19 ms·

Hard work vs. Long work (2011)

208 points by arto 6y ago

siscia 6y ago
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Df6ZI4_GhcgJ:https://seths.blog/2011/05/hard-work-vs-long-work/+&cd=2&hl=it&ct=clnk&gl=ch&client=ubuntu https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Df6ZI4...
k__ 6y ago
Important point: "Hard work" doesn't mean it has to be feel hard for you to do it. If you have fun setting up a K8s cluster, that's still hard work.
- hpoe 6y ago
  One thing I've found interesting is that the first time I do something related to tech as long as it isn't mind boggling frustrating cough Oracle cough I enjoy learning it. The second and third times it's tolerable, but if I have to keep doing something repeatedly the only way I can enjoy it any longer is by listening to an audiobook while doing it or by automating it. As soon as I set myself to automating I realize that I like it again because now I am interacting with it in a new way.
  - majkinetor 6y ago
    Oracle isn't even fun when automating.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      But seeing a modern ecommerce platform fully integrated with Oracle payments, invoices, inventory, and shipping is pretty satisfying when it's done.
      - majkinetor 6y ago
        Satisfying for Oracle overlords for sure. Always remember, Oracle doesn't have customers, only hostages!
- hcarvalhoalves 6y ago
  Not sure setting up a k8s cluster qualifies as "hard work" the way the author describes it. It seems by "hard work" he means work requiring novelty, creativity or insight, not simply intellectual work.
  - Alex3917 6y ago
    Or emotional labor. But yeah, setting up k8s would not qualify. I thought there was an older version of the same general riff in Fast Company, which I can't find right now, but here is a blog post about a version that appeared in Free Prize Inside: https://educationinnovation.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/06/education-difficult-work-vs-hard-work.html https://educationinnovation.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/06/ed...
    - wolco 6y ago
      It could be for someone who doesn't know what k8s is.
- alfonsodev 6y ago
  yes I think that's key, I imagine a typical 2 axis analysis for this, where one axis is hard/long and the other is passionate or not passionate about it. But I think there are more dimensions to it, as the article points out sometimes we shy away from hard work, because it's uncertain and your identity is on stake, you can fail, and I agree it takes that leap. I'd say it is a leap of faith, because sometimes you don't know if it is hard work that is relevant, and worth, or not, I've never been an academic, but I guess many PhD feel that way ?
- agumonkey 6y ago
  I keep bouncing about the idea of work. Producing the same exact thing can be thought as insufferable hell or unstoppable desired moment depending on the context. I also think it's crucial for society and humans. Unless most of us are wired to seek sadomasochism.
bschne 6y ago
Somewhat related, from Andy Matuschak whose notes were on here earlier today, on the feeling of progress when doing open-ended work: https://blog.andymatuschak.org/post/159979927467/satisfaction-and-progress-in-open-ended-work https://blog.andymatuschak.org/post/159979927467/satisfactio...
yamrzou 6y ago
https://archive.is/nGVxb https://archive.is/nGVxb
martindbp 6y ago
I prefer the labels "predictable" vs "unpredictable" work. For example, I've been experience the difference between research and back-end web dev work lately, and the main difference is that for research you don't know if it will pan out, while for back-end work you're almost always making incremental progress towards the end-goal. But I wouldn't necessarily call research "harder", it's just different. It's usually more difficult conceptually, but there's also way less stuff you need to keep in your head at the same time.
- Tervis 6y ago
  I think the hard part is that unpredictable work has to be done more with discipline. Predictable work often originates from external requirements, and the external interest to the work gives you motivation. However, unpredictable work requires more intrinsic motivation (or discipline), as there is no external interest until you get some results.
watertom 6y ago
Using his definitions, I hate long work. I avoid long work, I'll take hard work always.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Our jobs revolve around convincing machines to do the long work for us. I don't think I'll ever understand why so many of us are perfectly content doing the same long work over and over again. Do you know what computers are for?
  - james_s_tayler 6y ago
    Never really thought of computers as needing convincing but come to think of it it takes about as many tries to convince my computer to do want I want as it takes to convince my son. Hmm..
bullen 6y ago
What about "deep" work? The kind of work that requires you to understand the fundamentals of a complex system to be able to simplify/modify it for the better.
- datameta 6y ago
  I think understanding a system enough to modify/extend/repair it would be "wide" work. If one is dipping in thoroughly enough to truly understand all components and be able to build such a system that is also open to later modification - that is "deep" work.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
"You can work long, you can work hard and you can work smart, but you can only do 2 out of 3" -- source unknown, common among programmers on usenet in the 1990s
