That comic deserves its own submission to HN. People should never forget: you work to live, not live to work. Who cares how much money you make when you're too stressed & cynical to enjoy life.
While I agree with the line of thinking exhibited by this article and people like Tim Ferriss I'm stumped these ideas have yet to gain more recognition, not to speak of mainstream adoption.
Sure, we can all aspire to living the 4-hour work week but not everyone is Tim Ferriss and not everyone can or should live on selling digital products online either. Software needs to be written, products have to be designed and produced.
The question is: Why are these things measured in hours wasted during their creation instead of the actual business value that's been generated?
Why do we measure the work of a freelance software developer in terms of hourly payments instead of the value she creates? Of all things creating software should be measured by something else than the hours wasted during the process. Measuring output this way certainly is the easy way out. It provides some well-known and commonly shared standard.
However, it also promotes lazy thinking. In this kind of framework the programmer who develops software by using anti-patterns copiously is rewarded because he makes sure he can waste even more hours on maintaining this software in order to get paid even more. Basically, in this mindset writing maintainable software is as valuable as copying and pasting 'System.out.println("All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.)"' all day.
The problem with software in particular is of course that buying and selling software this way is not only well-established but it's also difficult to measure the business value beforehand.
Nevertheless, while I certainly haven't found a real solution to this problem I keep thinking there has to be a better way of measuring the value of work. Any thoughts?
It's because most software developers aren't salespeople. Simple as that.
Every freelancer who has found a way to explain why maintainable software is better, and why less code is better than more code, and why they spend less time than other person X, has thus also found a way to increase their rate by a handsome factor.
Unfortunately this is only possible for entrepreneurs. In a traditional employment situation your rate is defined by other people. They do define it as a business value (Google engineer makes more money than a government engineer), but they present it to their employees as a rate-per-time because that makes them easier to manage and more interchangeable.
Point is, at the end of the day, your pay is always judged based on the value you provide, not the time you put in.
For freelance in particular, 'quality' is too nebulous. It is far too easy to nitpick why a solution was good-but-not-great and to talk the price down once the work has already been done.
This holds true in most things. Quality is really hard to measure. It is much easier to say 'well, our start-up worked 15 hours per day, who could blame us for failing?'
It is a particularly American mindset that hard work is the only thing that matters. In the valley, you'll hear people say all the time that execution is the only thing that matters. It sounds great because it superficially appears measurable.
Unfortunately, you can spend a long time executing well on a dumb idea. Color is an example off the top of my head. Beautiful application, worked really well, but ultimately sharing images with the people that happen to be around you isn't something the people want.
Time is the default rivalrous good. Without having to know how to measure value produced, you can get a pretty good lower bound on it just by measuring the opportunity-cost of the time you're putting in, and then charging for that.
While I like the ideas (and I liked them even more the first time I read 4HWW), the real lesson I gained from my first, and second, attempt at lifestyle design is: either succeed alone or find better friends. Nothing kills enthusiasm and momentum like your entire social circle dismissing your efforts as a fool's errand.
It's a defence mechanism. Actively improving yourself makes the rest of the group look and feel bad [because they aren't]. They don't like those negative emotions, so they try to equalize. But it's much easier to equalize you to them, than themselves to you.
So they make fun. They passively bring down your efforts. They're much too nice to do it actively. And provide plenty of excuses for you to fall off the wagon.
BUT!
This is also a test of your resolve. If you can't do something against your friends' and family's will, how do you know you actually want to do it?
At least that's how I look at it. If I'm not confident enough in my choices that they would stand up to the scrutiny of my friends and family, then my choices need some more polish.
Am I the only one who thinks this is very selfish and primitive attitude? I like to think that I want to live not as an animal, for the sake of eating, sleeping and procreation. That I need to force myself to go beyond living for the sake of living and live for the sake of great ideas. I want to work on great things that contribute to progress and I care about that more than myself.
Yes. I'm fond of the Kinky Friedman quote "find what you like and let it kill you". You should enjoy what you do and do it well. This includes, where necessary, putting in the hard yards.
The author is right that working long hours for an employer is actually an intellectually lazy way to live. However this doesn't make hard work, effort or high-standards in themselves wrong at all. This is also a lazy attitude.
I think wording along the lines of "stop associating your life with your job" is more in line with what the author meant. You absolutely should want to contribute to progress and be a part of something greater than yourself.
However, the distinction is that whatever you are working on RIGHT NOW is not what's all important. You may and should love what you're doing right now, but attaching too much of your identity to your current product/role/company will cause you pain if the product/company fails, or prevent you from taking opportunities elsewhere where you can contribute to your overall goals more than where you currently are.
What you're saying makes sense, but I suspect is different than what the author means to say: "What you do for a living distinctly differs from who you are." There is work and there is job. I want to associate my work with my life, not the job where I currently do my work. I think the original article is telling me to not associate my life with my work.
He also says "learn languages, play music instrument, do sports", but these actually require work and overcoming yourself, and are synergistic with whatever you do 9-5.
I don't think it's necessarily selfish to want to separate your life and your work, but I do disagree that it's necessary. Whenever I see anyone earnestly giving the advice that you absolutely must do this in order to be happy, I just tend to think that's a person who hasn't happened to find the job that really lights their fuse. And that's fine, but these people need to stop telling those of us who have that we need to identify with our jobs less. It reeks of the kind of bitterness the less productive people have for the go-getters for "making them look bad."
