Work Hard (2007)

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/work-hard/

416 189 5 years ago

terrytao.wordpress.com

(2007)

there is an important distinction between “working hard” and “maximising the number of hours during which one works”. In particular, forcing oneself to work even when one is tired, unmotivated, unprepared, or distracted with other tasks can end up being counterproductive to one’s long-term work productivity, and there is a saturation point beyond which pushing oneself to work even longer will actually reduce the total amount of work you get done in the long run

Worth highlighting, for those of you that are skipping through.

pm90• 5 years ago

I'm glad you posted this as it goes against the "hard work cult" that seems to have gripped popular imagination. Hard work isn't just time spent on completing a task; this interpretation is maybe the easiest to understand and benefits employers the most.

gfodor• 5 years ago

I think there's an important point here too that cuts against a lot of memes: it's important to keep working hard right up until this point. A lot of people presume that if they put in a solid day's work they're going to do just as well as someone who is a "work-a-holic." That's not a great mental model, if the work-a-holic is working more but not so much they are hitting these problems mentioned. There's a fairly wide margin between underwork and overwork.

edit: Lo and behold my sibling is taking on one of the memes I mentioned. :) If you're working less because you feel it's doing too much in the favor of your employer, and not because you're otherwise going to start becoming less productive because of it, you're probably underworking in the sense outlined here.

gopalv• 5 years ago

A lot of people presume that if they put in a solid day's work they're going to do just as well as someone who is a "work-a-holic."

There are two kinds of workaholics - the ones who enjoy work and those who suffer from their work.

The article hits on the first kind in the passing

> Of course, to work hard, it really helps if you enjoy your work.

Working hard when you enjoy your work is easier and might look like workaholism to someone who is definitely not. If work is play, you might play longer & that gets a lot done, because mistakes you throw away don't feel like wasted time.

The workaholic that people knock are the ones who work because it gives them positive feedback they lack in the rest of their lives - from an inattentive parent, disrespectful spouse or demanding children.

My work environment is extremely gamified and well designed to give me great feedback to improve, excellent rewards for performance and throw in some respect of my peers. The home life is Sisyphean in comparison - cook dinner today and it doesn't lie on a progression towards cooking less tomorrow.

It's easy to get sucked into that and work on a death-march, because it feels like progress on a daily basis. That "How we built Internet Explorer" tweet felt very familiar to me, because I would definitely get sucked into a mission like that.

6gvONxR4sf7o2• 5 years ago

it's important to keep working hard right up until this point

As a pretty hard worker who is very far from workaholic, I strongly disagree. Work hard. It's super important. Put the time in or else you won't progress. But you don't need to go right up to the edge. If you put in solid work reliably for years, other factors will matter so much more than whether you go right up until that point.

SquishyPanda23• 5 years ago

it's important to keep working hard right up until this point

I'm not sure there's any real empirical evidence for this in the absolute way you stated it.

There are plenty of highly productive creative people who do 4 hours of highly focused work a day and then spend the rest of their time walking around a garden. If your goal is to produce great lasting work that seems to be a formula that works a lot.

Working up to your limit is useful for other scenarios, like where you want to crank out much more routine work. If you want to get promoted in a structured environment like a big tech company, then this strategy works well.

There are definitely cultures that value working long hours. You see it both in business and in academia, and I'm not aware of any evidence that it's better than the system where you empower workers to focus on as they need to and then take the time they need to recharge.

ttul• 5 years ago

And of course most of us are skipping through reading about “working hard…”

reidjs2• 5 years ago

Because working hard can mean skimming articles or delegating it to someone else to get you the gist of it. I don't have time to read every single interesting sounding article I come across. Well maybe I do, but then I wouldn't have as much time for commenting :)

tristanperry• 5 years ago

It's a great bit of advice.

It does also apply to companies who demand that their workers have bums on seats in an office 8-9 hours a day...

Companies often don't seem to understand that loading employees with meetings and bureaucracy, then wondering why productivity isn't higher, is fairly foolish.

PragmaticPulp• 5 years ago

Great point. I like to compare work capacity to exercise capacity. Too much exercise will actually harm your fitness rather than improve it. However, reasonable exertions, combined with appropriate rest, will improve your fitness over time.

Like exercise capacity, one's ability to work hard can also be improved through practice. This doesn't mean pulling all-nighters and chugging caffeine to override the sleepiness, though. It means setting incremental goals to try a little bit harder and then following up with proper rest and recovery.

For example, if you install time tracking software and measure that you spend 3 hours in your code editor every day (a reasonable amount for someone working an 8-hour day, due to time spent reading documentation, in meetings, and other activities), it would be a mistake to set a goal to spend 6 hours in your code editor. You'll get burned out and hate it.