war1025 6y ago
I like this, but also on some level I feel like it's nothing more than inspirational "rah-rah" garbage. I wish he would have expanded on it. A great example of the distinction from my younger days: We had the game GranTurismo2 back when I was 12 or so. We wanted the really fancy "best" car in the game. The right way to get the good cars is to improve your skill and gain access to the higher level races that have bigger prizes. That's the "hard work" part. What we did instead was do one of the easy races over and over and over again for a couple days until we had enough saved up in the game to buy the car. That's "long work" It's stupid and boring and no fun. If you want a fulfilling life, go for the "hard work". Which I guess is also just a stupid "rah-rah" inspirational quip.
- umvi 6y ago
  There was an MMO game called "Kingdom of Loathing" I played back in 2006. The right way to get more money in the game is to improve your skills/equipment and gain access to the higher level areas that have bigger monsters/better loot. (hard work) What we did instead was manually create hundreds of new accounts, complete the tutorial level and then send the tutorial prize to the main account for selling on the open market (long work). Eventually I figured out how to create an "autoit" script that automated the process of creating a new account, completing the tutorial, and then sending the goods over to the main account. The main account was getting very wealthy, but I should have known I needed to launder the ill-gotten gains somehow because an admin (Multi Czar) eventually caught on and all the accounts (including the main one) got banned.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - arsome 6y ago
    So does coding bots to do the long work for you count as hard work or long work? Because that's the kind of work I've always preferred.
    - nlbrown 6y ago
      Hard work takes over and replaces long work when innovation, new skills and modalities are center stage and repetitive tasks take a back seat. I'd consider any form of automation hard work.
Frost1x 6y ago
>Hard work is frightening. We shy away from hard work because inherent in hard work is risk. Hard work is hard because you might fail. You can’t fail at long work, you merely show up. You fail at hard work when you don’t make an emotional connection, or when you don’t solve the problem or when you hesitate. I disagree with this, at least what the author classifies as risk. I'm more than happy to take on challenging work, work I am emotionally connected to and want to see succeed--then fail. I can deal with failure and progress on just fine because I have pretty iron clad motivation. I've worked in R&D environments most my life and I can assure you, research has a lot of failure if you're doing it correctly. The risk that makes certain work "hard" vs others is that failure results in livelihood setbacks: not having food, not having a place to live, financial failure, health risks, not having any bit of job security, etc. Those to me are the real risks people shy away from when we talk about "hard" work. Give me a difficult/creative problem or task and I can try for hours, days, weeks, months, years... to find a solution, but only if I know at the end of the day I'll have a reasonably comfortable life. The way a lot of work is structured, I find "hard" work is that which has inherent livelihood risk to the person doing the work in some way, shape, or form. It could be health risk work (say a police officer), failed research resulting in lack of a job, or a poor new art collection that ruins the future career of an artist. Our society needs to learn to be more accepting to to a few more degrees of failure than the hypercompetiveness currently allows. Less and less failure is being acceptable and it's completely unrealistic to hold all humans to these standards. Yes, we should reward high risk success but should we punish every form of failure as we often do? Sure, laziness can be masked under failure and abuse this leniency, but so can success.
bluedino 6y ago
It’s like sports stars. You se the championship game on TV, but you don’t see the years of practicing, eating the right diet, all the sacrifices...
devmunchies 6y ago
This makes me think of war time vs peace time. During a war, the govt will put engineers and architects into an R&D incubator with all the resources they need. To the engineers, the fact that there is a war is irrelevant, they aren't paying attention to that, they're just focussing on innovation because it's their job. Couldn't this scenario be simulated, even without war? I think of bell labs. It strange that innovative environments, filled with hard work, aren't a priority until its a matter of life or death (of a company, nations, etc.) Related movie by studio Ghibli (engineers innovating during war time): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Rises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Rises
- ericmcer 6y ago
  Money is how we measure the worth of time spent. In that mindset doing hard, innovative work and failing is worse than doing nothing at all, because you lose both your time and money.
- njarboe 6y ago
  In war time patents are suspended or the government forces everyone to cross license. Along with the hard focused work, I think this is a big reason why tech advanced so much during WWI and WWII.
- jl2718 6y ago
