same amount of results as someone who has worked very hard. It is intoxicating, and knowing that others would be doing the same if I was working hard right now makes it very unappealing to work hard myself. I am cursed in that I will never be able to work hard again.
Strange that Firefox's reader view cannot be enabled for this post. Probably because instead of using `<p>` tags or similar, the content of the post is contained within a `<font>` block inside a table, with `<br>` tags separating the paragraphs.
Not having the content inside of `<p>` blocks is a departure from Paul Graham's older content, and a confusing one at that.
EDIT: It looks like the posts with the "Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator." banner are contained within a `<p>` block, and can be read with Firefox reader view, but those without the banner are not within a `<p>` block, and cannot be read with Firefox reader view.
>>There wasn't a single point when I learned this. Like most little kids, I enjoyed the feeling of achievement when I learned or did something new. As I grew older, this morphed into a feeling of disgust when I wasn't achieving anything. The one precisely dateable landmark I have is when I stopped watching TV, at age 13.
I wouldn’t dare question Paul Graham’s accomplishments, but I’ve always found it odd that some people are so proud of their abstention from television. There are time-wasting things on tv, but there are also time-wasting books, albums etc. I think not watching television and advertising that one didn’t was once an easy intellectual badge of honor. When there were only a few networks and the programming didn’t vary much, perhaps this made sense.
Every so often I still hear someone proudly say that they don’t watch television today. I usually wonder exactly what they mean, now that we are all able to choose the exact film or program we want and play it on demand. Surely it’s not a mark of excellence not to stream, say, the Criterion Channel?
I've wondered about the "no TV" stance too. I used to push back against it, but I believe there's something to it. Here's my current reasoning:
First of all, TV and movies have their strengths. Videos can communicate phenomena that are difficult to portray with the written text. They're also very accessible. However, all but the most low-budget shows and movies need to make money. Therefore, they need to appeal to a reasonably large audience. The economic motive limits the depth of the content.
Books can be written by individuals. Great books, and especially classics, are usually written for non-economic reasons. Often the author has a passion or a world view they want to share.
Books, as a medium, are older. Old books are filtered by time. They also let us learn about peoples who have different assumptions than we do. You can do this by reading about other cultures that exist today.
Books, as a medium, let one pause and think. You can write in the margins. It's possible, but more difficult, to do this when watching a show, listening to an audio book, or listening to a podcast. I like that I can listen to podcasts when I run or clean the dishes, but I grasp much less then when I read.
I agree that it's not enough to not watch TV. You need to discriminate regardless of the medium you're consuming, but I believe books are a better way to learn than most other mediums. Therefore, skipping television is probably a good idea if your goal is to develop a deep understanding of the world.
It's probably due to hidden third causes (the kind of personality + circumstance + challenges that cause people to abstain from TV are the same that cause this and that positive outcome), but it's there, at least according to lots of anecdata in this very same thread.
I stopped watching broadcast TV out of sheer spite towards the TV licensing system and the slack-jawed oafs that enforce it, but that's a uniquely British reason!
For me, I stopped watching TV twenty years ago - but then transfered my neurotic novelty seeking behavior to the internet. But because I quit once, it made it easier to reign in my mindless internet consumption. And then stop any mindless book consumption. Then mindless video-games.
So for my - "No TV" is a easy way to express "I'm trying to maintain a ballance between living a vigorous life and consuming meaningful media"
> There are time-wasting things on tv, but there are also time-wasting books
Books require constant attention to progress, TV doesn't, for me that's the big difference. If you start to drift out and don't remember the last few paragraphs, you know you can pause, read them again and continue. With a TV, you usually can't go back. You may be conscious that you were not engaged, but you can't take the steps to fix this.
Typical TV has low information density. It’s not a good way to learn. This is ameliorated in the non-fiction world in the YouTube era as there are so many detailed video essays now. PG grew up before then.
As far as fiction, books have told richer stories, though, again, things are somewhat different in the “prestige TV” era.
My personal take is working hard is a precondition towards being successful but not necessarily a guarantee.
Lots of normal people work very hard, many normal people I know outside of tech are working night shifts and a day job to just sustain their lives. Many of these people rarely have a full day off, rather they might scale back the night job in order to get rest, or rest whenever their scheduling allows for it. There probably working just as hard as a Bill Gates, but these people aren't exactly walking towards a path of riches. They're just sustaining and it's a very unfortunate reality of America today.
Really success comes from the prerequisite of hard work, the aptitude of the individual in regards to the task, and the ability of the resulting work to pay off in convexity, similar to a call option in finance. Generally non-convex pay outs are also associated with risk, perhaps alot of it. So really success comes from working very hard, being smart about it and taking on risk.
> ...because even in college a lot of the work is pointless; there are entire departments that are pointless.
I loved all of my CS courses in college. They were my bread and butter. I also liked a lot of my math courses and even an English class or two. I just wish I didn't take 5 history courses (three as part of an elective set that had to be liberal arts), three unrelated sciences (bio 1+2, and astronomy - imaging science was great and applicable), and two women and gender studies courses (nothing against the major, just unrelated to my degree).
I've been told countless times that these courses help round out a student. Most of them don't. I end up bullshitting them as much as possible and getting a B so I can focus on the courses I care about. A streamlined college education where we remove some (not all) non-major course work and save two or three semesters of time would be amazing, but of course that's two or three semesters of lost cash for a university...
> Most of them don't. I end up bullshitting them as much as possible and getting a B so I can focus on the courses I care about
I hear where you're coming from on this (and have been in similar shoes), but I suppose there is more nuance to it, mostly because professors and departments play such an important role in the experience.
The argument of liberal arts electives lending themselves to a richer education experience is a well-intentioned one, and does reap benefits if executed well by the professor, the department, TA's and so on. If not, well, it is just like you mentioned, one is inclined to BS their way out of a class to focus on things more important to them.
Speaking from my anecdotal experience, I have had to take three electives as part of my undergrad: microeconomics, macroeconomics, and a philosophy class on the philosophy of the mind. I have thoroughly enjoyed macro-econ and philosophy simply because the professors put in an incredible amount of work to inspire me to work hard and care about the subject. Micro-econ, on the other hand, was one giant mess and I did not show up to more than 3 lectures over the course of the semester.
I believe in the earnest that students stand to gain so much if some university departments and professors gave a crap about the experience that they are offering.
What you want exists: it's called a vocational school -- and no, as of now, many don't teach higher level academic subjects to the exclusion of all others, but they do provide a focused training for a specific line of work and nothing else. A Code bootcamp, for example.
Universities have their historical origins in educating the children of elites in the ways of the world: which by definition is a varied education consisting of many different subjects. I can only guess at the reasons why one can't commonly attend a Computer Science University in the U.S; but there are a handful of institutions in the world that are more focused (The Max Planck Institutes in Germany come to mind)
You chose to go to this University/College though. For whatever reason, you chose to attend studies there, knowing this was how the institution operated.
If you went not knowing how the institution operated, well, that's completely your issue.
You could have chose to seek your studies at any institution that caters to the ideals you've stated in your post. Yet you didn't, and you have the audacity to complain, about how the place you chose to attend operates, while they fully and publicly disclose how they operate
He was told prior to entry that the history courses round out his education. At the time, he accepted that explanation (or did not really care). After experiencing it firsthand, he no longer accepts that explanation.
PG takes a lot of peoples' claims for granted when they are probably exaggerations.
Gates:
>I didn't take a single day off in my 20s.
Most likely this is only technically true because its almost certain he took multiple days off in his 20s. We'd have to look at what Bill means here by working every single day. If he counts spending at least a couple minutes on something work related every day its far more believable than him spending approximately 3650 consecutive days working 8-12 hours or more.
Wodehouse:
>with each new book of mine I have, as I say, the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature. A good thing, really, I suppose. Keeps one up on one's toes and makes one rewrite every sentence ten times. Or in many cases twenty times.
This claim is even more unbelievable. I'd bet the average sentence he wrote wasn't rewritten at all, let alone 10-20 times. I think what he actually means is that sometimes he would have to re-write a sentence 10-20 times.
Very few people regret on their deathbed that they simply did not work hard enough. What they typically regret is not trying things and not spending time with family. Yes, trying things could mean work very hard, like starting a startup but it also often means not backpacking in Europe, not sailing around the world, not opening their own bakery, etc.
One meta comment I would like to make is that taking the advice of people looking backwards can be terribly misleading as people re-encode memories as they recall them, often to highlight the positives and to move goal posts towards what actually happened.
Someone who says "I'm so happy I moved to <place> in my 20s because <life event> happened" fails to highlight 2 things. 1) What were they aiming at and did they accomplish _that_ and 2) what were the multitude of true opportunities they turned down and would they actually be materially happier had those happened. Not would their current self prefer it, but if we could some how numerically rate the happiness of folks who go through alternate universes...
The good news is that there's a good chance you'll look back on your life events with mostly good feelings, regardless of what happens, because you'll heal and move on from the bad parts ...
I just started reading Fooled by Randomness and Taleb makes this exact point. People just make up a story afterwards about why they were successful but it’s completely meaningless fiction and Cherry picking
There are a lot of very good notes in these comments about our relationship with "work" and excellence. I currently operate from the perspective of creating something I'm proud of for myself, and I'm relearning the joy of leisure. My own life isn't defined by my greatness, my productivity, or my output. I've learned to realize that the "alarm-bells" that clattered in my head were more of an anxious, awful self-perception that my value was tied to my output.
A few weeks ago, I found a bit of recent scientific learning that gave me a renewed context around passion and pursuit. It turns out that research is showing that bodies and brains don't typically begin to degrade in their capacity for training muscle-memory skills until our sixties. For someone like me, who is anxiously accounting for how to try a lot of different pursuits (music, illustration, and especially relevant here, a constantly tenuous relationship with computers) this is a comfort. I was so motivated by a rush to get my foundations down by the time I was thirty, because the capitalist culture I'm steeped in says that's my deadline.
I had it ingrained that my teenage or twenty-something years were the time to plant the seeds, and it's all downhill after that. Besides the wisdom shared on the contrary (both in these comments and elsewhere), dipping this wisdom in research I didn't know about before empowered me further.
I appreciate that Paul adds a bit about how our focus doesn't often become clear until we're older, that our childhoods tend to distill topics in ways that can initially bland them to our taste. Nevertheless, I want to stress that you've got a lot more time to do something to your best ability. Even as you age beyond sixty or seventy, I've seen so many folks brush off the bit of extra physical or mental challenge that they face, and do great things anyway.
Your twenties won't make or break you. You have so much more time.
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.
> There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort.
There is one essential factor that if someone does not have, everything else mentioned here does not matter: luck or provision (scientifically speaking, luck does not exist). Every entrepreneur knows that no matter how hard they work, at the end of the day if they are not in the right place, at the right time, with the right people, success is not guaranteed.
