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How to Work Hard

• triceratops 5y ago
  > P. G. Wodehouse would probably get my vote for best English writer of the 20th century, if I had to choose. The guy who wrote about a hapless nobleman and his butler is a better writer than Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Arthur C. Clarke, George MacDonald Fraser, or John Le Carre?
  • Veen 5y ago
    It's the writing not the subjects. Wodehouse is hugely admired by other writers. I bet if you'd have asked each writer you name whether they thought they were better prose writers than Wodehouse, they'd say no. George Orwell was friends with Wodehouse and a great admirer. John Le Carre often named Wodehouse as one of his most important influences.
• yewenjie 5y ago
  Off-topic but Firefox gave me a potential security risk warning for the site!!??
  • acuozzo 5y ago
    I think the cert is expired.
  • headalgorithm 5y ago
    See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27196917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27196917
• nicholast 5y ago
  I know this is somewhat of a false dichotomy, but at some point I think PG's essays started to shift from being directed at startup founders to giving advice to his children that they can read when they grow older.
  • nicholast 5y ago
    Ok I just looked up the phrase false dichotomy, apparently doesn't mean what I thought it meant, probably would have been better said as "the two are not mutually exclusive", still point holds.
    • WillDaSilva 5y ago
      "False dichotomy" implies more than just the fact that "the two are not mutually exclusive". It further implies that the speaker in question has implied that the two are mutually exclusive, when they are in fact not.
      • chaosite 5y ago
        And it further implies that the speaker has suggested that the two options are the only possible ones, when in fact there are other possibilities. But the person you're correcting seems to have already noticed that, and has corrected themselves.
  • dalbasal 5y ago
    There probably is some tethering to whatever his perspective is at the time. At some point, YC was a relatively new idea coming to life and he was probably constantly thinking a certain way. Now, it's something that he's been up to for decades. That said, I think there's more of a zeitgeist change than actual change in pg's content. Things sound different 10-15 years apart. A lot of things age poorly, often: idealism, stand up comedy... most anything avante garde-ish. Clever people spoke highly of agile,for example, when it was manifestos and such circa 2005.
  • SlapperKoala 5y ago
    I feel like a lot of it is the same stuff that you get in generic self help books, but explained in contemporary techie language and cultural references. Not that that is necessarily bad per se, there can be a lot lot of value to reminding people of things that may seem obvious. But it's annoying when people treat him like a genius for saying fairly standard platitudes in a clever way
• aliceryhl 5y ago
  Typo: > There may be some people do who, but I think my experience is fairly typical
• WillDaSilva 5y ago
  Strange that Firefox's reader view cannot be enabled for this post. Probably because instead of using `<p>` tags or similar, the content of the post is contained within a `<font>` block inside a table, with `<br>` tags separating the paragraphs. Not having the content inside of `<p>` blocks is a departure from Paul Graham's older content, and a confusing one at that. EDIT: It looks like the posts with the "Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator." banner are contained within a `<p>` block, and can be read with Firefox reader view, but those without the banner are not within a `<p>` block, and cannot be read with Firefox reader view.
• dash2 5y ago
  Good place to say what a profound genius P G Wodehouse was. Here's one of my favourite exchanges from a Jeeves book: "If you will recollect, we are now in Autumn – season of mists and mellow fruitfulness." "Season of what?" "Mists, sir, and mellow fruitfulness."
  • heavenlyblue 5y ago
    What is that about?
    • FoldMorePaper 5y ago
      A reference to a Keats poem, apparently? <https://poets.org/poem/autumn https://poets.org/poem/autumn>
    • dash2 5y ago
      The joke is Jeeves' very solemn quotation of a famous Romantic poem.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• designium 5y ago
  Summary: - Working hard starts at school, but there is a lot of "distortion" - It's complicated to since it depends on multitude of person's factors and likes - You have to be honest with yourself - You have to find something you want or/and talented to do - More competitive areas or ambitious goals will required more effort - What was said before may not work given the circumstances of each individual
• brador 5y ago
  June 2021 for anyone wondering if this is new. Would be nice if we could get that date stamp into the title. Sometimes PG essays are reposted. Dang?