  Not in my experience (JIEDDO/Paladin in OIF/OEF). The R&D lab seems like a peacetime concept. All the ideas, all the experimentation, all the hacks that turned into programs, came from the field, often lab guys that got sent forward. The labs had their part for sending new toys, but the pace was so much faster for hacking things together at the front lines.
- hpoe 6y ago
  Point of correction on Bell Labs. There was a war going on not a shooting shooty war, but a cold war that was motivating a lot of the research. In war time the reason there is so much focus and emphasis is because a country is fighting for its survival, it forces efficiency and results in a brutal manner, because if you don't succeeded and out think and out maneuver the enemy people die. In the Cold War the same tension and feeling of fighting for survival was present.
GCA10 6y ago
This is a useful distinction, but it this misses what's actually hard about "hard work." The risk of failure is only 20% of the issue. What's central is the fact that do hard work well, you need to temporarily tear apart the solution-forming systems that have served you adequately so far -- and put them back together in a different way. In the midst of this, there's genuine discomfort and nausea. Even if you know you'll eventually get it right, having everything in pieces on the floor is very jarring. Finding your way through a lot of missteps, near misses and roadblocks takes a special sort of perseverance. I've done this long enough in my work that I get mordant joy from tracking the misses. Versions 2, 2A, 2B and 2C were dead-ends. It's on to Versions 3, 3A, etc. Usually version 4E or so gets the job done. And it's elegant and I'm happy again. I had one epic struggle that went into the 7s. I ended up cracking it in a borrowed lab in Arizona, because the usual settings in NYC and CT were not getting me there. Being patient and persistent at times like that is hard.
- highfrequency 6y ago
  Sounds like some interesting experiences! Would be curious to hear more details about the project and the discomforts along the way
- dougmany 6y ago
  It is hard. After a few times around, you start to recognize the dreaded feeling. But then you realize you are closer to the other side than the way back and press on.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
there are two other salient differences between hard work and long work - hard work when the person is skillful enough to do it is energizing, long work is always draining.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Only if you're using someone else's definition of hard instead of your own. If by 'energizing' you mean morale-boosting, yes. But hard work is generally taxing. You are paying for long-term happiness with short term pain. Having slain a dragon on Thursday, you are likely to be in high spirits on Tuesday. But for the rest of the day and possibly tomorrow, you're may be sitting here doing menial tasks or reading documentation.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
allie1 6y ago
I think it’s what the “failure” would mean for a person that makes it hard, part of the fixed mindset Carol Dweck is talking about, i.e. only seeking validation of what one thinks of oneself.
thisisbrians 6y ago
Seth is always pithy and thus leaves a lot of room for interpretation, but I do find this an interesting prompt. "Hard" is, of course, very subjective and depends a lot on the person and the project. What's hard for me may not be hard for someone else due to skillset, personal risk, time pressure, mindset, etc. and vice versa. What's created hard work for me in the course of founding a startup is constantly balancing delivery timelines against a lack of resources and deep skills on the team. Having to invent my way out of situations I'm not technically qualified to handle where there is real risk to the business in being wrong or late has been harrowing, but also a very effective way to grow my skillset.
andersco 6y ago
It seems what is being called “hard work” here really is “expert work” which often can be no work at all, in that it rests on the shoulders of likely thousands of previous hours of long work, and can sometimes feel effortless. One seminal example of this Paula Scher’s 5 minute design of the Citigroup logo. https://link.medium.com/KuxBw6rJi9 https://link.medium.com/KuxBw6rJi9
amanzi 6y ago
I really love this graphic showing the difference between hard work and being productive: https://twitter.com/lizandmollie/status/1231605700960432128/photo/1 https://twitter.com/lizandmollie/status/1231605700960432128/...
naringas 6y ago
aka the toil vs the hustle
squibbles 6y ago
For those who are musically inclined -- When learning to play a musical instrument (including voice), the distinction between long work and hard work is the difference between spending time and making progress. Long work is mindless practice; hard work is identifying weaknesses and using targeted practice to improve. For those in marketing -- Long work is spending more on an advertising campaign; hard work is determining what increases the conversion rate. For those in computer science or mathematics -- Long work is implementing a brute force approach to calculating a specific result; hard work is generalizing the problem and generating a class of results. For students -- Long work is studying to pass a specific exam; hard work is internalizing the fundamental principles of a subject so you can derive answers regardless of the particular exam questions.
known 6y ago
The Self-Attribution Fallacy https://archive.is/VCuFO https://archive.is/VCuFO