This view is biased towards certain kinds of people. Yes, these three ingredients might increase your success chances, especially in the US (being born is the US is luck). This is why so many 3rd world country people want to emigrate, for better opportunities. Even with this premise, you probably know of someone who worked incredibly hard only to be screwed by their boss, or the privileged kid who got a foot in the door at an Ivy League or a job.
People in Silicon Valley and tech live in a bubble - the danger of this is to attribute your success to hard work, when in fact everything was given (yes, even your opportunity to work hard or ability to be self-motivated was provided). Examples of SV's bias: "Everyone should learn how to code" (not everyone has a coder's mindset). "Universal Basic Income" (pandemic checks, people become lazy)
With this said, it is still our responsibility to work hard at everything we do.
> It comes partly from popular culture, where it seems to run very deep, and partly from the fact that the outliers are so rare.
As an outlier, you are the lucky few, don't forget that.
Would it have soothed you if he began the article with: “Though the advice in this article is necessary, it alone is not sufficient to achieve success. Luck also plays a large factor. You need both. You will also need to obtain financial leverage. Hard work at McDonald’s is not the type that this article addresses.”? It seems unnecessary to me, particularly because he’s already written articles on these subjects. [1] [2]
Also, as another person that doesn’t believe in free will, I find it interesting that you thought it necessary to critique the way PG handled this subject matter, as if he had any choice.
I'm not qualified to give advice to someone like PG. But millionaires and billionaires need to get some perspective and get out of their bubble before spouting nonsense advice to common people. For most normal people, it is about surviving and finding a profession that can pay the bills. At least acknowledging your role and place in society before focussing on some rarefied advice will be more useful (not to mention may also generate more clicks).
So as a challenge to PG: if you believe in yourself so strongly, prove it. Just freeze your billions and mansions for 6 months. Downgrade your life to live like a normal person. Get some perspective and write again. You'll probably become even more successful in the process (not that you care for it).
> [E]ven in college a lot of the work is pointless; there are entire departments that are pointless.
I find it interesting PG thinks that dismissing entire branches of science without specifying which ones nor justifying why, is a) a good take or b) makes his essay better.
What ability is required at a factory, you know, these useless workers producing means of subsistence, like food, homes, equipment? I think these workers make awesome things, well, because I need food, etc for living. It is only thanks to them you able to do what you want - what you call work, while they work 12 hours a day for very little. There is huge difference between their work and what you do.
With all respect, but I will recommend you changing the subject to something else, but not "hard work". May be "making profit hardcore XXX.".
One thing I find important relates to other people. Some say that success comes from hard work, or that the right focus is essential to success. But that's a false dichotomy.
In truth, there are many people out there who work incredibly hard, and some of them are even good, and some of those have the right focus.
Hard work is the precondition. Even if your focus is right and you're clever, you are always competing with people who also have that but put in many hours on top.
It's a tower, and if you want to rise, you need to tackle all the layers.
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.
"hard" is a weasel word, it means nothing concrete, it's not quantifiable, and even as a quality it's unclear, what is the emotional feeling attached to it?
"work" has two meanings:
1. activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result
2. a task or tasks to be undertaken; something a person or thing has to do
So what are we even talking about when we say "hard work"?
If you take the first definition, adding the "hard" qualifier makes no difference, because what makes an activity "hard" is that it requires mental and/or physical effort to accomplish. So in that sense, work is inherently effortful, and thus "hard". Maybe what people mean when they say "hard work" is sustained effort exertion?
If you take the second it makes more sense, but then it would imply that "hard work" is about the choice of task you undertake. If you choose to do harder tasks, you'd be "hard working". The issue here though is that it's not clear what makes a task "hard". I think the risk of failure is possibly the best way to qualify it here. If you're likely to fail the task, it is thus "hard" to you. But is that really what people mean when they evangelize "hard work"? To always work on tasks you are likely to fail at?
Since PG's example was how Bill Gates took no vacation in 10 years, I'll conclude that he's trying to suggests that "hard work" means have a "high rate of work per week".
So he seem to imply "hard work" is when most of your week is spent exerting mental or physical effort towards a result or purpose.
And that's where I hate the framing of "hard work", it's just "work", adding "hard" is just a pretentious qualifier.
P.S.: I really doubt Bill Gates success is attributable to not taking 15 days of time off per year for 10 years. That is not a lot of time, maybe if he worked 80 hours week, but as research shows, real physical and mental effort is unsustainable beyond some level, and rest is needed.
> I had to learn what real work was before I could wholeheartedly desire to do it. That took a while, because even in college a lot of the work is pointless; there are entire departments that are pointless.
The arrogance! This is one of my pet peeves at work: When someone looks at another person's work and judges its value or difficulty. "That's easy." "That's pointless."
Ugh.
Everyone else's job looks easy and/or pointless until you're the one doing it. Then it's important and challenging (hopefully).
Most people who feel their own work is pointless simply don't understand how their role fits into the bigger picture. I assure you, the profit motive is very good at weeding out truly unnecessary costs. It may lag, sometimes. But if there's a dollar being spent that doesn't need to be spent, someone is going to eventually find out and eliminate the expense.
I think this mentality comes from a deep need to feel superior to others. So when we can't understand or appreciate someone's job, it feels powerful to declare their work easy or pointless.
But that's just ignorance, arrogance, and, frankly, bullying by other means: I'll make myself feel bigger by making you feel small, and I'll do it in front of all of my friends so they can affirm how big and tough and awesome I am.
The author is right. Gender studies, for example, is a pointless degree. You certainly have a point about not being quick to judge, or overly dismissive, but there are certain things in life that are genuinely pointless, even in education.
Anthropologic, literature, and historical research endeavors, even -- and in all likelihood especially -- when they intersect, can have a lot of value in many fields of the humanities, and beyond. They can inform our societal, political and economic prospects, and shine a light on what we usually don't even acknowledge.
It's not because it doesn't impact your field/industry, isn't marketable and profitable, or because your politics don't comingle with them, that such studies are pointless or useless.
Handwaving humanities on the premise that they are humanities is just another very stereotypical show of STEM arrogance.
I don't think that's fair at all. We are on Hacker News, the whole point of this website is intellectual curiosity. People here understand the value of what doesn't impact their field/industry, isn't marketable and profitable. Look at how much open source code is produced just for the sake of it, because people believe it's the right thing. Look at how much cool projects with detailed instructions on how to do them yourself are shared. Dismissing everyone here as "STEM arrogance" means that you missed all of that.
You talk about "STEM arrogance", but maybe you should take some time to analyze where you feelings comes from, and if you're not suffering from a huge bias against these fields yourself. If the defenders of social sciences aren't even able to apply their teachings to themselves, people have the right to be skeptic about the value of their fields.
I don't like the "STEM arrogance" bit (I wouldn't go so far as to say there is anything inherently arrogant about those in STEM), but I also don't think you can ever fairly judge the value of someone else's field.
You don't know why they went into the field -- I promise it's because they saw more value in it for themselves than other fields.
You don't why the school offers such programs, but I promise they wouldn't offer it if they didn't think there was some demand for it. (Programs that don't get students to enrol stop existing pretty quickly.)
So while I don't believe in "STEM arrogance" or "HN arrogance" (I'm here because I believe this is one of the least arrogant and most open-minded online communities I've ever encountered), I do believe it's arrogant to proclaim yourself the authority on whether someone else's field has value. Just because you don't see the value doesn't mean it's not there. It might even be more valuable than your own.
By the way, not sure if this was intentional on your part, but "maybe you should take some time to analyze where your feelings come from" is very much an idea that came from the humanities. So there's a certain amount of irony in your comments.
I'm not proclaiming that I'm an authority on whatever field has value. We're actually saying pretty much the same thing: don't judge other people too quickly. I replied to someone that talked about "STEM arrogance" and implied that we can't understand that things can have a value without being marketable or profitable. This idea is wrong, and the action of the STEM field prove it.
> By the way, not sure if this was intentional on your part, but "maybe you should take some time to analyze where your feelings come from" is very much an idea that came from the humanities. So there's a certain amount of irony in your comments.
There's no irony except the one I was highlighting: someone is saying that humanities are important and have lots of value, while not applying that really fundamental concept.
The level of disrespect towards the social sciences in HN is just baffling to me.
Sometimes people study stuff for intellectual fulfillment. I haven't studied gender studies, but according to HN, if I were to study sociology I'd be an ass with a pointless degree.
I think people are conflating intrinsic value with extrinsic value.
PG’s point is that those degrees have no extrinsic value, even if they provide lots of time to think, learn, and gain enjoyment. That can certainly be valuable, but it isn’t necessary or helpful in achieving success.
Nothing wrong with that, and his choice of wording wasn’t ideal, but that was my takeaway.
It depends on how you're measuring value I suppose. Research for research's sake is rarely pointless, contributing to the sum of human knowledge is a worthy endeavour if you're okay with being in academia forever which many people are. Society's relationship with gender is a field worthy of study in my opinion, regardless of the political radicalism that apparently originates in that field.
I'd argue that the social sciences need more people involved in them, not less. For example, the way behavioural psychology has been weaponised during the pandemic by political actors (particularly the British government) has been very unethical in my opinion but as the social sciences are often seen by the general public as a bit woolly there's not been an awful lot of publicised expert criticism in the same way, say, a government denying genetics in favour of LaMarckism would put angry biologists directly into every newspaper.
Why would a Gender Studies degree be pointless? Given the current landscape around gender and such, having more educated people in that area seems like a very good thing.
Or maybe the people that want to justify their places are the ones creating that landscape in the first place? I work in tech, and really like tech and think it's important, but I know that I'm really biased because that's what feeds me.
You're going to get downvoted into oblivion I suspect, which may have been your intent?
Is History a _useful_ degree? Is Economics? Is Politics? Psychology or Sociology?
I actually don't want to make those determinations. I don't think I'm qualified. I have a rough view that highly specific degrees are worse overall than general ones. Eg Actuarial Mathematics vs Mathematics. Marine Biology vs Biology.
But those are personal dinner table views, and I'm not certain I'm right! I certainly don't want to define policy on it, and I'm not sure I know of anyone I think is qualified.
Curious to hear your opinion on why gender studies is a pointless degree? Other than you thinking it's "pointless", what is it about a gender studies degree that is pointless?
> Gender studies, for example, is a pointless degree.
I would say that, like most interdisciplinary and many other degrees, its not particularly useful as a vocational credential outside academia.
OTOH, gender studies as a component of or elective within other degree programs that are more vocationally useful outside of academia is useful, and you don't have that without gender studies professors who you don’t have without people focussing on gender studies.
I don't agree with the premise that gender studies is pointless (and if I had to guess, you selected that one for the sake of controversy?).
That aside, let's say that a degree is "pointless" if it doesn't lead to good job prospects. By that definition, there's an awful lot of fields of study that are "pointless".
For example, I love philosophy. It was my favourite topic in school. But the only job that a philosophy degree seems to make available is that of teaching philosophy.