• jimbokun 5y ago
  Being able to decide what to work on requires a certain amount of privilege, as opposed to needing to do whatever you can to pay for rent, bills, and groceries this month.
  • dhimes 5y ago
    I think you're on to something here. I'm struggling to articulate that somehow this essay addresses, albeit well, the low-hanging fruit of working hard, at least in the move-the-world-forward sense than this is written (he's not talking to bricklayers, he's talking to the architects). You have options; you have family/social support, and so on. These things allow the other things to become. [As you can seem I'm still struggling.]
    • UglyToad 5y ago
      This is sort of tangentially related, since TFA doesn't really talk about long hours as such but I definitely prefer the following angle: https://ericlippert.com/2019/12/30/work-and-success/ https://ericlippert.com/2019/12/30/work-and-success/
      • lifekaizen 5y ago
        That's a good post. Addresses the societal imbalances that are sometimes hard to see, adds a little more context: >If hard work and long hours could be consistently transformed into “success”, then my friends and family who are teachers, nurses, social workers and factory workers would be far more successful than I am.
  • yetihehe 5y ago
    So what? Being able to comment on HN requires a certain amount of privilege too.
    • pjerem 5y ago
      Personally, I just had to click on the "login" button then to fill a username and a password.
• Y_Y 5y ago
  Doesn't this sound shit though? If Bill Gates is so smart why did he have to work so much? Did he like coding and management more than days off? If a life of hard work is needed to get you into heaven that's fine. Or if anything less would mean you and your dependants going hungry. But once your basic needs are met then it's irrational not to start spending time on all of the other things that life has to offer. I feel like drive and energy and work-ethic are great, and you're useless without them. All the same if you have nothing else then you just become enslaved by your need to output more or increase your wealth or whatever, without connecting that to any healthy goal like health or happiness or wellbeing. It's like a cognitive defect, a disability except you're unable to not-do.
  • dataduck 5y ago
    Chris Williamson's video on this is really touching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbgkMhio3jY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbgkMhio3jY
  • markus_zhang 5y ago
    He probably didn't treat those as "work" as we laymen understand. We just work for bread and butter and most of the time workis kind of boring. But if you happen to work for yourself or enjoy your work for whatever the reason, you don't treat it as "work" and it's all about achieving the maximum happiness as you can. I expereinced this a few times in my life and I never regretted about working hard on it. Why would I regret about playing hard and achieving what I can? But sadly due to my shortcomings these events are short and far between.
    • borski 5y ago
      This is it. When you’re working on things you love, it’s hard, and can be lots of hours, but it doesn’t feel like work. Speaking from my own experience of founding a startup. There are also times it was absolutely miserable. But it’s true: I wasn’t beholden to my VCs or angels. I could have quit. I just enjoyed the work so much, so deeply, that I didn’t want to quit. The challenge was not burning out: I needed to take more vacation, because it not feeling like work didn’t mean it wasn’t, still, hard work which people need a respite from.
• nkingsy 5y ago
  I understand the drive to share here, as nothing fees better than hard work, but it’s a very intimidating read and feels quite navel gazey. In my experience, there is no such thing as hard work. There’s a universal river of truth that I can tap into in flow state, and if something is blocking me from getting there, I might as well watch a show and see if the river is open later.
• uniqueuid 5y ago
  Feels like solid advice overall. One thing I find important relates to other people. Some say that success comes from hard work, or that the right focus is essential to success. But that's a false dichotomy. In truth, there are many people out there who work incredibly hard, and some of them are even good, and some of those have the right focus. Hard work is the precondition. Even if your focus is right and you're clever, you are always competing with people who also have that but put in many hours on top. It's a tower, and if you want to rise, you need to tackle all the layers.