I agree as far as that goes. I'm very much in favor of working on great things that contribute to progress. I will add, however:
1. Make sure what you're working on is really a great thing that contributes to progress (e.g. not another junk social media "app").
2. If what you're doing really matters, all the more important to stick to a disciplined 30-40 hour working week to retain your ability to think clearly, instead of slopping into overtime and destroying your judgment.
3. Raising a family is the most important job of all (in a real sense it's the supergoal of which everything else we do is just a subgoal).
It just depends on how you find meaning in life. Hedonists and creatives are not interested in executing great ideas or progress, while the more traditional sort that is interested in progress & building things conversely does not place the same value on pleasure or arts that the hedonists and creatives do, respectively.
>We work 9-5 so that we can appear hard working in the eyes of others, so that we can look ourselves in the mirror and conclude an elaborated illusion – that we are doing something worthwhile.
I don't think this is the case at all, and its major point that a lot of philosophy/lifestyle/newage/whatever gurus miss out on. The vast majority of people on this planet work to provide for themselves and their families, not to give their lives some sort of existential meaning. I'm so tired of web 2.0 entrepreneurs/serial startup people/bros saying that the way we live our lives today is meaningless, and that only by following their philosophy can we hope to wrangle some sort of meaning from our wretched existence.
I'll say what I've said a bunch of times before. If people in the same position as this author want to effect some actual change in the meaning of work and life and time for a great many people, they need to start speaking with their dollars rather than their words.
Large part of why so many people work 9-5 IMO is because great works require the efforts of many people, and synchronization of efforts is a difficult problem. Thus following the same schedule essentially obviates a piece of what otherwise would be an eternal nest of scheduling headaches.
The quintessential picture of a couple, lifestyle designing the shit out of their coffee after what was most assuredly an extreme bike ride.
As someone who spent significant time and effort to travel abroad for an extended period, this bothers me. This is how you spend a Saturday, it isn't what 99.5% of the population will be able to achieve (or should try to achieve) for their day to day. Once you begin living without obligation or schedules, you'll find that it is interesting for only so long.
What people should strive for is a balanced life, that affords them flexibility to do the things they want, but also includes the obligations that most of us have. Not everyone can live like Tim Ferris, at least not until machines do all the work for us.
I actually agree with the article's main premiss, work for work's sake is pointless, but to hold up the 4HWW as the pinnacle of this, won't work for most people. So here is my attempt at a list of what will:
- Live close to work (under 30 minutes)
- Save as much as possible
- Do your absolute best at work, then go home
- Embrace things you like to do
- Make time to do them
As an example I asked my boss if I'd be able to take 1-1.5 months off at some point in the future to travel. He seems cool with it, so now my wife an I are saving. This allows us to maintain some normalcy when after traveling so we have a job and home to return to.
I didn't get the sense that the coffee-sipping couple was a picture of the ideal everyday schedule for someone who is following this advice. It's just something you can do, if you aren't just the average wage slave with no savings who can't fit a fun moment in edgewise.
Your advice is probably better and much more succinct.
after what was most assuredly an extreme bike ride
Hah! Their faces have a relaxed complexion (no flush or sweat), there isn't a speck of dust or dirt or mud about either them or their mountain bikes... It's either a setup or possibly pre-ride.
Well, considering what most people in the 1st world consider 'work' actually most people in the 1st world do.
I'd say that we wouldn't even have that 1st world - 3rd world distinction any more - at least not for long - if most people in the 1st world finally stopped being lazy and actually thought about how to contribute meaningful work.
Work for work's sake is what currently holds us back and absorbs more energy than anything else.
The main objective of any mainstream economic policy is to achieve (near) full employment. Not because it makes sense economically but our twisted work ethic learned and internalized over hundreds of years tells us to.
I think this is more targeted at people who don't push towards more aspirational work - e.g. staying in a 9-5 job as a web developer and paying the bills rather than developing a business and being ambitious. They may feel as though they are working hard and applying themselves, where they may be under-utilised and just using "hard work" as an excuse for not pushing themselves.
In other words, the classic "work hard / work smart" contrast.
> It seems just as odd to most of the first world as well.
I think it doesn't seem as odd as you might think. When people talk about the economy, they talk about putting everyone in jobs, not ensuring everyone is productive. It's a subtle distinction, but I think it's an important one. For many people, the metric of a good economy seems to be what fraction of the population work from 9-5, rather than how much people produce.
To be fair, I am stretching the applicability of the original article farther than the author probably intended.
> 2. Everyone will value their own time now much more, so you will automatically get paid for what you achieve, not for the hours you worked.
While a Star Trek Earth style system sounds awesome and utopian, I cannot help but thinking most people would just stay home and drink and/or watch Law and Order marathons all day. Hell, that does not sound too bad to me at all, and I love my work.
One if the big examples of ineffectiveness is the personal marketing large corporations push all employees to do. And personal marketing became the norm to conquer space in large corporations.
Many times I was tasked with the challenge of "earning a sit at the table" in projects and even activities for which I had the title and the responsibility to get done, per job description. Why is that? (I am not elaborating here, I'm in an iPad, sucks to type, but you got the big picture).
Those who dedicate fiercely to the tasks at hand to actually complete projects and truly contribute with the bottom line are systematically NOT rewarded properly.
