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There is no substitute for hard work
- foobarbazetc 5y agoLuck >>>> hard work. But hard work helps you get a bigger dividend out of luck.
- xupybd 5y agoGotta be in it to win it. Often hard work is how you get in a place for good luck to pay off.
- dimgl 5y agoNot sure I agree. A lot of my successes have been not only because of hard work but because I made good choices. Life is mostly about making your own luck.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y agoWell for my career, it definitely was luck. I got a programming internship in midwest, in a non-tech city...right when covid started. And it paid pretty well too. No amount of "oh you just worked hard" will convince me I got that. I'm 100% sure it was not only luck, but the fact that also I was the only one who applied because they mislabeled the position in a major city like 150 miles away haha.
- hytdstd 5y agoI think this is a little defeatist. You definitely won't get lucky if you aren't in the room-- hard work involves putting in the time in the room for that chance.
- WalterBright 5y agoHard work also means developing in advance the skills you'll need to take advantage when luck blows your way. For example, if you have no coding skills, nobody is going to invite you to join their software startup.
- newbie789 5y agoI agree. I worked hard as a waiter, hard as an Uber driver, hard as a construction worker. Then I got incredibly lucky (repeatedly) and now I make pretty decent money doing a job in which I decidedly do not work hard at all. I spent a lot of time reading (easy), some time developing social skills (somewhat difficult but not work), then got an opportunity (the exact opposite of hard) and it worked out. I agree that there’s no substitute for hard work. It’s its own thing. I disagree that it has some sort of inherent moral value or virtue, as far as I can tell that’s a line invented by management to make you feel better about not receiving a tiny fraction of the money you generate for your company.
- WalterBright 5y ago> not receiving a tiny fraction of the money you generate for your company I recommend starting your own business, where you get to keep 100% of the profit.
- newbie789 5y agoThat’s what I’ve done, after lots of good luck!
- WalterBright 5y agoI bet you're working harder and longer at your own business than you ever did as a waiter.
- newbie789 5y agoI literally do not. That was my point. Edit: To clarify, seriously no I do not “work hard.” Running my business is so, so much easier than building a deck or carrying sliding glass doors on my back 4+ stories. I got lucky in that I found myself in a situation where I fell ass-backwards into a bunch of clients wanting something that I can do easily (general IT and website stuff) that I learned as a kid (stuff I learned while also not doing hard work.) I am literally just lucky.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y agoLuck is when preparation meets opportunity. Life isn't just a dice roll for everything you do. You have an ability to influence it and can let the bad rolls get to you or not. Being able to make the best out of a bad situation is just as valuable as taking all the right paths.
- dougmwne 5y agoAnd a great strategy can make luck reproducable. Luck at scale becomes probability.
- Mengkudulangsat 5y agoHard work is easy if every step between you and the goal is obvious and definite. You can just autopilot your way to success. Hard work is hard if you are not sure whether the work performed contributes to progress or not.
- lifeisstillgood 5y agoThis is something about entrepreneurship - pretty much everyone here is skilled enough and hard working enough to have built e-commerce company X or Y. The thing is no one can tell if your had work will result in zero pay or millions. I think that puts most people off.
- javajosh 5y agoIn general I agree, but also, it's complicated. There are some problems that just need to be ignored, to stew in whatever it is that goes on in your neuronal soup while you're doing other things, until it's good and tender and done. Turning the direct heat of your attention on it doesn't help. The more interesting problems tend to be that way - the problems where you've got a feeling, an intuition, an itch, and you're not even sure where to begin. (It also happened to me a lot 5-10 years post college, when physics topics that hadn't fully clicked finally did - even though I wasn't consciously thinking about it). That said, yeah, just putting your ass in the chair, staying proximate to the problem, is a job well done, and worth doing. It's just not everything.
- WalterBright 5y agoThere is a substitute - working smart. > To be really good at anything means doing it a lot True, but working smart is figuring out another way to do it that doesn't require skill. For example, I could spend years and years studying chess to become a skilled chess player. Or I could spend a month or two writing a chess playing program that'll do even better. Or I could train and train and get my 10 km jogging time down. Or I could get smart and get a bicycle.
- itwy 5y ago> Or I could train and train and get my 10 km jogging time down. Or I could get smart and get a bicycle. What a nonsense statement.
- WalterBright 5y agoHow about this, then? I've drilled a hole in angle iron with a hand drill. That is dang hard work. The smart way is to instead work to earn enough moolah to buy an electric drill, then drilling holes in metal is easy & fast. Working smart is what lazy people do.
- bigiain 5y ago"there are three great virtues of a programmer; Laziness, Impatience and Hubris" -- Larry Wall, http://threevirtues.com http://threevirtues.com
- bigiain 5y agoI don't agree. It's pointing out the meaninglessness of assuming you know why people are doing what they're doing. Training to run faster is a stupid way to travel 10km faster, if your need/motivation is just to get somewhere and not to get fitter.