• leokennis 5y ago
  > There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, 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. I'd like to add that it is more than fine to not do great work. If you like to spend a lot of time with your kids and tend to your vegetable patch, by all means only try hard enough to keep the job that pays for that lifestyle. So, no dig on the author, but there is more than maximizing for great work. Try for a while to instead maximize for life happiness and experience how that feels for you.
  • nickelcitymario 5y ago
    Agreed, but I also found that 3-ingredient formula to be one of the more insightful things he says in this essay. It's a good way to understand what it takes to be successful at anything. Including, by the way, being a parent. Many of us aren't born with (or have a sufficiently healthy childhood) to have naturally great parenting abilities. But hard work and practice sure do go a long way.
    • lanstin 5y ago
      Anecdotally, from years at the playground, the attitude of trying to maximize the quality of your parenting is however a killer impediment to being a good parent. Parenting is challenging and a lot of time, but works a lot better when you are doing it in the moment rather than to achieve some agenda. Of course one of the great things about parenting is that mostly you get to have the same situations over and over again, and get to change your approaches (including consistency) to see what happens with different approaches. So you get practiced at each thing. And the talent needed for parenting is more intimate that for writing software - it's the talent to make your toddlers laugh, to make your 4 year old confident enough to try something they want to try. It's a set of skills for doing stuff between a particular parent/child system. My tricks might not work for you; my tricks for my first born did not work for my second born.
  • temp8964 5y ago
    PG never said you should maximize for great work. The essay is about "how to work hard", not "work hard is the only purpose of your life". You are missing the point here. In addition, you mistakenly exclude great work / achievement from happiness. Spending time with your kids is great, tending your vegetable patch is great, doing great work is also great. Life is not a single purpose process. Happiness is not a single threat process either. Currently all the critics on the essay are terrible, but you are better at least know to keep it civil.
• kungito 5y ago
  I really don't lije these "work hard in all your 20s" advice because I'm at nearing the end of my 20s with great results but I feel like I want to save what's left of my 20s instead of chasing more cash. I haven't personally met people who worked hard until 40s and felt like it was worth it for them. Being a successful person personally has always been way more than just having a successful career and money.
• jjice 5y ago
  > ...because even in college a lot of the work is pointless; there are entire departments that are pointless. I loved all of my CS courses in college. They were my bread and butter. I also liked a lot of my math courses and even an English class or two. I just wish I didn't take 5 history courses (three as part of an elective set that had to be liberal arts), three unrelated sciences (bio 1+2, and astronomy - imaging science was great and applicable), and two women and gender studies courses (nothing against the major, just unrelated to my degree). I've been told countless times that these courses help round out a student. Most of them don't. I end up bullshitting them as much as possible and getting a B so I can focus on the courses I care about. A streamlined college education where we remove some (not all) non-major course work and save two or three semesters of time would be amazing, but of course that's two or three semesters of lost cash for a university...
  • logshipper 5y ago
    > Most of them don't. I end up bullshitting them as much as possible and getting a B so I can focus on the courses I care about I hear where you're coming from on this (and have been in similar shoes), but I suppose there is more nuance to it, mostly because professors and departments play such an important role in the experience. The argument of liberal arts electives lending themselves to a richer education experience is a well-intentioned one, and does reap benefits if executed well by the professor, the department, TA's and so on. If not, well, it is just like you mentioned, one is inclined to BS their way out of a class to focus on things more important to them. Speaking from my anecdotal experience, I have had to take three electives as part of my undergrad: microeconomics, macroeconomics, and a philosophy class on the philosophy of the mind. I have thoroughly enjoyed macro-econ and philosophy simply because the professors put in an incredible amount of work to inspire me to work hard and care about the subject. Micro-econ, on the other hand, was one giant mess and I did not show up to more than 3 lectures over the course of the semester. I believe in the earnest that students stand to gain so much if some university departments and professors gave a crap about the experience that they are offering.