However, if you set a goal to spend 3.5 hours in your code editor every day, you can likely find low-impact ways to make that happen. Maybe you're more efficient with transitioning from meetings back to coding. Or maybe you cut down time spent reading articles on HN or Twitter by 30 minutes and apply it to coding instead.

Over the course of a 5-day work week, that extra 30 minutes per day adds up to almost 3 hours extra work. If your starting point was 3 hours per day, you've basically added an extra work day to your week without giving up much.

selestify• 5 years ago

Are there any such tracking software that you’d recommend?

agumonkey• 5 years ago

Seconded, I tried to push harder on too many fronts and overloaded my brain/memory to the point of physical pain (if that makes sense)

Patience, sensitivity and regularity is my best bet now. Also, it's fairly well known that a lot of ideas and understanding comes outside/after workouts.

ps: this is also true in music (which blends physical and intellectual sides)

hutzlibu• 5 years ago

"However, if you set a goal to spend 3.5 hours in your code editor every day"

I would be careful trying to set up such metrics for yourself.

I can stare for hours at code and not getting anything done. Then away from the screen on a walk or sitting down with pen and paper I solve the problem and implement it in 15 min in code.

My point is, I would focus on a tasklist. Clear things to do at once. (Or in parallel if they are trivial.) Getting things done, not spending time doing things.

Otherwise I agree to your post.

garrickvanburen• 5 years ago

Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is take a nap in the middle of the day.

On a daily basis, I do so more often than not.

nolaspring• 5 years ago

I’ve found that a lot of my co workers have stated to do this. It’s turned into a disconnected, tech siesta.

wvh• 5 years ago

Worth highlighting, for those of you that are skipping through.

Like my employer...

quickthrower2• 5 years ago

Working smart then :-)

noduerme• 5 years ago

This really is important. Exhortations to work hard seem a bit tone-deaf right now. I'm a person who's been self-employed and therefore self-motivated, driven, and devoted all hours of day and night to realizing ideas and products for the past 20+ years, organizing my own time in ways I've always noticed 9-5 friends find difficult to understand. Once I get into an idea or a big piece of code, I can get lost for days, forgetting to eat or shower. But that's always been balanced by an active social life, travel, exercise - things that help me maintain a psychological equilibrium while helping me structure my own time. Covid has upended the outlets I depend on for sanity to the point where it's very hard to get into the flow of work and research I need to commit myself to in order to accomplish long tasks. So I'm really trying to be gentle and easy on myself when I don't want to work up to the breaking point... or even of days where I don't want to do any serious work at all. Maybe this is a bad thing, but before lockdowns I never felt like I had to make myself work at all... I just wanted to, and nothing could take me away from it. Usually one big night out would be enough to motivate me to spend the next week happily locked indoors of my own volition. But without that balance... you just have too much time.

emodendroket• 5 years ago

This is a very important distinction. I realized over time that what I wanted out of work was not a job where I lived at the stupid office, but not one where I was twiddling my thumbs all day either. I really want to put in serious work, but then go home.

pototo666• 5 years ago

This.

Even though I know that working all night till 6 am is wrong, I still do this now and then, because work is sometimes addicting.

I need such message from real genius to help me control myself.

amai• 5 years ago

My physics professor used to say: "power is work per unit of time."

arvinsim• 5 years ago

I think this point is obvious.

What's not obvious is to find the line between doing too little and doo too much. There are just too many variables and a lot of nuance to consider.

snakeboy2• 5 years ago

Off-topic, but why is it that Terry Tao's blog attracts such low-quality comments? When I look at SSC/ACX, Shtetl-Optimized, Marginal Revolution, etc. the comments are mostly constructive, engaged, and well-informed. With Tao, it's a huge proportion of random people asking for generic life advice, or fanboy-ism.

This seems counter-intuitive, because Tao's blog is by far the least accessible of those above 3 blogs on a technical level. There's almost no reason to visit Tao's blog if you don't have a graduate maths degree.

thaumasiotes• 5 years ago

When I look at SSC/ACX, Shtetl-Optimized, Marginal Revolution, etc. the comments are mostly constructive, engaged, and well-informed.

There are constructive, well-informed comments on Marginal Revolution, but I wouldn't call them the majority...

gonehome• 5 years ago

Tao has gotten a lot more public media attention for the most part (Netflix, shows, TV, news, etc.) than any of the others which remain more niche. I'd guess as a result the audiences of the others are better selected to lean more high quality.

sfsylvester• 5 years ago

There's a Netflix show about him?

Also there's plenty of shows and news about MU, SSC etc. I'm also surprised that Tao's rather specifically niche blog attracts such comments. Is it possible that the other blogs are just better moderated and Professor Tao doesn't need or care to?

fighterpilot• 5 years ago

Because Terry Tao is a celebrity. People find his blog after watching him on Youtube.

strikelaserclaw• 5 years ago

This is true, his video on gaps between prime numbers had over 2 million views. People find his genius fascinating even if they don't understand his work.

paulpauper9• 5 years ago

large foreign readership , so English is not a primary language. probably also a lot of spam comments that get through.

