How to Work Hard - by Paul Graham
How to Work Hard - by Paul Graham
If you want to do great things, you’ll have to work very hard.
One didn’t always have to work super hard to do well in school. Some adults seem to do some things almost effortlessly. Was there some way to evade hard work through sheer brilliance? There isn’t.
Some subjects might seem easy because the schools have low standards. The reason that some famous adults seem to do things effortlessly is years of practice; they make it look easy.
Of course, those famous adults usually have a lot of natural ability too.
Ingredients to great work
There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort.
If you have just two of these ingredients, you can do pretty well. 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.
For example, Bill Gates 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. 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. If I have to choose, P. G. Wodehouse would probably get my vote for best English writer of the 20th century. Certainly no one ever made it look easier. But no one ever worked harder. At 74, he wrote
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.
Sounds a bit extreme, you think? And yet Bill Gates sounds even more extreme. Not one day off in ten years? These two had about as much natural ability as anyone could have, and yet they also worked about as hard as anyone could work. You need both.
That seems so obvious, and yet in practice we find it slightly hard to grasp.
There’s a faint xor between talent and hard work.
It comes partly from popular culture, where it seems to run very deep, and partly from the fact that the outliers are so rare. If great talent and great drive are both rare, then people with both are rare squared.
Most people you meet who have a lot of one will have less of the other. But you’ll need both if you want to be an outlier yourself. 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.
Defined vs Undefined goals, External vs Self-imposed goals
It is straightforward to work hard if you have clearly defined, externally imposed goals, as you do in school.
There is some technique to it: you have to learn not to lie to yourself, not to procrastinate (which is a form of lying to yourself), not to get distracted, and not to give up when things go wrong.
But this level of discipline seems to be within the reach of quite young children, if they want it.
If you want to do really great things, you will have to learn how to work toward goals that are neither clearly defined nor externally imposed.
The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working without anyone telling you to. You can’t be sure you are getting anywhere when you are working hard, but you can be sure you are getting nowhere when you are not, and it feels awful. Idealness has to be distasteful.
When we are kids, we enjoy the feeling of achievement when we learn or do something new. As we grow older, this morphs into a feeling of disgust when we are not achieving anything.
Several people get serious about work around the age of 13. Strangely enough, the biggest obstacle to getting serious about work was probably school, which made work (what they called work) seem boring and pointless.
We have to learn what real work is
We have to learn what real work is before we could wholeheartedly desire to do it.
That takes a while, because even in college, a lot of the work is pointless; there are entire departments that are pointless.
As we learn the shape of real work, we find that our desire to do it slots into it as if they are been made for each other.
Most people have to learn what work is before they can love it. Hardy wrote eloquently about this in A Mathematician's Apology:
I do not remember having felt, as a boy, any passion for mathematics, and such notions as I may have had of the career of a mathematician were far from noble. I thought of mathematics in terms of examinations and scholarships: I wanted to beat other boys, and this seemed to be the way in which I could do so most decisively.
He didn’t learn what math was really about till part way through college, when he read Jordan's Cours d'analyse.
I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that remarkable work, the first inspiration for so many mathematicians of my generation, and learnt for the first time as I read it what mathematics really meant.
There are two separate kinds of fakeness you need to learn to discount in order to understand what real work is. One is the kind Hardy encountered in school. Subjects get distorted when they’re adapted to be taught to kids — often so distorted that they’re nothing like the work done by actual practitioners. The other kind of fakeness is intrinsic to certain types of work. Some types of work are inherently bogus, or at best mere busywork.
There’s a kind of solidity to real work. It’s not all writing the Principia, but it all feels necessary. That’s a vague criterion, but it’s deliberately vague, because it has to cover a lot of different types.
You have to learn your limit to working hard
Once you know the shape of real work, you have to learn how many hours a day to spend on it.
You can’t solve this problem by simply working every waking hour, because in many kinds of work, there’s a point beyond which the quality of the result will start to decline.
That limit varies depending on the type of work and the person. Different kinds of work have different limits. The limit for the harder types of writing or programming could be about five hours a day. Whereas others like running a startup, we could work all the time - atleast at the beginning.
The only way to find the limit is by crossing it.
Cultivate a sensitivity to the quality of the work you’re doing, and then you’ll notice if it decreases because you’re working too hard.
Honesty is critical here, in both directions: you have to notice when you’re being lazy, but also when you’re working too hard.
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.
Finding the limit of working hard is a constant, ongoing process, not something you do just once. Both the difficulty of the work and your ability to do it can vary hour to hour, so you need to be constantly judging both how hard you’re trying and how well you’re doing.