- WalterBright 5y agoGoing a little deeper into this, 10km jogging times only have any meaning because people figured out smarter ways to move 10km faster long ago. The only meaning today is for bragging rights. Nobody's going to pay you to improve your 10km time. Being fit for health reasons doesn't require that much exercise. I jog for health reasons, and there's no health benefit past a certain point (and in fact, you're wrecking your body if you do). I don't time my jogs because there's no purpose to going faster. If I need to get there faster, I'll bike or drive.
- Animats 5y agoA good choice in parents can substitute for hard work.
- acituan 5y ago> There is also no replacement for the overwhelming satisfaction and pride that hard work and determination inevitably leads to. Maybe the satisfaction and pride of clever work that saves us from the hard work? Animals do hard work too; grazing pastures all day, hunting for caloric surplus, living hand to mouth. It was the satisfaction of inventing tools that made humans humans. Maybe the real hard work is in thinking things through? Maybe what OP calls shortcuts are the optimal paths, and maybe finding the optimal paths are more important than wandering around? > This is an innate, selfish need we all have but one that belongs entirely to us and us alone. Or it is protestant work ethic overgeneralized. And it has failure modes, namely not all hard work is blessed, or it was not the case that "arbeit macht frei". > To be really good at anything means doing it a lot. If that was the case, for complex skillsets like being a software engineer, tenure would automatically mean promotion. Sure, it does somewhat correlate, but not everyone who does a thing a lot gets equally good at those, and those who get good at a thing did not do that thing in the same quantity. So there ought to be really good substitutes to hard work after all.
- TimTheTinker 5y ago>> This is an innate, selfish need we all have but one that belongs entirely to us and us alone. > Or it is protestant work ethic overgeneralized. The Protestant view would be that the "innate, selfish need we all have", as OP put it, is to serve in some way; and what differentiates people from one another isn't whether we serve, but whom we serve. > And it has failure modes, namely not all hard work is blessed, or it was not the case that "arbeit macht frei". Work is and always will be inherently hard or toilsome in some way. We may not have sweat on our brow, but we all do have hard and frustrating aspects to the work we do... I don't think protestants would call all work "blessed".
- dragonwriter 5y ago> > Or it is protestant work ethic overgeneralized > The Protestant view While the “Protestant work ethic” concept holds that the ethic it describes is a consequence of certain Protestant (more specifically, Calvinist) beliefs, it does not intend to describe a general “Protestant view”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic
- hizxy 5y agoI’d love to quantify and or measure hard work.
- WalterBright 5y agoGet one of those bicycle powered dynamometers. I recall some parents who hooked up a bike to a dyno, which powered a TV. The kids could watch TV as much as they were willing to pedal. Their taste in TV shows improved dramatically.
- jleyank 5y agoSkill, Opportunity, Hard Work. One might need at lease two of these, possibly all three to make things happen. Recall von Manstein's four types of officers. Also, one of the most successful admirals for the US in WWII tried to avoid as much work as possible and left things to his staff - so that he could be free to make the biggest decisions. It all depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
- WalterBright 5y agoadd Willingness To Take Risks People who play it safe rarely get very far. Most people don't recognize Opportunity because it comes disguised as Hard Work.
- jhayward 5y ago> There is also no replacement for the overwhelming satisfaction and pride that hard work and determination inevitably leads to. This is an innate, selfish need we all have but one that belongs entirely to us and us alone. Prime example of generalizing from the (singular, personal) experience. The author should spend some time with non-neurotypical people (ADHD, ASD) and ask them how they experience the effects of hard work.
- binarysolo 5y agoCaveat to this: there is no substitute for hard work IFANDONLYIF you enjoy the journey itself, and want to be good at the process. There are plenty of things where people don't care for the process -- they just want the results, whether it's money, fame, body, or what not. And to that: there's plenty of substitutes for hard work. But I do think there are plenty of things where the deliberateness of the journey is the reward. For plenty of runners who run a marathon, the payoff isn't checking it off the todo list but the exercise of willpower. Same goes to hobbies, same goes to skills -- and honestly people tick in different ways. But I do think the OP just wants us to enjoy the journey and be invested in it.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoWork smart, hard, enjoy it, and seek excellence, or do something else.
- andreskytt 5y agoEverything I’ve ever achieved in life is because I put in the hard working hours. You want a degree from MIT while holding a job and raising kids, there’s no way around hard work. You want to gain experience, got to put the hours in doing project after project after project. You want to run a marathon, you need to put the miles in. Absolutely, just toiling away is not helpful, you better have a good trainer, pick the most useful projects and plan your time right, but the work has to be there. I guess my point is that if you get lucky or are willing to bend the rules or are super talented, hard work indeed is not necessary. I’m none of these and for me, there has been no substitute.