Those other sides also tend to have a fair share of low quality comments as well. A lot of troll bait or off topic stuff. I just don't read the comments, often I find that I am not missing out on much by not doing so.

drenvuk2• 5 years ago

You put etc. which leads me to believe you know of more good blogs. Can you please list them?

paulpauper9• 5 years ago

look at the blogrolls. they all link to each other. that's hwo to find related blogs. (or as Terrance Tao would probably call, a complete graph)

snakeboy2• 5 years ago

I'd second what the other poster said - your best bet are recommendations of blogs you like already.

Looking at my RSS feed, I'd also endorse Andrew Gelman's blog (applied stats), A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (history), and Applied Divinity Studies (rationalism à la ACX).

jonas21• 5 years ago

All blogs attract low-quality comments. Whether you see them is a function of how much effort is put into moderation. I'm just speculating, but Terry Tao probably has better things to do with his time.

Fk_ttao• 5 years ago

Does he still hate gays?

kenjackson• 5 years ago

This is off-topic, although I am curious -- what source do you have for this?

adem• 5 years ago

Look at the username, probably a troll.

cushychicken2• 5 years ago

If there's anyone I'll listen respectfully to about the value of hard, diligent work, it's Terence Tao.

Reminds me of Richard Hamming talking about his professional envy of John Tukey:

One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!

From "You and Your Research": https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

paulpauper9• 5 years ago

Remidns me of the 'cheat code' of reading a chapter ahead

TrackerFF• 5 years ago

TIL Bode, Hamming, Shannon, Tukey, et. al all worked at Bell Labs around the same time. Wonder what the culture must've been like, those are all household names in signal processing, control, information theory.

spenczar5• 5 years ago

Richard Hamming wrote a book, "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering", which - despite its name - is more or less a memoir of his own scientific career. It's a fun read if you're interested in that culture.

cushychicken2• 5 years ago

I did a double take the first time I read that passage from YAYR because I'd never properly realized that:

1. Bode was a person

2. He was alive in the past 100 years

Tukey was a legit fucking genius.

ZephyrBlu9• 5 years ago

If there's anyone I'll listen respectfully to about the value of hard, diligent work, it's Terence Tao.

Why? He is a genius, and most of us aren't geniuses.

vymague• 5 years ago

Ikr. The advice doesn't sound that convincing coming from the smartest man alive.

hycaria2• 5 years ago

He wrote eloquently about one of his failures in grad school iirc because he simply didn’t work enough nor seriously enough. Even though he is a genius there is quite a lot of work required.

beny23• 5 years ago

Of course the same applies not just in the field of maths. The same could be said about software engineering just swap “projects” for tickets…

TameAntelope7• 5 years ago

I've held for a long time that you must know the rules quite well before you're "allowed" to break them, and I think this reinforces my opinion on that.

Additionally, I think the obsession over "intelligence" and "natural ability" is vastly overstated, in general. It absolutely helps, and it compounds, to be smart, but a person who "works hard" is infinitely more valuable to their colleagues than a smart person who doesn't, and tries to rely on raw intellect.

My problem, and I wonder if others have this issue as well, is how hard it is to know these things intellectually, and also apply them to my life. I just cannot, for the life of me, maintain a "work hard" mindset. I'm still trying, but I very often fail at this, and its frustrating because I know how valuable it is to being good at what I do.

markus_zhang• 5 years ago

It really depends on what you define as natural abilities. The ability to work hard for 12 hours without break every day IMHO is as "natural" as having a good IQ.

zqna• 5 years ago

One attribute of having "high IQ" is being able to understand the vanity of working "hard".

albatross132• 5 years ago

It's kind of a double edged sword- I've worked with a few people that "work hard" and "get things done", only to find out once they leave (or go on vacation) that now we have to untangle a 600 line bash script that's integral to production.

I'm being a bit hyperbolic here, but the gist of my point is: not everyone who works hard is worth keeping around, especially if their hard work leads to an un-managable mess in the future.

dimitrios1• 5 years ago

I used to think like this too, but now-a-days, it's more like "What a luxury to be in a position where you get paid to untangle a 600 line bash script"

That is, usually these few hard workers are typically the ones responsible for getting a company to profitability precisely because of their GSD attitude. Now that the company has some runway, the architecture and refactoring can proceed.

bobfromsweden• 5 years ago

Yeah, this is probably a different kind of "hard work" than what the author is talking about. There's some people who work hard for the sake of results (hitting certain numbers, clearing tickets/stories, etc).