  • s5300 5y ago
    You chose to go to this University/College though. For whatever reason, you chose to attend studies there, knowing this was how the institution operated. If you went not knowing how the institution operated, well, that's completely your issue. You could have chose to seek your studies at any institution that caters to the ideals you've stated in your post. Yet you didn't, and you have the audacity to complain, about how the place you chose to attend operates, while they fully and publicly disclose how they operate I'm simply baffled by this thought process.
• jasperry 5y ago
  Maybe the world also needs people who are not so achievement-driven, who act as a kind of lubricant in the machine of society by making the environment around themselves lighter and more pleasant. And people who are that way should learn to value themselves and not feel guilty for not being as driven as some. A world where everyone is a nose-to-the-grindstone overachiever seems like a pretty dreary one to live in.
  • borski 5y ago
    It does, and you’re right. Not everyone has to work hard, and those people are important too. But: those people aren’t the folks for whom this essay is written.
  • lanstin 5y ago
    And really is Viaweb that big of a deal? He got rich by selling .com in the .com bubble to another .com company. That wasn't so hard at the time. He wrote a good book on Lisp, and used his riches to invest and get richer. None of this seems particularly extraordinary. Does he somehow imagine Dropbox or Viaweb have transformed human experience? He writes a good essay, but he seems overly impressed by his own success.
    • cma 5y ago
      He has had many successes. He essentially was the first to solve the commercial email spam problem: http://paulgraham.com/spam.html http://paulgraham.com/spam.html If you remember email before and after those techniques were implemented into mail clients of the time, it was night and day.
• philmcp 5y ago
  I prefer to focus on efficiency, rather than hours worked (i.e. effort). It results in a better work / life balance imo I actually just posted this article on HN today: https://4dayweek.io/blog/how-to-code-faster https://4dayweek.io/blog/how-to-code-faster
• dorkmind 5y ago
  Someone needs to murder paul graham.
• krustyburger 5y ago
  >>There wasn't a single point when I learned this. Like most little kids, I enjoyed the feeling of achievement when I learned or did something new. As I grew older, this morphed into a feeling of disgust when I wasn't achieving anything. The one precisely dateable landmark I have is when I stopped watching TV, at age 13. I wouldn’t dare question Paul Graham’s accomplishments, but I’ve always found it odd that some people are so proud of their abstention from television. There are time-wasting things on tv, but there are also time-wasting books, albums etc. I think not watching television and advertising that one didn’t was once an easy intellectual badge of honor. When there were only a few networks and the programming didn’t vary much, perhaps this made sense. Every so often I still hear someone proudly say that they don’t watch television today. I usually wonder exactly what they mean, now that we are all able to choose the exact film or program we want and play it on demand. Surely it’s not a mark of excellence not to stream, say, the Criterion Channel?
  • benjohnson 5y ago
    For me, I stopped watching TV twenty years ago - but then transfered my neurotic novelty seeking behavior to the internet. But because I quit once, it made it easier to reign in my mindless internet consumption. And then stop any mindless book consumption. Then mindless video-games. So for my - "No TV" is a easy way to express "I'm trying to maintain a ballance between living a vigorous life and consuming meaningful media"
  • BurningFrog 5y ago
    TV is passive consumption of someone else's story. NOthing wrong with that, but you're not exactly achieving anything by doing it.
  • prionassembly 5y ago
    It's an empirical regularity, dude. It's probably due to hidden third causes (the kind of personality + circumstance + challenges that cause people to abstain from TV are the same that cause this and that positive outcome), but it's there, at least according to lots of anecdata in this very same thread.