I think what we're seeing now is the market at work. There was, for a long time, a push to simply get a post-secondary education. It didn't matter which field. Just get a degree! Now we have a couple generations of heavily indebted students in fields that did not improve their job prospects, and they're telling the next generation: don't do it.
So I think we're going to keep seeing financial pressure on these fields until they shrivel up and go away. Capitalism at work, for better or worse.
But that's not the same as thinking these fields were pointless. I see tremendous social value in them. Having entire generations raised with a healthier and more accurate understanding of race, gender, class struggle, etc., is good for society. It's just not good at creating jobs.
So I guess my point (no pun intended) is that "pointless" is in the eye of the beholder. No one sets about wasting money pointlessly, and the things that you see no value in may be of great value to many others. You're not the arbitrator of what has value. Nor am I. But the market does a pretty damn good job.
Just because you think something is pointless doesn't make it so.
It would be much more truthful to say that everything in life is genuinely pointless than what you've said - and I'm saying this as a lifelong multidisciplined engineer.
Perhaps you meant to say useless instead of pointless? Yes, I would agree, that the overwhelming vast majority, if not all of gender studies degrees are useless in the world/societies we live in. But pointless? No.
That would actually explains non-profit-seeking organizations that degenerate and focus just on surviving and getting bigger and bigger. The unnecessary costs are the original intent, the necessary costs are feeding the bureaucratic machine.
In my experience, nonprofits do accrue a bit of needless fat that is often justified by their compassionate mission. BUT, even then, only by so much. They still need to accrue enough funds to pursue their mission.
Every organization has to be cost-aware. It catches up to you eventually.
For context, in my home town of Sudbury, Ontario, our leading university (Laurentian U) kept growing and investing in new things. There's lots of debate around the merits of what they were spending on. But it caught up to them in the form of bankruptcy.
One of the few things I like about capitalism (there aren't many, but that's just me) is that it gives a laser-clear focus. Just because an organization is a non-profit doesn't change that. At some point, you either bring in more revenue than you spend, or you fail.
Governments that continuously overspend eventually have their debts catch up to them, too. (See: Every empire in history.)
As others have already pointed out this will go down in history as the "Let them eat cake" of our times. The disconnect with the real life of billions of people is astonishing.
This article is hot garbage and so is much else Paul writes. The comments were 10x better than the crap written in this article like seriously? You should write a motivation book too.
Any discussion about hard work should have a mention of "in praise of idleness" [0].
In addition to that, let me tell you this.
The famous writer Andrea Camilleri [1] (author of Inspector Montalbano, an Italian TV series which became an international success [2]), in an interview years ago recalled when as a kid, spending Summers in his native Sicily would entail things like spitting on a coin and waiting for hours until a fly would get stuck in the saliva - essentially, being idle.
And this idleness, in his view, had a tremendous value.
Praise hard work, sure. But don't think that you can escape the big questions about life, or that hard work is the only way to achieve greatness.
This is some next level clickbait and we all fell for it. With „hard work“ he is touching on somthing we all can relate to. So we read the thing.
What he is trying to get across is: a) i know hard work, that is why i „made“ it. b) it takes hard work to make great things c) this proves i made great things.
This is not a philisophical reflection. It is marketing BS. I am not a hater. Just trying to give name to the elephant in the room.
The other thing that I found interesting was this:
"What can one do in the face of such uncertainty? One solution is to hedge your bets, which in this case means to follow the obviously promising paths instead of your own private obsessions. But as with any hedge, you're decreasing reward when you decrease risk. If you forgo working on what you like in order to follow some more conventionally ambitious path, you might miss something wonderful that you'd otherwise have discovered. That too must happen all the time, perhaps even more often than the genius whose bets all fail."
I'm not sure the things we view as safe, such as, medical/law/grad school/mba are really hedges.
You could go to medical school as a safe path but be interested in tech. I thought about this but the medical gate keepers didn't value the tech when I was applying ... Today we see ambitious medicine/tech convergences which arguably present a path there.
I think there is a bigger issue is that we don't know what the jobs of the future will be. But we do know they will be organized around disciplines but not exactly what they are. They will most likely have a technology component because tech is what enables growth.
> And since you can't really change how much natural talent you have, in practice doing great work, insofar as you can, reduces to working very hard.
Only a few people will have the right body type to be great at any given sport, but a lot will have the right body type to be great at at least one sport. E.g. if you don't have the right body type for basketball, you might have the perfect body type for ski jumping or whatever.
> Knowing what you want to work on doesn't mean you'll be able to. Most people have to spend a lot of their time working on things they don't want to, especially early on. But if you know what you want to do, you at least know what direction to nudge your life in.
This is the hardest part for me. The stuff I dream about, my deepest “deep interest,” I don’t think I could make a meaningful dent in without substantial capital. And I didn’t come from a background with any kind of money. In my early twenties I spent years, largely wasted, chasing these dreams with the idea that I could find a less capital-intensive path or somehow get someone to invest in me. Eventually I realized it just wasn’t going to happen, and I needed to find an alternate interest that could feed me and my family.
At this point I see it as, if my alternate career pays off then perhaps I can circle back to my dreams in (hopefully early) “retirement,” when I have enough resources that I could live for a long time without income - or, better, enough capital to invest directly, but that seems unlikely.
Until then, I just do my best to enjoy the challenges of my alternate career path.
This is the first essay by PG which I find somehow misleading.
It took me a couple of years after quitting my frenetic goal-driven life to be able to sit back and enjoy. I was the kind of person that have a task on Trello to shave and shower.
If you feel that doing nothing is wasting time, I feel there is a good chance you need to look deeper within yourself and see what your REAL drive is. Why you do what you do? Why you can't sit in peace? Why do you have FOMO? Why looking at the TED talk by 10-year-old-genious millionare makes you feel miserable? You try to compensate by keep moving, never stopping, and sedate your anxiety and fear with a ... job. Something you can be very good at, something that can be meaningful, yet you are in autopilot.
If you can't turn it off because you feel discomfort, well, maybe you are missing out on your inner voice. You can go by probably for decades ignoring it, and actually use ""FOCUS"" as mean to procrastinate/getting distracted from thinking about your human condition.
I think "natural talent" is sort of a false concept. After time, hard work and practice often turn into talent. When you train hard at something and improve your skills enough, an outside observer will label you as talented. The better your skills, the more talented. You are the only one that knows you didn't start with those skills.
I wrestled competitively for 20 years. By the end of my career, people would talk about how naturally talented I was. But I knew that everything they were talking about came about through two decades of practice. People talked about how fast I was. But I spent years doing plyometrics. I was slow before that. People talked about how strong I was; I was doing pushups and pull ups every day with my dad starting at 8 years old. People just saw the results of 20 years of practice, and didn't see where I started out, so they called it talent.
I think to be extremely successful at something, you don't need talent. You can build talent in yourself. There is something to be said about people who are naturally very bad at something. Those people might never appear talented at something they are naturally very bad at. But then again, given enough practice over time, they might.
If you look at anyone who is a true master of a skill, their mastery lies not in their natural talent, but through their years of practice, their drive and their passion for what they are doing. Talent plays a small role over time. It mostly plays a role in the beginning.
For something like sprinting or weight lifting, I will give that natural ability is important. There are only so many people that can be as fast as Usain Bolt. But for sports that are more skills based, like martial arts, or other activities that are skills based, like coding, talent only takes you so far. After a certain point, talent becomes insignificant compared to all of your hard work.
The article isn't wrong or incorrect in itself, but since the definition of "doing great things" once again centers on extreme Bill-Gates-level success, I take issue with two points:
In these extreme examples (Gates, Bezos, Musk, etc) the environment is the true differentiator to go from success to extreme success. Not talent, not working hard. Doing the right thing at the right time in the right environment creates the snowball effect. It still requires hard work, but hard work is not rare or unique. Bezos is about a 100.000 times richer than a "plain" successful millionaire, so surely hard work is not the game changer here.
Success requires hard work, extreme success requires luck or foresight. In the case of Gates clearly luck, as he pretty much missed every single tech trend in the decades to come. He has zero foresight, but I'm sure he worked hard in his most energetic years, like pretty much everybody.
I protest against leaving out the luck factor as these people and their admirers truly believe they are some god-like character, a 1000 times smarter than everybody else.
There has been an entire industry trying to replicate the success of Jobs, for example. As if you can replicate that. You can't replicate any of these outcomes as they are time-bound. You can do exactly what Jobs did and the outcome would be shit, no matter your talent or how hard you work.
The second part of my protest is completely leaving out the enablers of your success: workers. 99.9999% of your wealth in the case of extreme success is delivered by them, not you. Not even mentioning that is classic hero admiration. And this doesn't even go into how often the relation is highly exploitative. We know the issue with Amazon workers, as well as the true reason of Microsoft's success: the merciless elimination of competitors in criminal ways.
I started to work full time during the summers at 15 in IT - doing easy tasks like imaging laptops and setting up desktops for teachers my local school district. My friends would spend their time with video games, hanging out, etc. At the end of the summer, I asked if I could work part time after school for the district so that I don't have gaps on my resume. When I got out of high school, I technically already had several years of experience and I just started to apply for jobs instead of going to college. I hit over a decade of "professional" experience by the time I was 25.
Do I regret working hard during those early years? Definitely not. It shaped me to be what I am today. I believe you should live your life that way you want to live it. You can't achieve great things by doing mediocre amount of work. Figure out where you are content with life and live it without regret of "what could have been".
Is anyone else surprised there isn't more discussion of focus? I know many people (myself included) who work hard but on too many things simultaneously and the results aren't as good as folks who seem to just keep plodding along on one thing. Two of my friends who are extremely successful seem less interested in the field they are in, and while intelligent not outrageously so, and don't work super hard. But they just keep at one thing without distraction. Over 10-15 years it's added up. And it's not an easy thing to do. Sticking at one thing 50 hours a week for 10 years is intolerably boring for many people.
Sometimes I have an ability to hyper-focus on some task and make it in one or two days rather than weeks, but after that I feel so exhausted mentally, that I cannot do anything sensible for a week or two. What I am getting at, is that often it doesn't matter.
Paul Graham makes a few points that show why medical training needs reform. There's a disconnect between hard work and income in medicine:
i. You work hard throughout residency, yet your salary is fixed. The hardest-working neurosurgery resident gets the same check as the coasting primary care trainee.
ii. Trainees are praised for their academic knowledge and their academic output, yet the highest-earning physicians are in private practice.
iii. Physician jobs in desirable areas are scarce, and they pay the least. Hard-work improves your chances of getting a job in a competitive market, but at a lower salary.
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.
There's different things to consider I think than just finding something that you can work as hard as possible on. I think Tom Blomfield's story is worth hearing about, it sounds like he found being CEO really anxiety inducing even if clearly he was very successful at it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP2_QOCrVO4&ab_channel=TheDi...
