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).
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."