208 points by arto 6y ago

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Df6ZI4_GhcgJ:https://seths.blog/2011/05/hard-work-vs-long-work/+&cd=2&hl=it&ct=clnk&gl=ch&client=ubuntu https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Df6ZI4...

k__ 6y ago

Important point: "Hard work" doesn't mean it has to be feel hard for you to do it. If you have fun setting up a K8s cluster, that's still hard work.

hpoe 6y ago
One thing I've found interesting is that the first time I do something related to tech as long as it isn't mind boggling frustrating cough Oracle cough I enjoy learning it. The second and third times it's tolerable, but if I have to keep doing something repeatedly the only way I can enjoy it any longer is by listening to an audiobook while doing it or by automating it. As soon as I set myself to automating I realize that I like it again because now I am interacting with it in a new way.
- majkinetor 6y ago
  Oracle isn't even fun when automating.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    But seeing a modern ecommerce platform fully integrated with Oracle payments, invoices, inventory, and shipping is pretty satisfying when it's done.
    - majkinetor 6y ago
      Satisfying for Oracle overlords for sure. Always remember, Oracle doesn't have customers, only hostages!
hcarvalhoalves 6y ago
Not sure setting up a k8s cluster qualifies as "hard work" the way the author describes it. It seems by "hard work" he means work requiring novelty, creativity or insight, not simply intellectual work.
- Alex3917 6y ago
  Or emotional labor. But yeah, setting up k8s would not qualify. I thought there was an older version of the same general riff in Fast Company, which I can't find right now, but here is a blog post about a version that appeared in Free Prize Inside: https://educationinnovation.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/06/education-difficult-work-vs-hard-work.html https://educationinnovation.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/06/ed...
  - wolco 6y ago
    It could be for someone who doesn't know what k8s is.
alfonsodev 6y ago
yes I think that's key, I imagine a typical 2 axis analysis for this, where one axis is hard/long and the other is passionate or not passionate about it. But I think there are more dimensions to it, as the article points out sometimes we shy away from hard work, because it's uncertain and your identity is on stake, you can fail, and I agree it takes that leap. I'd say it is a leap of faith, because sometimes you don't know if it is hard work that is relevant, and worth, or not, I've never been an academic, but I guess many PhD feel that way ?
agumonkey 6y ago
I keep bouncing about the idea of work. Producing the same exact thing can be thought as insufferable hell or unstoppable desired moment depending on the context. I also think it's crucial for society and humans. Unless most of us are wired to seek sadomasochism.

bschne 6y ago

Somewhat related, from Andy Matuschak whose notes were on here earlier today, on the feeling of progress when doing open-ended work: https://blog.andymatuschak.org/post/159979927467/satisfaction-and-progress-in-open-ended-work https://blog.andymatuschak.org/post/159979927467/satisfactio...

yamrzou 6y ago

https://archive.is/nGVxb https://archive.is/nGVxb

martindbp 6y ago

I prefer the labels "predictable" vs "unpredictable" work. For example, I've been experience the difference between research and back-end web dev work lately, and the main difference is that for research you don't know if it will pan out, while for back-end work you're almost always making incremental progress towards the end-goal. But I wouldn't necessarily call research "harder", it's just different. It's usually more difficult conceptually, but there's also way less stuff you need to keep in your head at the same time.

Tervis 6y ago
I think the hard part is that unpredictable work has to be done more with discipline. Predictable work often originates from external requirements, and the external interest to the work gives you motivation. However, unpredictable work requires more intrinsic motivation (or discipline), as there is no external interest until you get some results.

watertom 6y ago

Using his definitions, I hate long work. I avoid long work, I'll take hard work always.

hinkley 6y ago
Our jobs revolve around convincing machines to do the long work for us. I don't think I'll ever understand why so many of us are perfectly content doing the same long work over and over again. Do you know what computers are for?
- james_s_tayler 6y ago
  Never really thought of computers as needing convincing but come to think of it it takes about as many tries to convince my computer to do want I want as it takes to convince my son. Hmm..

bullen 6y ago

What about "deep" work? The kind of work that requires you to understand the fundamentals of a complex system to be able to simplify/modify it for the better.

datameta 6y ago
I think understanding a system enough to modify/extend/repair it would be "wide" work. If one is dipping in thoroughly enough to truly understand all components and be able to build such a system that is also open to later modification - that is "deep" work.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