> The one precisely dateable landmark I have is when I stopped watching TV, at age 13.
It frustrates me when people brag about this like it's a universally good thing. Imagine 100 years ago someone bragging that they stopped wasting time reading books.
It's especially frustrating to see PG do it given that he's an artist (or at least used to be), basically putting down another art form.
TV has good and bad things. TV can convey information. TV can be an art form, consumed passively like a painting. And TV can just be a mental escape, like reading a novel.
TV is not good or bad, it's how you spend your time watching it that matters.
It frustrates me when people bring out the "it depends" card and because then you can't condemn anything. I condemn TV, as it is a waste of time for most people. More importantly, it is a waste of headspace and mental energy. Obviously this doesn't apply if your work is to be a filmmaker. But PG addresses this point well: if that is not your deep interest, then it's a waste of time. Most people don't watch TV out of deep interest and high motivation, except perhaps people like Christopher Nolan.
TV is a particularly harmful form of entertainment. There are plenty of studies on the negative correlation between hours of TV watched per week and attention span, short-term memory, and general intelligence. The real cost of TV watching is not the number of hours watched, it's the effect on the other hours of your waking life. For me, the effect is noticeable -- when I cut out TV from my life, the improved mental clarity is quite palpable.
So I've switched to other activities for fun, which may not be as physically healthy, but have less mental cost. Smoking a cigar, a light tipple, and reading books while listening to music in a park don't take that toll on my mental acuity.
TV sucks, I don't think anybody should watch it when a better alternative is available. Radio too.
There might be good things shown on it occasionally, but there are better ways to get at them nowadays. Ways that don't require you to synchronize your watching with availability.
Main appeal I see in TV/radio is the constant live-ish stream of content, and more access to hard-to-license content than competing livestreams.
These days I think watching TV means includes streaming and other types of on-demand services. I watch TV whenever I can and it's never synchronized with a broadcaster's schedule, except for sports.
This is because the word "TV" is essentially useless. It means different things to so many different people, and often "TV" is the word people use when they want to be critical of entertainment.
I can't remember the last time I watched a TV show through a cable provider. But I can tell you the last time I watched a YouTube series.
The attitude of feeling guilty when you're not working can be useful to motivate yourself, but I think it s also something to be careful of.
Indeed, sometimes this time of pressure can grow so pervasive it becomes impossible for you to relax, and humans aren't endlessly working robots: we need to also have time where we calm down, which PG explained.
However, he didn't warn of developing too much of a work ethic to the point relaxation itself is something you don't enjoy.
> Some of the best work is done by people who find an easy way to do something hard.
This is a pretty good insight. Every time I’ve been somewhat successful it’s been because I discovered a different approach which made the problem approachable.
When I tried to understand math by rote memorization it was boring. When I understood it as a tool to make predictions about systems, it seemed much more useful. Learning the equations became a side effect of another thing I was trying to do.
While going through the comments on this thread, I remembered a chapter in language textbook while I was in school, the name of the chapter was 'Charchasatrat hawaraleli mhatari'. It was about people discussing a well known parable. This chapter portrayed how people discussed everything except the message of the parable.
Similarly, I feel majority of the comments in this thread talking everything except message PG trying to convey.
In my opinion, this article could be much better if it accounted for few additional perspectives.
1. There are people in this world who do better with consistency over volume. Dedicate 1 hour every day on your subject of interest. You are bound to get really good at it in few years. The challenging part is “1 hour every day.”
2. Work-centric life shouldn’t be celebrated to this extent. It just doesn’t do good at the end.
Maybe PG should include some draft reviewers who are hard working but not rich. Seems like an echo chamber to include the reviewers he does. Unbelievable.
It's one thing to learn how to work hard on tasks you love to do.
It's quite another to learn how to work hard on tasks you hate to do (but still need to be done). I suspect a lot of people that "work hard" programming would not be able to work hard doing manual labor (i.e. digging sprinkler trenches or painting a fence in the hot sun) and would quickly rationalize hiring someone else to do it for them.
Since many comments mentions that hard-work alone doesn't matter.
According to Daniel Kahneman, mere hard-work doesn't click unless we have access to expert feedback in the domain we work. He used to compare hard working f1-formula-driver without any input from past drivers vs driver with input from expert.
Hard work without mentor won't click. Environment and people around us also matter as much as the hard-work we do.
I'm a bit wary of this essay even though I'm a fan of PG.
With neoliberal rhetoric like this:
"Like most little kids, I enjoyed the feeling of achievement when I learned or did something new. As I grew older, this morphed into a feeling of disgust when I wasn't achieving anything."
I wonder if we're not forgetting to just chill. Can he just chill?
For people with my upbringing its even harder, because hard work often does not pay rewards, so you have to intentionally reject the feedback loop that nature and reality is throwing in your face.
There is a whole class of incredibly hard working people that never receive, are actively denied reward or are effectively punished for their hard work.
Hard work without dopamine reinforcement takes extreme mental toughness.
When I was younger, for some odd reason I thought it was important to convince people that hard work was important. But today, the more people I see commenting that "hard work" is essentially a scam -- or something to that effect -- the happier I become. It just means that there is less competition. Feel free to do your own thing, relax, skate along and enjoy life.
This is the trait that I have found in successful people around me:
> The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working without anyone telling you to.
> 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.
Have an anxiety disorder and a fear of failure - you'll always be worried that by not working, you are going to fall behind or something bad is going to happen.
I say this partly tongue-in-cheek, but I don't think it's altogether incorrect. Having a compulsion to work to the level of 'alarm bells' going off doesn't sound like fun to me.
Professional athletes often train 30 hours a week. They cycle between easy and hard training days.
If they would workout hard every day their performance would stall or even plummet.Nutrition and sleep is also very important for them . I don't understand why the lessons from pro sports are not taken into account also for work. In both cases it is about performance after all.
To me this article describes how to get on target.
Once on target, I do think you go balls to the wall as long as it's sustainable while getting good results.
On a side note, I really dislike this style of writing where it tries to be psuedo technical and even uses psuedo technical terms. I realize this isn't necessarily Paul's shortcoming, but rather my own subjective preferences.
I understand the drive to share here, as nothing fees better than hard work, but it’s a very intimidating read and feels quite navel gazey.
In my experience, there is no such thing as hard work. There’s a universal river of truth that I can tap into in flow state, and if something is blocking me from getting there, I might as well watch a show and see if the river is open later.
That answer is different for everyone. Maybe the article should be “How to determine whether you should work harder”, but at the end of the day I’m not sure anyone can be convinced by an article.
If you don’t have any anxieties based in the lack of having attained something specific, then you probably won’t (and maybe shouldn’t) work hard at all.
Think of how astonishingly amazing it is to be a sentient being in a universe of 100's of billions of galaxies! What could anyone ever do to come close to justifying such a privilege? Sure, work hard if you like but don't forget what an astounding trip existence is.
Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water.
Admittedly I'm a puzzled by the quality-level of these posts.
A lot of stuff, like the lack of formatting and HTTPS, give off an antique feel, almost like a signal that they're not meant to be taken seriously. Ditto for the over-the-top arrogant tone and relatively sparse content.
I might be off-base on this, but I sometimes wonder if these articles aren't like a honey-pot for non-serious YCombinator applicants. Like maybe people who resonate with these articles are flagged as non-serious applicants, to better focus the pool? Maybe we're all looking a little silly for commenting here at all, rather than moving on with our days and being more productive?
All the things you noted aren’t substantive arguments against the essay, in my view.
The casual assertions, the unsupported and contentious theme, and the complete omission of anything approaching a consideration of alternatives are common themes in PG’s essays. And those are what make them almost uniformly worthless, in my opinion.
The reason I'd advocate in more public settings is that things ought to be secure-by-default, and that adopting security only upon realizing its necessity is a hazard-prone policy that constantly backfires.
But for a specific example of something that could go wrong: someone could inject malicious content into a non-secure page. The original content might be plain-text, but a man-in-the-middle can still inject whatever they like regardless.
As a common example of a simple attack: an attacker could man-in-the-middle people who connect to a nearby wireless network. Notes:
1. There're a bunch of ways that an attacker could get people to connect to their network. Examples: spoofing a legitimate network; setting up a password-less network; putting up a poster falsely advertising the SSID/pass to a network that falsely purports itself to be official; they're an actual employee of the establishment and just compromise the legitimate network; they're a remote-hacker who's exploited a vulnerability in the router.
2. The attacker could do lots of random stuff. Examples: they could inject malicious code; they could inject misinformation to facilitate scamming someone; they could insert ads; steal CPU-time/electricity for crypto-mining; they could just put gross porno on everyone's phone in a restaurant as a troll. Or something else. Or multiple things.
3. The original site being just plain-text doesn't really matter; the attacker can replace the entire thing without even contacting the real website. Or they can get the real website, then add other stuff to it.
The simple rule-of-thumb for website-operators is to just keep everything secure(-ish, if we're being realistic).
>One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you'll have to work very hard.
Says the guy who made it big in his 32th year by selling a company he had just founded 2 years before.
An aspiring message to single mothers working two jobs and barely making rent and all other kind of working stiff working their arse off to keep the lights on, the buildings clean, the power running, the cables installed, the food served, the minerals for the PCs mined, and so on, in the backbone of the "digital" economy...
>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.
Well, that's because he never "worked" the way 99.9999% of the people he is lecturing do: he did what he wanted to do, running his own company, bossing other people below him, and making billions whole at it.
If Bill Gates tried working as an employee on someone else's business, with BS bosses and middle managers running you around, and not making anything to write home about, we'd see how fast he would have wanted a day off...
(Not that there's any reliable way to cross-check whether he really "never had a day off" in his 20s, or what his work day actually amounted to)...
or, you know, work hard when it's work time and take a life balance. your company isn't going to come to raise your children (if you have them) when you die, nor are they going to live a happy life for you.
we have to stop thinking exploiting ourselves for someone else's gain makes us a better person.
i'm not saying the author says the opposite, but i think in any discussion of hard work we need to bring up balance. a good part of Bill Gates success was the money infusion from his friends and a wildly asymmetrical deal with IBM and the writer of DOS on the other side.
if we don't take a more nuanced approach we are (intentionally or not) perpetuating the myth of sacrificing your life for your company. i did that with my 20s and a chunk of my 30s. would not recommend. live your life, you only get one trip through and sometimes the body doesn't hold up well enough to keep enjoying all the things you love.
To me, it seems that if we've put ourselves in a society that requires hard work, we've failed somewhere along the way, when do you run a business and value making things harder for customers? So if we've made societal success hard, we've kind of failed as a society in my opinion.
“Societal success” in this sense is relative to others’ performance, and as such will always be “hard”, because the person aiming for this success is by definition aiming to be a statistical outlier.
> “Societal success” in this sense is relative to others’ performance
That's only true because we failed to offer something better. Societal success should mean: "economic security and independence, and the pursuit of happiness", where happiness is defined as one's wellbeing. And that shouldn't require hard work.