  • goodlifeodyssey 5y ago
• kstenerud 5y ago
  The true ah-ha moment comes when you finally realize how much bullshit this is. "Hard work" is the mantra that keeps you a slave. "Success stories" are the tasty carrots that keep you toiling away your best years enriching others in pursuit of the things you're supposed to seek in life: Power, success, status. "Life hacks" are little dopamine hits to keep your eye on the carrot. And the kicker is that those few who actually do attain these things mistakenly attribute it to their own prowess, when it's mostly luck and circumstance with a smattering of ambition and striking deals in the right networks. They then take it upon themselves to perpetuate the system that now feeds them at your expense. So you go on toiling away, pushing that wheel around and around for years as your masters feed you stories of their success and a promise of your own one-day-someday, until eventually you hopefully realize the futility of enriching these parasites, and get off their treadmill. The proletariat are only useful to the rich if they're toiling for them. Edit: In case you're wondering why this tanked to the bottom of the comments despite being at 38 points after 30 minutes, it's because the admins can artificially drop a comment's priority if they don't like it, and prevent further upvotes (downvotes still work though).
  • eafkuor 5y ago
    Yeah this is absolute shit, and it appeals to a very specific kind of "driven" people. Nothing against them but they need to realise that most others just want to enjoy their short time on this planet. I'm happy with my really mellow stable job that leaves me plenty of free time to do the things I actually want. Life is too short.
    • giantg2 5y ago
      And then there are many people like me who work a job they hate, still don't get much time to enjoy life, all just to pay the bills. Less time on the planet might actually something many of us look forward to as life is full of pain and misery.
      • warent 5y ago
        I hope this doesn't come across as insensitive but this is something I've never understood. If life feels like this, that seems like an indicator that it's time for some massive change. Usually people give some vague abstract response about why massive change is just unrealistic, indicating some fragile house of cards, while in a simultaneous act of cognitive dissonance dreaming of the day it topples. Perhaps we could: sell everything and move into a van to live on the road; or get a cheap house boat; or declare bankruptcy and move into a Buddhist monastery; quit jobs to transition into a more mindless one that allows more free time; find a nonprofit organization in a different country to throw oneself into; teach English in a foreign country; etc... It's like, when we're brooding so much that we're done with life, it just seems like that's the best time to give life a chance, because at that point there's nothing left to lose.
• nickelcitymario 5y ago
  > I had to learn what real work was before I could wholeheartedly desire to do it. That took a while, because even in college a lot of the work is pointless; there are entire departments that are pointless. The arrogance! This is one of my pet peeves at work: When someone looks at another person's work and judges its value or difficulty. "That's easy." "That's pointless." Ugh. Everyone else's job looks easy and/or pointless until you're the one doing it. Then it's important and challenging (hopefully). Most people who feel their own work is pointless simply don't understand how their role fits into the bigger picture. I assure you, the profit motive is very good at weeding out truly unnecessary costs. It may lag, sometimes. But if there's a dollar being spent that doesn't need to be spent, someone is going to eventually find out and eliminate the expense. I think this mentality comes from a deep need to feel superior to others. So when we can't understand or appreciate someone's job, it feels powerful to declare their work easy or pointless. But that's just ignorance, arrogance, and, frankly, bullying by other means: I'll make myself feel bigger by making you feel small, and I'll do it in front of all of my friends so they can affirm how big and tough and awesome I am.
  • bumby 5y ago
    I agree with the main parts of your post but how does the quote below fit into non-profit-seeking organizations? (E.g., govt, schools, charities etc.) >the profit motive is very good at weeding out truly unnecessary costs.
    • musingsole 5y ago
      In my experience, nonprofits do accrue a bit of needless fat that is often justified by their compassionate mission. BUT, even then, only by so much. They still need to accrue enough funds to pursue their mission.
    • nickelcitymario 5y ago
      Every organization has to be cost-aware. It catches up to you eventually. For context, in my home town of Sudbury, Ontario, our leading university (Laurentian U) kept growing and investing in new things. There's lots of debate around the merits of what they were spending on. But it caught up to them in the form of bankruptcy. One of the few things I like about capitalism (there aren't many, but that's just me) is that it gives a laser-clear focus. Just because an organization is a non-profit doesn't change that. At some point, you either bring in more revenue than you spend, or you fail. Governments that continuously overspend eventually have their debts catch up to them, too. (See: Every empire in history.)
