I don't think the author misses any of the points that have been brought up as critiques of the article. He says in the second paragraph that "hard work is comp

I don't think the author misses any of the points that have been brought up as critiques of the article. He says in the second paragraph that "hard work is completely irrelevant is you’re not working smart and being productive." Also, "hard work is also counter-productive if you’re sacrificing your health to an extreme degree and if the increase in quantity of hours worked is leading to a decrease in your creativity." I think the best summary of the article is a quote from the quote of Seth Godin: "[Hard work] begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with." This article is not about physical labor or spinning your wheels without making progress. It's not about burning yourself out. It's about doing the shit that other people don't want to do. It's what Paul Graham was getting at when he wrote, "If you have two choices, choose the harder." It's what Thomas Edison was getting at when he said, "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration." There are people who sit around on HN or Reddit all day not doing anything productive. Actually focusing on work for long periods of time is hard. There are anecdotal statistics that the average 40-hour-a-week worker works 1.5 hours a day. Hard work means working all 8.