If it was the case, than people could choose to work as hard or as easy as they want to achieve anything grandiose and ambitious, but they wouldn't have too, they'd be free to choose too or not.
At least it is my opinion that a society should try to eliminate the need for physical and mental exertion from its citizens, while providing them with their needs met, and thus setting them free to do as they please. What they please to do could be to work on extra hard problems, or to put hard work 24/7 on some goal, even if it's a stupid one, like a world record at cherry pit spitting.
The way it is now, "societal success" comes from being an outlier in being able to have this freedom to choose to continue to work hard or not. People basically aspire to achieve societal success by performing better then others financially and getting themselves into a position of inequality where they hold the big end of the stick. And the messaging is that to achieve this privileged position, you need to put in "hard work". And I feel this is the wrong outcome of society.
It all boils down to motivation and what you want out of life. Compound interest is great but health and youth never return, and the opportunities of today are not always here tomorrow.
(That said, I have been at it since 4:30AM today and working on a single venture for six years in extreme adversity. Anything else would be boring!)
Billionaires absolutely love talking about zero work life balance. Makes it seem like having rich parents, stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars of computing time, committing federal crimes, abusing patent law, and blatantly violating antitrust weren't the important parts.
Because they only want you to do the overwork part.
Really happy to read that most readers are critical about this article. This article is extremely shortsighted! Kids don’t fall for this trap. Life is about people and relationships.
p.s. Steve Jobs is already forgotten. Bill Gates will be joining that list too. Now that we know his dirty secrets, fastet than expected.
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.
A common tension we experience with PG's recent essays is that they make you wonder if you fit into his world (the way that Patrick Collison, Kyle Vogt, Sam Altman and other well-known founders do). Those stories usually contain elements of above-natural raw talent combined with insane amounts of hard work and the foresight to channel all that talent and effort into development of highly valuable skills. There are a good amount of people like that out there, and his writing deeply resonates with them. At the same time, there are many more people out there who quickly discover that their lives have very few overlaps with PG's narrative.
For example, perhaps they started a startup and got burned (contrary to PG's narrative). Or they never cared for any skills that one traditionally needs to build a digital product (primarily programming, design, and the intercept between the two in form of a well-rounded PM). Or worse yet, their career took them into the analog world, with all the pros and cons of that universe. Last but not least, perhaps they just simply value the benefits of starting a family and providing for them with a low-to-moderate but predictable and stable income.
If you belong to that latter group, no way that PG will resonate with you, similar to how Karl Marx won't be a favorite author for a monarchist or Rush Limbaugh for a Democrat. Or those people right or wrong? It depends on who you ask. It's the same with PG - we just have to come to understand that the startup world is a polarizing ideology that works for some and not for others. I bet you that any founder out there that made money with a startup is quite likely to like PG's writing. Conversely, if you tried and didn't succeed (or never even wanted to give it a shot), it would be more difficult for you to align your thinking with PG's.
It appears to me that Graham's essay is
missing information and emphasis on one
more crucial input to doing "great work"
or being successful at all. That input is
the importance of and good approaches to
“ 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.
It is too common to see the well off capitalists extol the virtues of hard work, usually as a means unto itself, ignoring the reward.
They often say, you peasants could be like me if only you understood how to work hard, while completely ignoring the fact that not everybody is fairly compensated for their hard work.
I wish I was in such a good position that I could spend 5 hours a day writing about whatever self-indulgent topics I'm feeling while being able to pat myself on the back and call it a hard days work.
Thanks for taking the time to write this up and share your thoughts :D
As someone who leans towards "Work Smart, Not Hard", I had the following thoughts while reading this:
> Bill Gates... Lionel Messi...
These are very interesting examples, and I don't think I actually would have said that either of them actually did any "great work". What they have in common is what they are both "top of their field" in fields which are highly competitive/winner-take-all, and therefore get an insanely disproportionate amount of compensation.
When I think "Great Work", I think of scientists and inventors. Interestingly enough, many scientists and inventors were "all over the place" with their careers - many of them being polymaths who pursued a number of diverse hobbies. They often also spent time "idle", or "thinking"(Feynman was a good example of this), which is how I find that I do my best thinking as well. I see creative work as benefiting significantly from "not work" activities such as idleness. Steve Jobs had a similar line of thinking:
> Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
In summary, although hard work can capture more value in winner-take-all environments, I think creative work creates more value, and creative work requires taking frequent breaks, and yes, a healthy amount of idleness.
> P. G. Wodehouse would probably get my vote for best English writer of the 20th century, if I had to choose.
The guy who wrote about a hapless nobleman and his butler is a better writer than Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Arthur C. Clarke, George MacDonald Fraser, or John Le Carre?
It's the writing not the subjects. Wodehouse is hugely admired by other writers. I bet if you'd have asked each writer you name whether they thought they were better prose writers than Wodehouse, they'd say no. George Orwell was friends with Wodehouse and a great admirer. John Le Carre often named Wodehouse as one of his most important influences.
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.
There’s that line from COD that I’m sure is from somewhere else - amateurs practice until they can get it right, professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong. That’s sort of how I look at it. It’s served me well so far.
ADHD seems like it impairs most of the (useful) hard work somebody could dedicate themselves to. Could there also be a scale of this that's unrelated to ADHD?
These days, it's not difficult to create products that are far better than your main competitors' products in every respect. The hard part is merely getting the attention of customers so that they know that your product exists...
It's extremely difficult to create this scenario whereby a prospective customer will actually compare your product against a competitor's product. If people were more open to experiment, it would be easy but network effects are just too strong. Likely propped reinforced by endless money printing.
Infinite money printing just allows the economy to maintain its structure forever. The winners always get bailed out so they always stay winners and the losers always have their competitors bailed out so they always stay losers.
People might really believe that this is all it takes. However we know there's a secret sauce : luck. You can work as hard as you want, if luck is not on your side you won't get far.
I worked hard in my 20's with nothing to show for it. Not born into connections or money. I know almost nobody that has a degree. Spent years on my own startup with my ex-ceo being a code monkey for him whos richer and more connected than me. Poof, 4 years of income and work gone. Now I can't even find a job. How exactly, am I supposed to "work hard"? It is a complete meme. Also funny he uses Gates as an example, a man born into wealth.
I tried working hard and wasted 100% of every day of my 20's. No memories formed, no money made, just "working hard".
Here's how you work hard: grow up in a stable life with money and connections and win the mental health lottery.
The framework that I have for myself, is to figure out which letter from MAPS [1] is missing from the work, and then figure out how to fill it. I’ve found that if I have all 4, then it’s much easier to work hard without asking myself “why” every day.
[1] Usually known as CAR, but I find MAPS more helpful:
Mastery: Do you enjoy geeking out about the subject matter? When others correct you, or show you a better way to do something, are you annoyed or delighted? If annoyed, this may be something you should be delegating if you can.
Autonomy: Do you feel sufficiently powerful enough to accomplish the tasks you deem necessary for your goals, and in the way you want to accomplish them?
Purpose: Is this goal helpful to anyone? Is anyone counting on you to accomplish this?
Social Interaction: Do you enjoy spending time with the people you’re working with?
Mods are doing a good job these days putting up two articles talking about opposite-ish viewpoints on the front page it feels very intentional and it is interesting.
I have noticed that “what I work on” is more significant than “how many hours I spend working”. You have to be pointing the right way, not just going fast.
It's very shocking to read this and not even mention how supportive the privilege of starting out wealthy is. Hard work looks different if there's no where to go up or out.
> Hard work looks different if there's no where to go
The essay assumes a lot about who the reader is and the type of work they're doing. This perspective on work is obviously utterly alien to a single parent who's a dental assistant, part-time wait staff, has two young kids, and is barely making ends meet. But that person works a hell of a lot harder than any startup founder I've ever met. For them, the answer to "how to do hard work" is simpler: remember your kids starve and go homeless if you don't. Then, get up, go to work, and do what you're told. Continue until you have enough to pay the rent, buy food, and pay the baby sitters. Remember how lucky you are to have a roof and food. Repeat.
On one hand, I understand exactly what PG is saying -- the sort of work that requires high productivity without anyone telling you to work feels way harder than straight forward wage labor. There's a reason people drop out of phd programs and intentionally seek out specifically boring & predictable engineering/sales jobs (see: the post from the cmu undergrad).
On the other hand, I completely understand how the idea that autonomy and ownership over your own labor makes work harder -- and bragging about working 7 days a week for two whole years -- must seem incredibly tone-deaf to someone who has no choice but to do long days for 7 days a week under abusive management for 18+ years, only to get a reprieve of merely working 8-10 hour days for the 25-30 years after the kids are grown up and move away.
But PG isn't writing to that audience. The primary audience for many of his essays are people like him: guys who grew up geeky in upper middle class suburbs. There's nothing wrong with writing for the audience, but he does a kind-of bad job at signposting the fact that his advice is utterly irrelevant to the 50+% of the population that never have the opportunity to invest in themselves.
But PG isn't writing to that audience. The primary audience for many of his essays are people like him: guys who grew up geeky in upper middle class suburbs. There's nothing wrong with writing for the audience, but he does a kind-of bad job at signposting the fact that this is the target for his advice.
If that's his audience, perhaps a better essay would be, "Look you've got it pretty easy in life already, don't blow it (and even if you do, you'll probably have a second/third/fourth chance)", not: "listen to me about how to work hard because I know", because I haven't been convinced that he knows.
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.
He should let much more of that into his writing, because he could have written this post in 2007 and it would mostly read the same, and he's not the same person he was back then. Also, in sort of the same way that pg-writing-about-lisp is one of the harder pg's to dislike, dad-mode pg is probably his most likable and persuasive mode.
Duh. This is just a “hard work propaganda” piece. Some parts just read like “Believe in Jesus or your limbs will start melting away!”. Just like that.
Is this how venture capitalists have always functioned, or is it a new kind of initiative? Is there some kind of threat they perceive seeing many people, organisations, and even some nations talk about work-life balance (et cetera)?
Besides, is this what pg essays are all about? So much brouhaha for this? I have read one more of these 1-2 years ago or so and it was the same feeling. No wonder I’ve never encountered these writings or talk about them anywhere out of the HN.
No PG you are presenting speculative opinion as fact. Conscientiousness is a measured and well documented personality trait, it is also formed around age six. It also happens to be social in its construction.
Software engineers typically report lower than average Conscientiousness, because the more complex the task, the less it has an impact. It's also negatively correlated with IQ.
Suggesting it is a choice is demonstrably wrong. It is environmentally learned by the age of roughly 6.
Even if true, do you think that you are trapped by that? Personally, I think that you can choose to cultivate more conscientiousness, whether or not you have that as a personality trait. (This is true of other traits, too. You can also choose to cultivate, say, honesty. Or kindness.)