• rexreed 5y ago
  Doesn't it all depend what you want out of life? And is the hard work even guaranteed to provide you what you want out of life? Hard work, desired outcomes, and goals are not in alignment. What's the point of this essay, to convince people who don't want to work hard to work hard? Is this meant to chastise people? Motivate? Demoralize? Self-congratulate?
  • borski 5y ago
    To identify that for people who succeed, hard work is often required, and most people aren’t born with the ability to do really hard work. That takes conscious effort and an uncanny ability to stay on task. ADHD makes this hard, fwiw, and PG is not saying this mode is right for everyone. But I would agree with that idea: working hard isn’t natural, at least for some people, but it is a requirement for attaining success. If you’re going to work hard, it makes sense to do it on something you love. And there are people who thrive on hard work. There are a bunch of prerequisites, some of which he explicitly states (find something you love, eg) and some implicit (sometimes you have to take the job you don’t like, because circumstances dictate that; families, eg). But it certainly isn’t for everyone.
• sidcool 5y ago
  John Carmack read a draft of this.
  • ridruejo 5y ago
    I noticed that too. I would love a podcast of them talking about any topic really
• wantsanagent 5y ago
  "Natural ability" is a cop-out and PG should know better. It'd be fine if this came with a disclaimer, "we don't know what natural ability is and the more we learn the more complex and diverse this umbrella term becomes." But taking it at face value is fuzzy thinking. It feels like this was included to hedge his bets. The Polgar sisters(1) serve as evidence that while "natural ability" may be a thing it's even less important than you might imagine. Instead this and work like that of Ericsson(2) on the development of expertise point to repeatable environmental factors for success. I look forward to a day when we can eliminate this phrase and replace it with measurable phenomena and repeatable processes. (1) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r (2) - https://smile.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbooks-Psychology/dp/0521600812/ https://smile.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Han...
  • mikewarot 5y ago
    "Natural ability" is when your skills and interests happen to have a good impedance match with a problem to be solved.
    • jahewson 5y ago
      That’s not what it means.
  • newacct583 5y ago
    Is anyone else distressed by pg's sudden turn to these sorts of para-culture-war issues? He's gotten increasingly anti-woke over the past year or two and it's starting to leak into sloppy argumentation like this. In decades past, he'd discuss similar issues ("how to identify a good hacker", stuff like that), but the focus was on the talent and what it meant and how it worked. Now... suddenly this kind of genetic stratification is just a given? Not a good smell.
    • s5300 5y ago
      Appears that he's having some sort of internal struggle/identity crisis the past few years that he can't come to terms with.
• giantg2 5y ago
  Hard work can be good, but only if you own a substantial capital interest in the company/result. But if you can hire people to do it for you, then you can reap the benefits and live a life worth living. If you are just part of the labor and not the capital, then there really isn't an incentive to work harder than necessary to keep you job or earn a measly raise. If you tell people that if they work 12+ hours a day in their 20s that they would be multi-millionaires or billionaires, then almost everyone would accept that position. The real world doesn't work that way and using statistical outliers like Gates is disingenuous to the discussion about hard work and how it applies to normal people.
  • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > If you tell people that if they work 12+ hours a day in their 20s that they would be millionaires or billionaires Billionaire isn’t a realistic goal, but millionaire is a common outcome for software developers who work hard through their 20s and 30s now. It doesn’t even require a FAANG job or living in a super expensive city any more, just wise job selection, a reasonable amount of financial savvy and budget adherence, and a deliberate effort to work on your career path. You don’t need to own substantial equity in a company in your 20s to have a reason to work hard, as long as you’re doing work that builds your skill set, reputation, and network. Everything you do (or don’t do) has some impact on your persona capital over time. Working hard in the mailroom or stocking shelves at a grocery store isn’t going to translate into a successful software career, but making an impact and helping people get things done at several companies through your 20s is the easiest way to build a strong network that opens doors in your 30s and beyond
    • necrotic_comp 5y ago
      And luck. Don't forget luck.