There's a different sort of hard work involved in achieving deep mastery over something. Reading, researching, building and testing ideas... it takes hard work to become an expert at something, but I guess you're far more likely to see the former type of hard work than this.

a9h74j• 5 years ago

Why not rotate their assignments as a matter of policy. They might do a deep dive and fix something no one bothers to fix on a similar assignment. But then it is due dilligence to have another look at their work. I know this sounds theoretical compared to practice, but it seems to be on the level of separating conceptual or design breakthoughs from production-izing code.

gautamdivgi• 5 years ago

The obvious question is why this wasn’t caught and rectified in code review? This seems to be as much a failure due to lack of oversight as opposed to the failure of the person who created the mess.

a13692099932• 5 years ago

How is that hyperbolic? 600 lines is pretty short for a (longest-involved-in-this-project) un-managable mess of a production-critical bash script. I've seen several well upwards of 6000 lines.

paulpauper9• 5 years ago

Additionally, I think the obsession over "intelligence" and "natural ability" is vastly overstated, in general. It absolutely helps, and it compounds, to be smart, but a person who "works hard" is infinitely more valuable to their colleagues than a smart person who doesn't, and tries to rely on raw intellect.

That may be true for something like digging a ditch, but IQ is needed to make those necessary logical leaps for more abstract matters. Only hard work is like adding 1+2+3....n. Having a high IQ is knowing the shortcut to sum it instantly.

542458• 5 years ago

So, so little of most people’s work is deep abstract thought like that. I used to have this research assistant - she was from an entirely unrelated arts major, and was a bit… well, let’s say not terribly book-smart (which she was very upfront about). We ended up with her due to some last minute issues with other candidates. But holy smokes could she ever focus. She could sit down for hours and hours and process way more material (reviewing data, publications, participant communications) than anybody else because she didn’t get sidetracked. What she didn’t know she knew to ask and get clarification on. She would work circles around many “smarter” RAs because of her amazing work ethic. And this isn’t digging ditches, this is honest-to-goodness academic research.

oso2k• 5 years ago

Knowing a preemptive shortcut is also "working hard".

1) Knowing when to apply previous experience is a skill that requires work and practice. 2) Someone else knowing a shortcut that I don't know means they worked hard when I was not observing them.

osigurdson• 5 years ago

Do you mean discovering the formula independently (i.e. as Gauss did as a child) or simply knowing that the formula exists?

TameAntelope7• 5 years ago

The whole point of the submission is that even when high IQ is required, you also need to "work hard" to do anything substantial.

The common thread is "work hard", not "be smart", but people obsess over intelligence/natural gifts, and consistently underestimate the "ditch diggers".

Jobs was a ditch digger.

Gates was a ditch digger.

Musk is a ditch digger.

PG is a ditch digger.

Tao is a ditch digger.

Jordan was a ditch digger.

Woods was a ditch digger.

Carlsen is a ditch digger.

Some (all) of them also are naturally gifted, but their success is due to their ability to "work hard", or at least that's what I've read them say over and over again. Maybe I and they are all wrong about it, I'm open to that possibility, but theres a consistent theme that every successful person I can think of repeats when asked, and it's some variation on "work hard".

PartiallyTyped2• 5 years ago

Having high IQ is not knowing the shortcuts but being able to identify them.

Fact of the matter is that we make progress when collective effort is put onto something. Not everyone of us is a Terry Tao, or John von Neumann, but we can at least exploit our comparable advantage and help those better than us. Sucking your ego sucks but coming to terms with our inherent limits is freeing.

finolex1• 5 years ago

Hardwork exposes and primes you to the techniques needed to make those big creative,logical leaps. Nothing is ever discovered truly independently.

6gvONxR4sf7o2• 5 years ago

I've been learning to draw lately. It's amazing how much of what we presume to be natural ability is "just" the product of endless work. During my day job, I do math and it's the same. People say "I'm not a math person," but that's as stupid as "I can't draw." It's self fulfilling.

Personally, I prefer "work diligently" over "work hard" because the most useful mental model for me is that it's a marathon, not a sprint. The idea is to go far, not fast.

davegauer• 5 years ago

This is spot on. How many people who believe they do not have the ability to draw have ever actually put deliberate practice into it?

I can't sit down at a piano and play a song, not because I'm incapable of it, but because I've never put any effort into learning how.

nicbou• 5 years ago

I saw this in university. You passed the physics exam by studying hard and practicing. People who put in the work got the results. There was no just getting it.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 5 years ago

I've held for a long time that you must know the rules quite well before you're "allowed" to break them, and I think this reinforces my opinion on that.

I had an art teacher that pointed this out about Picasso. He got famous for his Cubist/Abstract work, but he was actually an excellent realist.

giantg24• 5 years ago

It's probably good advice, and maybe my dissent is just due to my burn out, but...