"You can work long, you can work hard and you can work smart, but you can only do 2 out of 3" -- source unknown, common among programmers on usenet in the 1990s

war1025 6y ago

I like this, but also on some level I feel like it's nothing more than inspirational "rah-rah" garbage. I wish he would have expanded on it. A great example of the distinction from my younger days: We had the game GranTurismo2 back when I was 12 or so. We wanted the really fancy "best" car in the game. The right way to get the good cars is to improve your skill and gain access to the higher level races that have bigger prizes. That's the "hard work" part. What we did instead was do one of the easy races over and over and over again for a couple days until we had enough saved up in the game to buy the car. That's "long work" It's stupid and boring and no fun. If you want a fulfilling life, go for the "hard work". Which I guess is also just a stupid "rah-rah" inspirational quip.

umvi 6y ago
There was an MMO game called "Kingdom of Loathing" I played back in 2006. The right way to get more money in the game is to improve your skills/equipment and gain access to the higher level areas that have bigger monsters/better loot. (hard work) What we did instead was manually create hundreds of new accounts, complete the tutorial level and then send the tutorial prize to the main account for selling on the open market (long work). Eventually I figured out how to create an "autoit" script that automated the process of creating a new account, completing the tutorial, and then sending the goods over to the main account. The main account was getting very wealthy, but I should have known I needed to launder the ill-gotten gains somehow because an admin (Multi Czar) eventually caught on and all the accounts (including the main one) got banned.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- arsome 6y ago
  So does coding bots to do the long work for you count as hard work or long work? Because that's the kind of work I've always preferred.
  - nlbrown 6y ago
    Hard work takes over and replaces long work when innovation, new skills and modalities are center stage and repetitive tasks take a back seat. I'd consider any form of automation hard work.

Frost1x 6y ago

>Hard work is frightening. We shy away from hard work because inherent in hard work is risk. Hard work is hard because you might fail. You can’t fail at long work, you merely show up. You fail at hard work when you don’t make an emotional connection, or when you don’t solve the problem or when you hesitate. I disagree with this, at least what the author classifies as risk. I'm more than happy to take on challenging work, work I am emotionally connected to and want to see succeed--then fail. I can deal with failure and progress on just fine because I have pretty iron clad motivation. I've worked in R&D environments most my life and I can assure you, research has a lot of failure if you're doing it correctly. The risk that makes certain work "hard" vs others is that failure results in livelihood setbacks: not having food, not having a place to live, financial failure, health risks, not having any bit of job security, etc. Those to me are the real risks people shy away from when we talk about "hard" work. Give me a difficult/creative problem or task and I can try for hours, days, weeks, months, years... to find a solution, but only if I know at the end of the day I'll have a reasonably comfortable life. The way a lot of work is structured, I find "hard" work is that which has inherent livelihood risk to the person doing the work in some way, shape, or form. It could be health risk work (say a police officer), failed research resulting in lack of a job, or a poor new art collection that ruins the future career of an artist. Our society needs to learn to be more accepting to to a few more degrees of failure than the hypercompetiveness currently allows. Less and less failure is being acceptable and it's completely unrealistic to hold all humans to these standards. Yes, we should reward high risk success but should we punish every form of failure as we often do? Sure, laziness can be masked under failure and abuse this leniency, but so can success.

bluedino 6y ago

It’s like sports stars. You se the championship game on TV, but you don’t see the years of practicing, eating the right diet, all the sacrifices...

devmunchies 6y ago

This makes me think of war time vs peace time. During a war, the govt will put engineers and architects into an R&D incubator with all the resources they need. To the engineers, the fact that there is a war is irrelevant, they aren't paying attention to that, they're just focussing on innovation because it's their job. Couldn't this scenario be simulated, even without war? I think of bell labs. It strange that innovative environments, filled with hard work, aren't a priority until its a matter of life or death (of a company, nations, etc.) Related movie by studio Ghibli (engineers innovating during war time): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Rises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Rises

ericmcer 6y ago
Money is how we measure the worth of time spent. In that mindset doing hard, innovative work and failing is worse than doing nothing at all, because you lose both your time and money.
njarboe 6y ago
In war time patents are suspended or the government forces everyone to cross license. Along with the hard focused work, I think this is a big reason why tech advanced so much during WWI and WWII.
jl2718 6y ago
Not in my experience (JIEDDO/Paladin in OIF/OEF). The R&D lab seems like a peacetime concept. All the ideas, all the experimentation, all the hacks that turned into programs, came from the field, often lab guys that got sent forward. The labs had their part for sending new toys, but the pace was so much faster for hacking things together at the front lines.
hpoe 6y ago
Point of correction on Bell Labs. There was a war going on not a shooting shooty war, but a cold war that was motivating a lot of the research. In war time the reason there is so much focus and emphasis is because a country is fighting for its survival, it forces efficiency and results in a brutal manner, because if you don't succeeded and out think and out maneuver the enemy people die. In the Cold War the same tension and feeling of fighting for survival was present.