Conscienciousness is the easiest dimension to change over time with incremental intervention, so yes. Trauma can also change personality, but either way you wont go from bottom 1th percentile to top 99th without the task consuming your life.
Among other things, bright kids are often not challenged in school. Many of them learn to coast and not be too troublesome and do what little they have to do to hit the check marks the adults around them require while secretly pursuing some means to quietly also meet their own needs.
They can end up feeling like school work is pointless and like "a monkey could do this."
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.
This article has more than quadrupled my existing opinion that the concept of hard work is largely a fabrication designed to show off to other people.
If anyone’s seriously read this article end to end and didn’t conclude: “Wow, Paul is really struggling to back this up.” You might be in junior high.
The reality is that inflation and monetary policy combined with degradation of schools means you have to play a completely different life game to succeed now. And “working hard” while being a waiter or bartender isn’t going to get you there.
Paul is really trying to avoid the fact that unless you are gaining extremely highly valued skills in the exact right industry at the exact right schools at the exact right time, working hard is a complete waste of time. And everyone can feel it at a gut level.
People know when their work isn’t going to be rewarded. And in this era, you won’t be rewarded 90% of the time for
Most skills or most efforts.
"Natural ability" is a cop-out and PG should know better. It'd be fine if this came with a disclaimer, "we don't know what natural ability is and the more we learn the more complex and diverse this umbrella term becomes." But taking it at face value is fuzzy thinking. It feels like this was included to hedge his bets.
The Polgar sisters(1) serve as evidence that while "natural ability" may be a thing it's even less important than you might imagine. Instead this and work like that of Ericsson(2) on the development of expertise point to repeatable environmental factors for success.
I look forward to a day when we can eliminate this phrase and replace it with measurable phenomena and repeatable processes.
Is anyone else distressed by pg's sudden turn to these sorts of para-culture-war issues? He's gotten increasingly anti-woke over the past year or two and it's starting to leak into sloppy argumentation like this.
In decades past, he'd discuss similar issues ("how to identify a good hacker", stuff like that), but the focus was on the talent and what it meant and how it worked. Now... suddenly this kind of genetic stratification is just a given? Not a good smell.
So... I actually have a theory. He had kids. His kids are precocious and bright. And if you watch him on twitter he loves to talk about how smart they are. Which is hardly weird. But read back through his early writing: PG's school experience seems kinda traumatic. He hated it, he has an essay likening schools to prisons. So he's projecting his anxieties onto his kids.
And modern educational thought (be it "woke" or not), has very much moved away from a focus on the Best and Brightest students and onto a theory of education that prioritizes the needs of the disadvantaged. PG's kids just aren't what people are talking about. Educators tend to assume they'll do just fine given their existing advantages.
But PG didn't do fine, in his mind. He thinks society is moving in the wrong direction.
Which is ironic, because if anything modern educational environments (my kids are almost the same age) are much MORE inclusive and benign and much less likely to produce the kind of anxiety he experienced. His kids will do better than he did BECAUSE the school brings everyone else into the discussion and doesn't drive a competetive prison. He just can't see it.
urgh all this "working very very hard" glorifying talk makes me feel nauseated. science and creativity stems from leisure and idleness. not working very very hard.
I find the mentions of Messi, Newton, Mozart and Wodehouse bizarre. The essay is similar to Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour theory, whether you agree or not, at worst Gladwell is writing a journalistic think piece.
Here though, is Graham credibly putting himself in the same category as Mozart? Dropping a reference to Patrick Collison, who no one outside of tech would have a clue who that is in the same breath as you namedrop Newton?
“I’m a successful businessman. This is how I acted. So did these other successful business people. And as a matter of fact, some of the greats of history in other fields also acted like this. Put together, I think that this behavior is conducive to success (in the way I define it).”
Personally, I find it much more useful to go into each of these reads to find some piece of something I can incorporate into my life.
I don’t think it’s particularly useful to disparage the author. In this case, I don’t think he has a megalomaniacal belief in his legacy as a luminary, but even if he did, I trust my ability to extract information from what he writes.
There’s also a meta-discussion here. In human speech a common technique is to use X_j (j=1..n) diverse objects that each have k (k=1..m) characteristics Y={Y_jk} where for each j, there exists some k such that you can form a subset Z of Y which has the property that for any y_1, y_2 in Z, |m(y_1)-m(y_2)|<d, for some interesting measure of the characteristic m, and some small number d to illustrate an idea.
Usually, the idea is that the diversity in X_j resulting in this form of Z points to some commonality among the elements of Z. The idea is usually not that all Y_jk are in an equivalence class but that the subset Z is in a single equivalence class.
To put it more plainly through illustration: Messi, the fifty year old drunk Sunday leaguer, and I all choose to warm up before games to avoid injuries. This indicates that perhaps the warming up is a good idea. What it does not indicate is whether Messi, dad, and I are equivalent across all our characteristics. In fact, the interesting part is that we aren’t but that we share this.
> There’s also a meta-discussion here. In human speech a common technique is to use X_j (j=1..n) diverse objects that each have k (k=1..m) characteristics Y={Y_jk} where for each j, there exists some k such that you can form a subset Z of Y which has the property that for any y_1, y_2 in Z, |m(y_1)-m(y_2)|<d, for some interesting measure of the characteristic m, and some small number d to illustrate an idea.
> Usually, the idea is that the diversity in X_j resulting in this form of Z points to some commonality among the elements of Z. The idea is usually not that all Y_jk are in an equivalence class but that the subset Z is in a single equivalence class.
Unfortunately Graham provides no data or references to back up his claims that the iconic figures I mentioned worked hard or whether that was a factor.
My criticism is that there is a risk about putting yourself or your buddies (I assume Collison is one) in the same frame as people who are exceptionally notable. Hence I will give Gladwell a break as a journalist just bombastically making claims to entertain people because he is talking about other people.
There's nothing wrong with drawing comparisons at different scales. If you're talking about how to accomplish something it's fine to talk about famous works as well as mundane works and everything in between. If you're seeing it as a measuring contest you're missing the point.
Being able to decide what to work on requires a certain amount of privilege, as opposed to needing to do whatever you can to pay for rent, bills, and groceries this month.
I think you're on to something here. I'm struggling to articulate that somehow this essay addresses, albeit well, the low-hanging fruit of working hard, at least in the move-the-world-forward sense than this is written (he's not talking to bricklayers, he's talking to the architects). You have options; you have family/social support, and so on. These things allow the other things to become. [As you can seem I'm still struggling.]
That's a good post. Addresses the societal imbalances that are sometimes hard to see, adds a little more context:
>If hard work and long hours could be consistently transformed into “success”, then my friends and family who are teachers, nurses, social workers and factory workers would be far more successful than I am.
Yeah, but you have access to a computer and you are speaking english. Some may consider that privilege, like "Being able to decide what to work on requires a certain amount of privilege". I can decide what to work on like all of my friends and family but I don't think me or they are privileged. In current climate, anything beyond subsistence is considered privilege and used to belittle and shame those who have means to have life not lacking in neccessities. I'm flamebaiting, because original comment is not in any way insightful, but essentially means 'Oh look, he can choose what to work on, he is "privileged"' without any further meaning.
Maybe I misinterpreted oc, but I understood that « choosing what to work on » was about choosing precisely what project you want to work on and not just doing the job you wanted but on the project of your boss.
Because that is really rare and close to impossible if you are not an entrepreneur : I have. personally never ever worked on a really interesting project, and tbh, the few times I switched jobs following my attraction to the product, it went terribly wrong.
I’m not saying that you can’t be happy and fulfilled in this situation : my current company is really nice and I’m happy to be paid correctly to do what I wanted to do, but our products are extremely boring and I would never choose to work on my current project if I had a true open choice. And I don’t think I’m the exception on this one.
While you might not always agree with Paul but his writing usually reflects something that has been deeply thought out. I can almost see a man walking and thinking...
The true ah-ha moment comes when you finally realize how much bullshit this is.
"Hard work" is the mantra that keeps you a slave. "Success stories" are the tasty carrots that keep you toiling away your best years enriching others in pursuit of the things you're supposed to seek in life: Power, success, status. "Life hacks" are little dopamine hits to keep your eye on the carrot.
And the kicker is that those few who actually do attain these things mistakenly attribute it to their own prowess, when it's mostly luck and circumstance with a smattering of ambition and striking deals in the right networks. They then take it upon themselves to perpetuate the system that now feeds them at your expense.
So you go on toiling away, pushing that wheel around and around for years as your masters feed you stories of their success and a promise of your own one-day-someday, until eventually you hopefully realize the futility of enriching these parasites, and get off their treadmill.
The proletariat are only useful to the rich if they're toiling for them.
Edit: In case you're wondering why this tanked to the bottom of the comments despite being at 38 points after 30 minutes, it's because the admins can artificially drop a comment's priority if they don't like it, and prevent further upvotes (downvotes still work though).
The thing he doesn't mention is all the people burned out by 35, with the best years of their life behind them, coping with deep and lasting psychological damage that will affect them for the rest of their lives, and nothing to show for it (except, if you're lucky, a bit more money).
The thing he doesn't mention is all the people burned out by 35
The business model of his company is built on the backs of those people. The more of those people he can attract, the richer he becomes (to a first approximation)
The fetishisation of work does seem to largely come from people with enough money that they and at least several generations of their progeny will never need to do it.
Yeah this is absolute shit, and it appeals to a very specific kind of "driven" people. Nothing against them but they need to realise that most others just want to enjoy their short time on this planet. I'm happy with my really mellow stable job that leaves me plenty of free time to do the things I actually want. Life is too short.
And then there are many people like me who work a job they hate, still don't get much time to enjoy life, all just to pay the bills. Less time on the planet might actually something many of us look forward to as life is full of pain and misery.
I hope this doesn't come across as insensitive but this is something I've never understood. If life feels like this, that seems like an indicator that it's time for some massive change. Usually people give some vague abstract response about why massive change is just unrealistic, indicating some fragile house of cards, while in a simultaneous act of cognitive dissonance dreaming of the day it topples.
Perhaps we could: sell everything and move into a van to live on the road; or get a cheap house boat; or declare bankruptcy and move into a Buddhist monastery; quit jobs to transition into a more mindless one that allows more free time; find a nonprofit organization in a different country to throw oneself into; teach English in a foreign country; etc...
It's like, when we're brooding so much that we're done with life, it just seems like that's the best time to give life a chance, because at that point there's nothing left to lose.
I think the biggest thing is that life can suck in any of the alternatives. Human suffering is universal. People are reluctant to switch if there isn't a well defined value proposition. Life is about trade offs, so there isn't a perfect solution. Even living very minimally is expensive due to things we have little to no choice in like taxes, medical stuff, etc.
Sure, I could go live in a cabin in the woods. That will mean my wife divorces me, I'd still need a job to pay for taxes and medical bills, I would likely end up incarcerated for not being able to pay child support, and loose the cabin/land anyways.