I'm tired of hearing "work hard". Very often, working hard does not lead to success. It sure as shit didn't work out that way for me. There are many people who do not work hard and make tons of money in things like NFT, crypto, securities, office politics, scams, etc. It seems like luck is the shared variable... of which I have none.

spoonjim2• 5 years ago

His advice isn’t for how to get rich in crypto, it’s for how to succeed in academic mathematics. I can’t imagine that anyone has ever “lucked” their way into that.

giantg24• 5 years ago

It's not luck alone. You can still work hard in math and fail. Didn't get the grant you needed - tough luck. Want tenure? Better be ready to play politics. Etc

paulpauper9• 5 years ago

same principle applies. a lot of people vying for something in which few can succeed

sdenton4• 5 years ago

Hard work is necessary but not sufficient.

Picking the right problems to work on is also necessary, and difficult to get right. Worming in on a hard unsolved problem that is eventually incredibly important is the scientific equivalent of winning the lottery, and we know lots of examples of this. Recently, mRNA vaccines, neural networks, and the twin primes conjecture come to mind. But there are doubtless many, many other examples of people working on a possibly-fundamental problem which never actually break through, and we never hear about it.

But I would argue it's still worth making a concerted effort to identify good problems to solve, and specifically thinking about what makes a good 'hard problem.' It's much easier to make progress in an under-studied area, simply because the low hanging fruit haven't been eaten yet. The danger, of course, is that understudied things may be understudied for a reason: they're not actually relevant to anything else, or there's some secret impediment and many others have already failed.

By contrast, cracking away at ridiculous subproblems from the last generation of academics is almost always a dead end, imo; you're competing with people who already know the field extremely well, the low hanging fruit has been picked, and the obvious roads to relevance have probably already been well-explored. Unsolved problems in a long-standing discipline are often unsolved because the right tools are missing or it's impossible within the existing paradigm... Or the problem is just irrelevant, relative to the amount of effort needed to solve it.

ramble ramble ramble

didibus10• 5 years ago

Nowadays people extend luck to include:

- Your genetics - Your intrinsic abilities - Your intrinsic tastes - Your parents - The teachers you had - The time you were born in - The environment you were born in - Etc.

So for example for mathematics you'd assume you need some predisposed genetics, you need some good education towards it, access to books and material, you need to be someone who loves doing math, you need to be in a position to have the time to dedicate to math (so access to food, shelter, etc.)

Since all these things are out of your control, the question becomes, what if you bad lucked in all of them, can you still, through sheer hard work, make a valuable contributions to the field of mathematics (and not by luck of hitting your head, or stumbling randomly on a key fact), but simply from your constant effort towards it?

But I'd say I think the author presupposes you've been mostly lucky already, and is talking about how to go beyond that luck, and achieve even more gains with what you do have control over.

mattnewton• 5 years ago

The way I look at it, luck is a very important variable, but it's one outside your control almost by definition, so it's not worth writing about how to change it.

So if you can't load the dice what can you do to get those high rolls? Well, maybe you can roll the dice more often (try more avenues, work harder), maybe the dice aren't all equal and you can observe many dice and pick the ones that happen to be paying out higher than you would expect if they were truly fair (market research), or something else.. I think people write about all those things not to claim that the dice rolls don't matter but because there are things that are both controllable and matter.

I agree with the burnout though, it can be hard to keep playing when you feel like a high roll is "due" but can't get one. I feel like some part of this is how we are wired, to solve the multi-armed bandit problems that life present us.

But what do I know, my rolls haven't been very high. I wish you luck in beating the burnout.

mindentropy4• 5 years ago

I have come to the conclusion that working hard is basically rolling the dice. You can roll your dice in a single game or change games or even multiple games simultaneously.

The thing is it is impossible to know if will be lucky or not. So the only way to know the truth is to roll the dice.

paulpauper9• 5 years ago

Bezos and Elon Musk derived much more mileage from their hard work in their 20s and 30s than someone who works at McDonald's. Such is life.

burntoutfire• 5 years ago

He also mentions setting realistic expectations. So, not "work hard to get rich" or "work hard to have a breakthrough scientific finding" (as there's too much involved there) but perhaps "work hard to be appreciated enough to make very good money" or "work hard so that I can make an non-trivial addition to my field of study" etc.

Also, if you're not really motivated by anything working hard can get you, then there's no point in hard work. Most people hate hard work and it's not worth it for them, hence they coast doing the minimum that doesn't get them fired. It's a perfectly valid life strategy, although the American religion of workoholism treats it as heresy (while millions of people practice it, feeling unnecessary guilt doing it).

giantg24• 5 years ago

I would love hard work if it actually resulted in something. I'm not making very good money. I'm not making meaningful contributions to my field. I'm not even in a position to do either. The problem is, hard work is rarely rewarded beyond some words. If it's not rewarded and I'm not in a position to make an impact, then there's no point.

didibus10• 5 years ago

Bingo!