GCA10 6y ago

This is a useful distinction, but it this misses what's actually hard about "hard work." The risk of failure is only 20% of the issue. What's central is the fact that do hard work well, you need to temporarily tear apart the solution-forming systems that have served you adequately so far -- and put them back together in a different way. In the midst of this, there's genuine discomfort and nausea. Even if you know you'll eventually get it right, having everything in pieces on the floor is very jarring. Finding your way through a lot of missteps, near misses and roadblocks takes a special sort of perseverance. I've done this long enough in my work that I get mordant joy from tracking the misses. Versions 2, 2A, 2B and 2C were dead-ends. It's on to Versions 3, 3A, etc. Usually version 4E or so gets the job done. And it's elegant and I'm happy again. I had one epic struggle that went into the 7s. I ended up cracking it in a borrowed lab in Arizona, because the usual settings in NYC and CT were not getting me there. Being patient and persistent at times like that is hard.

highfrequency 6y ago
Sounds like some interesting experiences! Would be curious to hear more details about the project and the discomforts along the way
dougmany 6y ago
It is hard. After a few times around, you start to recognize the dreaded feeling. But then you realize you are closer to the other side than the way back and press on.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

there are two other salient differences between hard work and long work - hard work when the person is skillful enough to do it is energizing, long work is always draining.

hinkley 6y ago
Only if you're using someone else's definition of hard instead of your own. If by 'energizing' you mean morale-boosting, yes. But hard work is generally taxing. You are paying for long-term happiness with short term pain. Having slain a dragon on Thursday, you are likely to be in high spirits on Tuesday. But for the rest of the day and possibly tomorrow, you're may be sitting here doing menial tasks or reading documentation.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

allie1 6y ago

I think it’s what the “failure” would mean for a person that makes it hard, part of the fixed mindset Carol Dweck is talking about, i.e. only seeking validation of what one thinks of oneself.

thisisbrians 6y ago

Seth is always pithy and thus leaves a lot of room for interpretation, but I do find this an interesting prompt. "Hard" is, of course, very subjective and depends a lot on the person and the project. What's hard for me may not be hard for someone else due to skillset, personal risk, time pressure, mindset, etc. and vice versa. What's created hard work for me in the course of founding a startup is constantly balancing delivery timelines against a lack of resources and deep skills on the team. Having to invent my way out of situations I'm not technically qualified to handle where there is real risk to the business in being wrong or late has been harrowing, but also a very effective way to grow my skillset.

andersco 6y ago

It seems what is being called “hard work” here really is “expert work” which often can be no work at all, in that it rests on the shoulders of likely thousands of previous hours of long work, and can sometimes feel effortless. One seminal example of this Paula Scher’s 5 minute design of the Citigroup logo. https://link.medium.com/KuxBw6rJi9 https://link.medium.com/KuxBw6rJi9

amanzi 6y ago

I really love this graphic showing the difference between hard work and being productive: https://twitter.com/lizandmollie/status/1231605700960432128/photo/1 https://twitter.com/lizandmollie/status/1231605700960432128/...

naringas 6y ago

aka the toil vs the hustle

squibbles 6y ago

For those who are musically inclined -- When learning to play a musical instrument (including voice), the distinction between long work and hard work is the difference between spending time and making progress. Long work is mindless practice; hard work is identifying weaknesses and using targeted practice to improve. For those in marketing -- Long work is spending more on an advertising campaign; hard work is determining what increases the conversion rate. For those in computer science or mathematics -- Long work is implementing a brute force approach to calculating a specific result; hard work is generalizing the problem and generating a class of results. For students -- Long work is studying to pass a specific exam; hard work is internalizing the fundamental principles of a subject so you can derive answers regardless of the particular exam questions.

known 6y ago

The Self-Attribution Fallacy https://archive.is/VCuFO https://archive.is/VCuFO