Trying hard doesn’t mean constantly pushing yourself to work, though. There may be some people who do, but I think my experience is fairly typical, and I only have to push myself occasionally when I’m starting a project or when I encounter some sort of check. That’s when I’m in danger of procrastinating. But once I get rolling, I tend to keep going.
What keeps me going depends on the type of work. When I was working on Viaweb, I was driven by fear of failure. I barely procrastinated at all then, because there was always something that needed doing, and if I could put more distance between me and the pursuing beast by doing it, why wait? Whereas what drives me now, writing essays, is the flaws in them. Between essays I fuss for a few days, like a dog circling while it decides exactly where to lie down. But once I get started on one, I don’t have to push myself to work, because there’s always some error or omission already pushing me.
We have to make some amount of effort to focus on important topics. Many problems have a hard core at the center, surrounded by easier stuff at the edges. Working hard means aiming toward the center to the extent you can. Some days you may not be able to; some days you’ll only be able to work on the easier, peripheral stuff. But you should always be aiming as close to the center as you can without stalling.
Figuring out Problems to work on
The bigger question of what to do with your life is one of these problems with a hard core. There are important problems at the center, which tend to be hard, and less important, easier ones at the edges. So as well as the small, daily adjustments involved in working on a specific problem, you’ll occasionally have to make big, lifetime-scale adjustments about which type of work to do. And the rule is the same:
working hard means aiming toward the center — toward the most ambitious problems.
By center, though, I mean the actual center, not merely the current consensus about the center. The consensus about which problems are most important is often mistaken, both in general and within specific fields. If you disagree with it, and you’re right, that could represent a valuable opportunity to do something new.
The more ambitious types of work will usually be harder, but although you should not be in denial about this, neither should you treat difficulty as an infallible guide in deciding what to do. If you discover some ambitious type of work that’s a bargain in the sense of being easier for you than other people, either because of the abilities you happen to have, or because of some new way you’ve found to approach it, or simply because you’re more excited about it, by all means work on that.
Some of the best work is done by people who find an easy way to do something hard.
As well as learning the shape of real work, you need to figure out which kind you’re suited for. And that doesn’t just mean figuring out which kind your natural abilities match the best; it doesn’t mean that if you’re 7 feet tall, you have to play basketball. What you’re suited for depends not just on your talents but perhaps even more on your interests.
A deep interest in a topic makes people work harder than any amount of discipline can.
It can be harder to discover your interests than your talents. There are fewer types of talent than interest, and they start to be judged early in childhood, whereas interest in a topic is a subtle thing that may not mature till your twenties, or even later. The topic may not even exist earlier. Plus there are some powerful sources of error you need to learn to discount. 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 difficulty of figuring out what to work on varies enormously from one person to another. That’s one of the most important things I’ve learned about work since I was a kid. As a kid, you get the impression that everyone has a calling, and all they have to do is figure out what it is. That’s how it works in movies, and in the streamlined biographies fed to kids. Sometimes it works that way in real life. Some people figure out what to do as children and just do it, like Mozart. But others, like Newton, turn restlessly from one kind of work to another. Maybe in retrospect we can identify one as their calling — we can wish Newton spent more time on math and physics and less on alchemy and theology — but this is an illusion induced by hindsight bias. There was no voice calling to him that he could have heard.
So while some people’s lives converge fast, there will be others whose lives never converge. And for these people, figuring out what to work on is not so much a prelude to working hard as an ongoing part of it, like one of a set of simultaneous equations. For these people, the process I described earlier has a third component: along with measuring both how hard you’re working and how well you’re doing, you have to think about whether you should keep working in this field or switch to another. If you’re working hard but not getting good enough results, you should switch. It sounds simple expressed that way, but in practice it’s very difficult. You shouldn’t give up on the first day just because you work hard and don’t get anywhere. You need to give yourself time to get going. But how much time? And what should you do if work that was going well stops going well? How much time do you give yourself then?
What even counts as good results? That can be really hard to decide. If you’re exploring an area few others have worked in, you may not even know what good results look like.
History is full of examples of people who misjudged the importance of what they were working on.
The best test of whether it’s worthwhile to work on something is whether you find it interesting. That may sound like a dangerously subjective measure, but it’s probably the most accurate one you’re going to get. You’re the one working on the stuff. Who’s in a better position than you to judge whether it’s important, and what’s a better predictor of its importance than whether it’s interesting?
For this test to work, though, you have to be honest with yourself. Indeed, that’s the most striking thing about the whole question of working hard: how at each point it depends on being honest with yourself.
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.