It's been a while since I looked into it, but last time I checked, I couldn't find any evidence behind "hard work".

This article kind of sums it up: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-success-come...

If you wake up in the morning full of vim and vigor, bounding out the door and into the world to take your shot, you didn't choose to be that way

Your coworkers that come into work early ready to crush through the workload in anticipation, and when the day is over, can't find the will to stop working, because frankly there is nothing outside their work that they are more passionate and excited about so they keep working. Well they are not finding it hard to do so, it's the opposite in fact, they'll find it hard to not work and do other things.

In your case, I think the conclusion is important as well:

What if you've been unlucky in life? There should be consolation in the fact that studies show that what is important in the long run is not success so much as living a meaningful life. And that is the result of having family and friends, setting long-range goals, meeting challenges with courage and conviction, and being true to yourself.

Success is overated, and I've known people where success actually hid a deeper loss of enjoying life without self-judgement and constant comparison to others.

reasonabl_human• 5 years ago

Thanks, needed to hear this today.

mindentropy4• 5 years ago

And that is the result of having family and friends, setting long-range goals, meeting challenges with courage and conviction, and being true to yourself.

You need luck to not have broken families and friends. Sustaining a family is so fragile these days.

ramraj073• 5 years ago

Working hard for money, or even recognition, doesn’t always end well. The generalization of what he said from my perspective is that one should work hard to better themselves and do things they want to do, well.

It can be math, biology, coding, music, woodworking, anything. If you’re convinced that you’re quite good at what you’re doing and you only work 9-5 on your skills and projects, then it means you’re either developing crud apps, or you’re ignorant of what you actually don’t know. Again both are perfectly fine if that’s all you want from your career or hobby, but if it comes to questioning working hard in a generalized sense at the least you should preface it with your choices in this regard.

P_I_Staker3• 5 years ago

"Grind yourself to a pulp for someone else's profit or else you're lazy and a bad person"

- Everyone in the USA

unholiness• 5 years ago

Seems to have the hacker news hug of death. Cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Tr5R5J...

jarenmf• 5 years ago

Reading alone would take some serious hard work. To make any meaningful contribution in any field you have to do some serious reading (and understanding) to bring yourself up to date with the field.

bserge• 5 years ago

On a related note, this always trickles down to low level managers who then proceed to tell it to the floor workers.

Trying to motivate a cleaner, assembly operative, driver, cashier, warehouse operative, packer and other low level workers with it is like telling them to go fuck themselves.

It sounds like bullshit. It is bullshit. No one fucking loves these jobs. There's nothing to aspire to. Working hard means just killing yourself faster (but not fast enough).

paulpauper9• 5 years ago

what if you work hard and derive meaning from your work

themacguffinman3• 5 years ago

I can certainly understand how one can derive meaning from a trade or profession, but I would find it difficult to believe that anyone could really do that for menial jobs like a cashier or warehouse packer. These jobs are dead ends, they don't have a meaningful spectrum of quality and you're little more than a warm body.

A comedian (David Mitchell) once joked that he's proud of the UK's terrible service reputation. It doesn't seem honest or appropriate for service staff to be so happy and enthusiastic, why would they be? There's very little to be happy about.

hellbannedguy• 5 years ago

You would think the average HN'er wouldn't fall for it, but they do.

The rich have been telling the poor how to live their lives forever.

Jesus being the exception. (He wasen't rich)

I only get offended by wealthy boys giving their midlife, or old age, success speech

Or, thinking they can advise on art, philosophy, or writing, because they have a mouthpiece.

Every one of them leaves out the emphatic wealthy father who knows how difficult it is to make it big in a very competitstive system.

P_I_Staker3• 5 years ago

I thought I was the only one that got offended by that kind of thing, it's ridiculous. How have these people convinced themselves that they're actually better.

MaysonL• 5 years ago

I used to work at a company where the janitor, by working hard, and being willing to step up to opportunities he was offered, became a shift supervisor. Not every company is like that, true, maybe almost none are, but it can happen. Reminds me of the concept "return on luck" to go along with "return on investment".

n8cpdx• 5 years ago

Trying to motivate a cleaner, assembly operative, driver, cashier, warehouse operative, packer and other low level workers with it is like telling them to go fuck themselves.

This reads as true given how most jobs are currently organized/implemented. I don't think it has to be true though.

I used to work bagging groceries and pushing carts for a supermarket. I loved it. I worked quite hard and was recognized by customers for doing so. I personally enjoyed being able to help someone through great service.

Many of these jobs are naturally game-like (checkout the day before Thanksgiving = time trial). They are critical _essential_ positions.