To drill down on your response here, is it that you’re frustrated by not having those options?
I get being frustrated if your dream is to live in a cabin in the woods. But it’s hard to fathom being frustrated if you value the relationship with your wife more than living in said cabin. What are the underlying expectations from your life that you feel shut out from? Based on your earlier post, the only expectation seems to be “not to work in a job I hate” which seems completely attainable.
If I’m prying too much, just feel free to ignore me.
How would you define “a job you like” and how much would you have to make to pay your bills? Are there main drivers for those bills like high cost of living, medical issues, student debt?
At this point, I don't know what job I would like. The biggest part would be a place that actually follows their own policies and doesn't violate them to the detriment of the employees. Sadly I feel that would happen anywhere.
I could work with $80k per year if the healthcare and other benefits are good. It would also be nice to have the ability to advance and make it to a tech lead at $120k.
Obligatory not GP, but fee very similar. To me, “job I like” is a very difficult category for me to explain. Normally, when browsing jobs, I see something I think would be cool to work on. Most things disinterest me, so I maybe will see one of these once every few months, always woefully unqualified. There’s not really a specific domains, industry, etc. tying them together, just me thinking it sounds cool to work on.
> Perhaps we could: sell everything and move into a van to live on the road; or get a cheap house boat; or declare bankruptcy and move into a Buddhist monastery; quit jobs to transition into a more mindless one that allows more free time; find a nonprofit organization in a different country to throw oneself into; teach English in a foreign country; etc...
You are making the extremely generous assumption that the person is unbound and able to effectively disappear with no responsibilities to anyone other than themselves.
Among the truly miserable people I have encountered, the most common reason was bearing the burden of one or more dependents. A little sister with severe mental health problems, a sick parent unable to work, a drug-addicted and orphaned nephew. Can't exactly sell the house and move to Japan when your sister needs her SSRI and therapy to not hurt herself.
And the second most common reason was having little or no income at all, for whatever reason, in which case getting a job that they hated would _already_ have been a step up.
> Perhaps we could: sell everything and move into a van to live on the road; or get a cheap house boat; or declare bankruptcy and move into a Buddhist monastery; quit jobs to transition into a more mindless one that allows more free time; find a nonprofit organization in a different country to throw oneself into; teach English in a foreign country; etc...
Name one of those things you can do when you have family members depending on you.
To ignore that element just telegraphs a complete lack of understanding of the basic premise that underpins human existence.
To ignore that element just telegraphs a complete lack of understanding of the basic premise that underpins human existence.
It's true family is extremely important and clearly I personally do not have much in the way of familial ties (though not by choice). If I'm speaking from one extreme, it seems like you are speaking from the other extreme. The premise of one person's existence isn't the same as the basic premise of all human existence in general. We all have different experiences.
Everyone around me that has wealth built it up from simply talking and connecting with people. Going out for golf and drinks where people tend to let their guard down and just enjoy themselves allows people to build trust.
This would, in my opinion, truly define their success as luck. I will outwork them, out hustle them, learn things and do things yet I am a whole Everest beneath them with wealth.
But they will strike up a conversation in a hot tub in Mexico and end up partnering up on a major project/deal over mojito's and bubbling water. Whilst I build my landing page stuffed with SEO keywords because I have 'data' to guide me.
Imagine knowing someone in 2009 who could get you in early on uber or airbnb. or in 2006 get you in on Facebook. you need to know the right people, combined with luck (choosing to invest in uber isntead of quora) and some risk taking.
All of my 'successes' (granted they are very small but hey you gotta take some wins from time to time) have come from opportunities which arose from conversation.
If hard work were correlated with success, we would probably all know a lot more successful people . Most people who bust their ass have little to nothing to show for it compared to people who are truly successful, like people with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars or critical acclaim. Look how many people aspire to be successful writers, athletes, marathon runners, singers, actors..are those who fail not working as hard?
It seems nowadays, or maybe not only in modern age.
Being not doing anything is more painful than to be occupied and leaning toward burning out.
It kinds of reminds me of a published story on hn [0]
> "That is why we like noise and activity so much. That is why imprisonment is such a horrific punishment. That is why the pleasure of being alone is incomprehensible. That is, in fact, the main joy of the condition of kingship, because people are constantly trying to amuse kings and provide them with all sorts of distraction.—The king is surrounded by people whose only thought is to entertain him and prevent him from thinking about himself. King though he may be, he is unhappy if he thinks about it"
It seems that being in the passive mode or `flow` is a therapy itself, we can't seems to even stand non-productive ourselves to a certain extent. And modern convenient distractions only steer ourselves down this path even further.
This was my high school experience, but it was an early lesson I took to heart.
I used to work at K-Mart, one day a windy storm blew in. I was really hustling to get all the shopping carts in before they blew around the lot and damaged vehicles. I was still trying to get my other responsibilities done and noticed the patio furniture was starting to blow around too. I mean at this point I'm literally running to get to everything.
New guy, chatting up the manager. I can't remember the exact reason, but at some point on the same day the manager got upset that my stuff wasn't done. (my stuff being organizing and fronting shelves)
This guy didn't do anything. Like literally just hung out and made the manager laugh.
That's when I knew. Hard working people don't get ahead on their hard work alone. Sure, it gets recognized when you've got good leadership in charge. Honestly though, after that experience, I've seen it over and over.
Do solid work, know what you're doing and help others around you. Just don't kill yourself trying to impress your boss. The old saying goes, "If you want something done, give it to the busiest person."
You're just asking for someone to dump their load on you in some way. If you have the capacity and enjoy your work, get it done. If you don't, and there's no deadlines, why stay late?
- Relationships: The single biggest deathbed regret is neglecting relationships (either not forming them, or squandering them).
- Finding time to live: The second greatest deathbed regret is missing out on life: Travel, arts, discovery, etc. As you get older many parts of this become a LOT harder.
- Stress free living: Stress is one of the top causes of a short lifespan.
I didn’t really interpret the essay that way. I think the essay applies as much to working hard on personal things, like becoming better at playing some instrument or painting better. Both of those take a lot of hard work, but it has nothing to do with ”toiling away your best years enriching others”.
This essay is basically yet another pamphlet for puritan work ethics. Funny that it comes at a time where "faith" in hard work as a main determinant of success is at a low point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27514188
This is bullshit. This is what people who’ve failed tell themselves to rationalize that failure.
People who’ve succeeded at achieving ambitious goals are able to look at success from both vantage points: from having yet to succeed and succeeding. You’ll hardly ever, if ever, hear them say it’s solely the consequence of having the right networks and being lucky.
Sure some luck is involved, but most of it is attitude, and this is NOT the attitude.
I say thank God for people with this faulty perspective. It makes it easier to succeed when the playing field is full of people who’ve told themselves it’s futile to even try.
> People who’ve succeeded at achieving ambitious goals are able to look at success from both vantage points: from having yet to succeed and succeeding. You’ll hardly ever, if ever, hear them say it’s solely the consequence of having the right networks and being lucky.
Yes, people tend to adopt a personal narrative that maximizes their own moral status, so successful people artificially minimizes the effect of circumstance on average and unsuccessful people artificially minimize the effect of choice.
But we don't have to rely on competing personal narratives weighted by who has the resources to reach a larger audience; these are concrete fact questions, and there is plenty of evidence that (1) circumstance beyond personal traits has a very large role, (2) personal traits contribute in ways different than the popular narrative of the successful, and (3) the personal traits that contribute are themselves largely products of (mostly inherited and early childhood) circumstance, not active choice.
> Yes, people tend to adopt a personal narrative that maximizes their own moral status
Exactly, that's what I'm saying about rationalizing. The only thing those who've yet to succeed lack is the vantage point of the successful. So I'd argue the successful are operating with an information advantage.
> The only thing those who've yet to succeed lack is the vantage point of the successful.
No, that's a pre-Enlightment (or maybe postmodernist, it can be hard to tell the difference at times) attitude.
What both most who have succeeded and most who have not succeeded lack who don’t actively seek it out is the perspective of structured, broad information gathering, analysis, and hypothesis testing beyond self-justifying rationalization of personal experience.
But no one needs to lack that, because plenty of that has been done, so there is no need to rely on duelling self-justifying constructed narratives to understand the world.
The amount of luck involved in "success" is almost always underestimated. Whether it's being born into a family with money, or having a great teacher who helps you understand Calculus. To avoiding health issues and accidents. To choosing a spouse that doesn't self-destruct. The list is long.
Luck is the trump card of life. You can be smart, hardworking, all the business traits that are espoused by "successful" people, and still fail. As Lefty Gomez said "I'd rather be lucky than good."
Look at Michael Jordan. He had talent and an incredible work ethic. Yet until the Bulls drafted Scottie Pippen, he didn't have the team required to win a championship. Imagine if the Bulls missed out on drafting Pippen and had drafted Dennis Hopson instead? Would Jordan have still become the GOAT?
> People who’ve succeeded at achieving ambitious goals are able to look at success from both vantage points: from having yet to succeed and succeeding.
You fell for the classic survivorship bias fallacy.
I think this is a fantastic discussion, one of the best I ever read on HN. :) Its a provocative article, for sure! Very good for people to ask whether they should work hard, why they should work hard, and at what. A good recent example I feel of someone who works extremely hard and its 100% worth it, is Prof Sarah Gilbert, the person behind the Oxford-Astra-Zeneca covid vaccine, which BTW has a Malaria vaccine on the heels of it which would be amazing.
find it hard to take life advice from some dude who got lucky in the dotcom, has done nothing of note since and actively supports sexist, racist people as "he's not a bad guy".
Find it even harder to take seriously a treatise on "work hard" when the underlying message is "make ME wealth, bitch
".
> I had to learn what real work was before I could wholeheartedly desire to do it. That took a while, because even in college a lot of the work is pointless; there are entire departments that are pointless.
In other words, "the work I want to do is real but the work you want to do is trivial and pointless."
I really genuinely have enjoyed Paul Graham's writing over the years but moments like this seem arrogant and tend to spoil some of the enjoyment. I'd be genuinely curious to know what departments he finds pointless, and why, in the grand scheme of things, they have no "point" in comparison to computer science or whatever.
While it's true that computer science can be used to enable, for example, much cheaper air travel, or important forms of cancer diagnosis, it's also true that a great many computer scientists work on less crucial problems like optimizing ad targeting or enabling scams.
Similarly, while many English lit majors may end up contributing little most of us find valuable in that field, there are some who will become authors who genuinely help other humans find more meaning in life and feel less alone, and others who will shed new light on history and thiis contribute to the understanding of our present.
I'm not saying fields can't be compared. Maybe the average engineer's college studies help society "more" (for some definition) than the average humanities major's studies do. Fine. What I'm saying is - it takes a lot of arrogance to cast aside entire college departments as worthless.
I think your reading is not just uncharitable, but wrong.
> In other words, "the work I want to do is real but the work you want to do is trivial and pointless."