These people probably don't love their jobs because they aren't treated as well as they should be. Realistically, bagging groceries is ~80-120% as hard as writing software (in terms of perceived effort); the software engineer shouldn't be making 5-20x more.

Making it clear that people are actually valued, by actually valuing them, makes a huge difference. Sadly, there are generations of MBAs who are allergic to the concept.

nonameiguess• 5 years ago

He is very specifically referring to putting in the work to achieve breakthroughs in graduate-level and higher mathematics here. No one in the that field is driving factory workers to actually produce the proof breakthroughs for them.

P_I_Staker3• 5 years ago

To be honest, I don't see it as that different as a developer. None of my work makes the world a better place, and I work on products most people would see as essential and important. I want to be vague, but it's not like we make useless junk. The people pushing this garbage will be the ones seeing the benefits, I'll get a pat on the back if I'm lucking (and maybe like 1-3gs which will go right in my 401k)

Realistically, at mid-to-senior level, I've already seen all the significant changes to class that I will likely see. Hard work isn't even the main way to get ahead in the corporate world. Politics and social BS will have way more sway, and besides that, you just have to ensure that you don't have a reputation for incompetence (however exceptionalism is optional). Your mileage may vary, but in any case, hard work only gets you so far.

While I might be able to squeeze out an extra 10 or 20 grand here and there, salaries don't really go down, and it's not likely for that incremental improvement to have much of an effect. You know what will effect me though? Sacrificing the little personal time I do have.

It will only make me crazier and less healthy, by causing me to skip self-care and socialization. Something has to give, and I will not be seeing my friends, skip working out and cooking, or my house will be a disaster. I've done the math and 40 hours plus cooking/cleaning/exercise, basically yields 0 free hours, and whatever remains has to be use to relax or hang with friends.

It's just a bigger middle finger to the kind of low paying jobs you're talking about, because at least in engineering, you get a bigger payout for that sacrifice, and a chance of advancement. That's no small thing, and I'm not trying to say things are exactly the same, but it's not so different.

OtomotO• 5 years ago

I will always work smart, rather than working hard.

I don't define myself or my self worth solely via the work I do.

Always. But then again, in my culture it's not as extreme as in other parts of the world.

didibus10• 5 years ago

I don't really know if I believe in hard work. I feel more inclined to see things from the motivation school of thought. When you're motivated, all work is easy. The "hard" feeling comes from pushing through doing something you are not motivated to do.

And the thing is, I don't know if anyone is successful at that. I feel most success comes from people who had the motivation for it. Can you force yourself or others through work that they're not motivated to do and actually expect it to deliver on breakthroughs?

themacguffinman3• 5 years ago

I'm fairly confident that when the article says "hard work", it just means "a lot of work". The article later mentions that more motivation will help you work harder.

The point is that motivated or not, high quality output requires a lot of work. Working a lot on a particular thing is still going to be easier for some and harder for others.

didibus10• 5 years ago

Ya, I agree with you 100%. But I think this is the problem with calling it "hard work". If working a lot on thing X is something I don't struggle with, and in fact I enjoy and find fun, and am really motivated to do, than it's actually pretty easy for me to put in a lot of time and effort into it. Isn't it weird then that I'd go and tell others I'm a "hard worker"?

I just find it a bit deceiving. Like people can hear that and think, damn, this person is able to work through something they hate doing, have no motivation to work on, and where there are other things they'd rather do, yet somehow they can power through using raw will and focus on putting tons of time and effort into it? Well damn, I must be a weak minded person then.

Personally, I think that second interpretation is common, and it does more harm than good in my opinion. Every time I have put a lot of time and effort into something, I either really enjoyed the thing, or I was really motivated by the outcome. In both cases, that made it pretty easy for me to put in a lot of work.

mym19903• 5 years ago

I actually believe the complete opposite. People who rely on motivation to get them through to the finish line in long term situations probably never make it there. Motivation is a very fleeting feeling unless you find something that utterly sets your soul on fire, and I would almost say it is a crutch for many. Sometimes you're going to get up in the morning and you're just going to have to push through. And there will almost always be small/medium/large pieces of work that are simply not fun(and you can't always delegate). The people who succeed will be the ones that have developed a mindset of resilience and just doing what needs to get done.

didibus10• 5 years ago

Might depend what you mean by motivation. I'm using it to mean both your enjoyment of the work and your desire for its outcome. So I see it as a function of that. Having more of one could offset the lack of the other, but ideally you'd have plenty of both.

If you really like doing something, you'll get good at it, and some stuff might not involve other work you might not like. For example, there's a game I really like playing, I'm quite good at it, I don't care for any outcome, just like doing the work, so putting in time and effort to get good was pretty easy.

Other things, I really want the outcome, I'll go out of my way, do things I don't really like doing, because I'm motivated by the result, still feels easy because of that.

Now, okay, sometimes there's some things you really hate doing, but it's needed for something you want. I think those are the tricky one, because you need to remind yourself of your goal, how much you want it, and all that, but what you're doing there is motivating yourself. So ya, in my view, motivation is key.

chrisweekly• 5 years ago

See also the classic book "The Hacker Ethic" by Pikka Himanen (foreword by Linus Torvalds).

https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4690

brailsafe• 5 years ago

So if you are already a child prodigy, born into a family of prodigies, specifically within Mathematics, and you want that PHD, gotta keep grinding.

courtf3• 5 years ago

It's also a lot easier to work hard when you are handed access to every academic resource on the planet before you hit puberty. His life story is the most blatant counterexample to this article imaginable. Sounds like a case of deep denial.

wheelinsupial2• 5 years ago

Maybe an article he wrote called A Close Call: How a Near Failure Propelled Me to Succeed [1] might be of interest to you.

"After many nerve-wracking minutes of closed-door de- liberation, the examiners did decide to (barely) pass me; however, my advisor gently explained his disappointment at my performance, and how I needed to do better in the future. I was still largely in a state of shock—this was the first time I had performed poorly on an exam that I was genuinely interested in performing well in."

"In retrospect, nearly failing the generals was probably the best thing that could have happened to me at the time."

[1] https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202007/rnoti-p1007.pdf

ramraj073• 5 years ago

No ones saying anyone here has had the privilege of being born with a mind comparable to Terry’s, but a charitable (at the least) reading of his thoughts would be about working hard to better yourself, wherever you are today. If you’re just a programmer writing good code, you can work hard (not necessarily for your boss) to get better at it. Or not. Your choice. But given the day and age we live in you cannot keep insisting about the lack of opportunity if all you’re talking about is getting better yourself.

alexashka• 5 years ago

It's interesting to see what qualified as worthy of a blog post not so long ago.

It takes time and effort to do difficult tasks? You shouldn't overwork?

What new insights, let me blog about it :)

For those who don't know, the 8 hour work days and holidays were talked about by Adam Smith more than 200 years ago. The reason that system was put in place was because letting people work as much as they wanted led to over-exertion and injuries, lowering productivity.

That was for physical labor by the way. In another 200 years, I expect people to finally realize that thinking is harder than repetitive physical labor and one can't do more than a few hours of it, per day.

Until then we'll have 'burn out' blog posts and people reading and posting on HackerNews/reddit/twitter during work hours.

m0zg• 5 years ago

Same thing in a lot fewer words, for "visual thinkers" among us: https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

This holds up really well, in any STEM field, not just mathematics. Celebrate those dimples on the surface of human knowledge, if you can, in fact, even make them. Very few people can, and our future depends on them.

tacojimjennings• 5 years ago

I just come here for the self help blog posts honestly

keithalewis• 5 years ago

I work hard to be lazy. Put in the effort once and keep leveraging off of it.

ramraj073• 5 years ago

That’s exactly what Terry advices against. Not because you owe the company or anyone else that, but it’s possible you might regret not doing so yourself. My advisor described it as “being too smart for your own good.”

ChrisMarshallNY2• 5 years ago

At the end of the article, he references "The Gap" by Ira Glass. Someone made an excellent video, based on that[0].

Worth the watch (IMNSHO). It's very short, and very encouraging.

[0] https://vimeo.com/85040589

France_is_bacon• 5 years ago

"It is also important to direct your effort in a fruitful direction rather than a fruitless one"

This is actually the most critical sentence in the entire article.

I read an article somewhere, maybe 25 or 30 years ago, that was about this exact topic.

Some successful scientist, I don't even remember his name now, was asked about his success.

He said that others worked just as hard and diligently. But his skill was in selecting the projects that had a high degree of probability of success. He would watch others in his profession and see how they made horrible choices in the selection of their work. The unsuccessful people made a series of unwise choices. Tilting at windmills that had exceptionally poor chance of success, areas where there was no funding available or very difficult to get funding, and all sorts of other problems.

The same thing is true with everything. For example, lots of people start businesses that are shitty selection right off the bat - they have almost zero chance of success before they even begin. All teh perfect execution and hard work will be for naught. The founder has blinders on.

You always hear about the successes. People always say false things like, the idea is 1%, execution is 99% of it. Not true. It's more like, the idea is worth 99%, and the execution is the other 99% of success. Trust me, I've seen a LOT of great execution on shit ideas and the company goes down the drain. You just never hear of them. And by the way, this is in regards to ideas that are actually have a corporation started around them, as opposed to just aimlessly talking about ideas.

Anyways, take what you will from what I just wrote.

Work Hard (2007)

Related Stories