No, "the work you want me to do is trivial and pointless". And the context is college, and even more so high school. It's not a news flash that the work they want you to do in school isn't "real". It's exercises designed to teach you, not actual work that needs done.
> Similarly, while many English lit majors may end up contributing little most of us find valuable in that field, there are some who will become authors who genuinely help other humans find more meaning in life and feel less alone, and others who will shed new light on history and thiis contribute to the understanding of our present.
Given that Wodehouse was one of PG's positive examples, this also seems to me to be missing the point of the essay.
>No, "the work you want me to do is trivial and pointless". And the context is college, and even more so high school.
You choose your college and you choose your major, and you choose to go to college in the first place, so I'm not clear what you are referring to here. What entire college department exists to somehow force people to study its subjects? If someone's university is assigning work they don't work to do, they can transfer elsewhere. (They tend not to, because the educational institutions for adults that are strictly focused on a single topic lack prestige. Even a relatively technical "good" school like MIT will try to round out the academic experience of its students.)
Perhaps arrogance should be added to what it takes to be successful.
I'm only half joking; I do think a certain kind of arrogance is conducive to success. Not the kind that screams insecurity and turns off your teammates, rather the kind that goes: "Perhaps I really am the first person who can do this." and then does it.
Huge surprise that the quintessential capitalist _just so happens_ to write an essay suggesting that you should never stop working at any moment of your entire life.
>"Hercules went to King Augeas, and without telling anything about Eurystheus, said that he would clean out the stables in one day, if Augeas would give him a tenth of his fine cattle.
Augeas couldn't believe his ears, but promised. Hercules brought Augeas's son along to watch. First the hero tore a big opening in the wall of the cattle-yard where the stables were. Then he made another opening in the wall on the opposite side of the yard.
Next, he dug wide trenches to two rivers which flowed nearby. He turned the course of the rivers into the yard. The rivers rushed through the stables, flushing them out, and all the mess flowed out the hole in the wall on other side of the yard."
PDS: See, King Augeas was expecting that Hercules would clean up the stables the old-fashioned way -- by using his strength to clean them out manually.
King Augeas was expecting that Hercules work hard for him.
Hercules did work hard, but additionally, Hercules also worked smart -- by digging only what was necessary to direct the river or rivers -- and letting the flowing water, letting nature itself -- do all of the work!
Now compare this to MapReduce.
Compare this to Jeff Dean of Google, and all that he does.
Jeff Dean and MapReduce leverage computation power (think of them as the streams of water) -- to do all of the "Heavy Lifting".
They work hard -- but they also work smart.
They utilize an infrastructure (Hercules with the water from a river, Jeff Dean wtih the power from distributed computing/distributed queries/MapReduce, etc.) which when skillfully directed, at their hands, performs all of the hard work for them...
They work smart.
Now this being said, I'll close by saying that I am Paul Graham's greatest fan -- I think he is one of the greatest intellectuals in the world today! And I agree with 99.44% of everything else that he has so wisely and eloquently said or written in the past!
And I love his essays, YCombinator, HN, etc., etc.!!!
Meh. This isn't a guide on how to work hard, tbh, unless "wake up at 13 with the will to work hard" is a guide. "Be like Bill Gates" is no guide.
Give me a guide by someone who grew up a slacker, fucked off deep into adulthood and then learnt or taught themselves the hard lessons on working hard. What to do when you want to sleep in, when you want to stay out late, when you have such aching, gnawing anxiety about going to class that even looking at the textbook is ... hey look, Witcher Season 2 is on. A person who had been through that shit can talk about "how to work hard"
> Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. 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!
> What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.
On the other hand, I would also recommend caution here -- I strongly believe that some people simply have a much higher capacity/tolerance for work. John Carmack appears to have been able to sustain 80-hour weeks without burning out. I can't. I don't feel bad about this gap. This observation is pretty mundane; it's exactly the same way that the average person's psyche or physique simply can't tolerate the training workload of an olympic athlete.
"Work harder" might be the right advice for someone who has excess capacity that they are not using. It might be terrible advice for someone who is already trending towards burnout working 50-hour weeks when their capacity is 40-hour weeks. There's an element of self-knowledge required to honestly evaluate yourself and determine exactly how capable you are. (Of course -- push yourself sometimes. You might surprise yourself. I personally think it's a good experience to have pushed up against burnout on a project I care about, to know what my limits are. But I don't aspire to ride that line in perpetuity.)
So many things annoy me about this sort of self-help guru vagueness.
"One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you'll have to work very hard" - this is not true. You have to work, but the "hard" part implies that stress is important. Stress is incidental - everyone experiences stress regardless of work. I learned years ago that high achievers don't experience more stress... an in fact they tend to rephrase problems to give them LESS stress. They work, but they purposely make those things less stressful. The work itself, from their perspective isn't "hard" at all.
"There are three ingredients to great work: natural ability, practice, and effort". These aren't separate things! Natural ability is learned just like anything else. It's a set of skills that you develop through building your own ways of thinking. You get those through practice. And for some, that effort is often negligible for one reason or another - experiences and thoughts that they have because of emotions or places they grew up or what context they relate to. I could go on for hours about this specific topic.
"And yet Bill Gates sounds even more extreme. Not one day off in ten years?" - A surprising number of people do this anyways. If it's not stressful to them, it's not effort... it's just what you do. By the way, most of these people don't become rich. Why? It's not because of "natural ability" or "lack of practice and effort". It's because their daily work covers things that aren't, directly, money. "Cows got to get fed" or "lawn has to be mowed" or "kids need to be watched" or "spend a bit of time on something that I actually like". For Bill Gates, that "just what you do" was probably "work on microsoft". And if it failed, he's publically said that yeah, his backup plan was to go back to Harvard, becuase that was of course an option for him. Relatively speaking, it wasn't a super high risk decision.
"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". This sounds, honestly, quite unhealthy. It's "feel pain now because reasons. I have multiple theories on how this sort of thought process comes around. For example, When we can't relax during our downtime, or we don't actually get the rewards of our labor.
But you notice that outside of constructed work environments (like school, or any job where you have a direct boss), this doesn't happen. Those who practice violin practice until they're done practicing, then they relax, then they come back later and practice some more. They don't half-ass practice, because there isn't a point to that. If you're practicing, it's not "so that I can work hard, and if I don't I feel guilty". Instead it's "I need to polish this one part of the song" or "I'm struggling with my fingering here" or maybe even "I'm going to play with this section of the song, it seems fun". Note - it's not pointless work. So "I'm working, but not working hard" just... doesn't happen. Because why would it? That doesn't make the song better, it doesn't make you better.
The more I go through the article, the more I just think the goals are getting tripped up by a combination of external forces that take up mental resources, and a mental model where the stress of the situation determines the quality of the product.
I have tons of suggestions (I trimmed this comment down and rewrote it 3 times already). The big one though I think is learning to roll with what matters. Do everything you're doing, and then take a break, and then do it again. Honestly, unless you get into the nitty gritty details, It's really a lot simpler than people think.
I think Paul Graham is a brilliant programmer. This site coded in Lisp is unbelievable. I'm being honest. One of my current goals is wanting to learn Lisp, and I thank Paul for that.
He's a C writer though. (We all can't be good at evertyhing. Personally, I have never met a person from a wealthy upbringing who could write well.)
It's too long, and I'm still not sure what he is saying?
I can offer this, but it's for ambitious poor/middle class people.
Work hard at getting ahead. I worked through school, and got out with a B average.
If you are poor getting through college, or starting a business, will not be as easy as the guy who has the wealthy sympathetic father, or mother who sits on the company Board of Directors when they are buying your company. (Easy shot a Bill Gates?)
What am I saying? If you are poor, life will be harder.
You know it already. You know you can't make too many mistakes early on.
You know there will be no one to help when the chips are down.
You won't be offered jobs, or perks in life because of your family name.
You know you will need to work harder than Biff, or Charles.
I did everything I was suspose to do in college. I made every class count, even though I knew most of it was a joke.
I then had a nervous breakdown.
Looking back, I think I should have concentrated on socializing a bit more. I should have networked more too.
In all honestly, I didn't like kids from wealthy families. I found them boring, and unimaginative.
Those wealthy kids usually become wealthy adults though, and those connections will be important later on. I still want to upchuck even thinking about using a person to get ahead though.
This feels like the kind of essay describing a thing that, if you have to be told about it, you don't have it.
I'm on HN during my work day. People who "work hard" probably aren't. They probably only know about pg through direct connections, not through idly scrolling the Internet bored one day.
The thing about finding motivation is that you don't actually find it.
There are certain things you want out of life as a human being, and if believe your work is aligned with that, you'll pour your soul into it.
On the other hand, if you see work as a distraction from the rest of your life, working will be an uphill battle. I guess it's important to find work you care about, or find a deeper, more meaningful reason to do work.
Every person I've ever met who claims to be one of these hard workers who puts in 70 hours a week and never takes time off always seem to be taking mid-week holidays to Bali, golfing on sunny Tuesday afternoons etc. It's all a big show.
> 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.
This is not true, everyone who knows even just a little bit about football (I suppose not many people here) would know Messi was the preternatural talent (not like he has not worked hard, but his talent is by far his biggest asset), it is C Ronaldo in any case who is a totally dedicated person to training.
You dont do this at 8-10 because you are a "hard-worker", you do it because you won the genetic lottery:
@senordeveloper Have You seen the training viedoes of Messi training with Barca and ARG? This guys trains like a maniac. CR7 IS a good counter-point to Messi's natural talent, but that doesnt take away the fact that the guys trains by practicing free-kics with a Robot Goalkeeper. Now enjoy Your time sink of the day;
https://www.google.com/search?q=messi+robot+goalkeeper&rlz=1...
You cannot bring a variety-show video and be expected to be taken seriously. Messi is not sloth, but he has never ever distinguished himself for being a training freak like Ronaldo, Zanetti,Batistuta, etc, if anything when younger (18-23) he was very undisciplined in some aspects of his training, for example he had a crappy diet and was kinda weak and injury prone.
One thing from this essay really stuck out to me:
> The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working without anyone telling you to. Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off.
One thing that always happened at the end of a semester is we'd have a few days after exams but before flights back home. On these days I'd typically try playing a video game (my hobby before college) and every time I would stop playing after just an hour with deep feeling of unease at the pit of my stomach. "Alarm bells" is exactly how I would describe it - a feeling at the core of my psyche that I have been wasting time and there must be something productive I should be doing or thinking about.
Years later, having tackled anxiety problems that had plagued me most of my life, I came to recognize that my relationship with hard work during my college years was not healthy and that this deep seated desire to do more work is not a positive thing, at least not for me.
I've since reformed my ambitions, instead of looking to start a company or get a PhD in mathematics, I've decided that hard work is not the love of my life and instead I should focus on my hobbies while looking for a career path that can be simultaneously fulfilling but laid back.