      • giantg2 5y ago
        This. I have experienced a lot of bad luck. Luck is a huge component that can even negate other factors like hard work.
• throwaway98797 5y ago
  I wonder if how to work hard is best answered by the inverse. How to not work hard? 1. Work on things of little importance to yourself 2. Pretend that you dont need to work hard and that’s for suckers. 3. Work on things that don’t require your talents … more?
• andy_ppp 5y ago
  There's different things to consider I think than just finding something that you can work as hard as possible on. I think Tom Blomfield's story is worth hearing about, it sounds like he found being CEO really anxiety inducing even if clearly he was very successful at it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP2_QOCrVO4&ab_channel=TheDiaryOfACEO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP2_QOCrVO4&ab_channel=TheDi...
• unklefolk 5y ago
  Regarding the "work hard in your 20s" advice. I took the approach that in your 20s you are still forming, still growing, still malleable. The experiences you have in your 20s will have a disproportionate effect on the kind of person you end up being. Therefore, you have to think about what environment, what experiences you want to foster that growth in. I would suggest optimizing for variety and new experiences is a better idea that working 80 hours weeks throughout your 20s. In your 20s, don't just work hard, work hard at becoming the person you want to be.
  • Forge36 5y ago
    Work hard at learning?
    • unklefolk 5y ago
      Yes. And "learning" shouldn't just be measured in PhDs or being an expert at one thing. I think the "work hard" advice can be interpreted as "focussed, tunnel vision, excelling in one area to the exclusion of everything else" when there is great benefit of aiming for a wider range of experiences in your 20s.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    Good advice. The issue, of course, is that we seldom have the luxury of this, unless we are willing to make sacrifices, or do a heck of a lot of extracurricular work. In my own development, I never had the advantage of a fancy sheepskin, so I wasn't really paid that much, compared to a lot of folks, and my employers didn't have much of an issue, when it came to throwing me at experimental stuff. It wasn't much of a risk, for them. Meant that I learned a lot. I was also given a disproportionate amount of architectural responsibility. I learned how to design systems, and complete stuff, early in my career. But it also meant that I have spent my entire career, looking up a lot of noses. I've usually been a "n00b," in most of my endeavors, and geeks tend to treat neophytes pretty badly (maybe because of all the atomic wedgies we got in grade school?). It drove me to do a much higher-quality job than what might have been considered acceptable. I developed a "screw you, I'll show you" attitude, and I've habitually produced highly-polished work, from the very beginning[0]. Didn't always win me friends. No one likes it when the chav kid shows up the toffs (but the bosses liked it, and really, they were the ones that mattered). I'd say that the humility taught by that treatment was as valuable as the book-larnin'. It forced me to solve my own problems, find information, develop a thick skin, and not rely on "magic answers from the sky." I was never able to throw the problem over the fence, so someone else could address it. I always had to clean up my own messes. I also practiced a very good team ethic, with a great deal of kindness towards teammates that were struggling or being marginalized. I figured out how to support and mentor people without making it seem as if that was what I was doing (the trick is to lead by example). I used the cruelty that I experienced from other geeks, and from awful managers, as an antipattern, in my own dealings with others. I think it helped me to be a fairly good manager. It's always a very good idea to help out folks that are not that high in the food chain. They are likely to return the favor, sooner or later, and they often have their fingers on the real pulse of things. They can be quite helpful. It hasn't been that much fun, and I haven't lived high on the hog. But I am pretty good at what I do, and, in this phase of my life, it's paid off in spades. When I saw the title, and who wrote it, I said to myself "This should be fun." [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/TF30194/TF30194-Manual-1987.pdf https://littlegreenviper.com/TF30194/TF30194-Manual-1987.pdf (Downloads a PDF of my first-ever engineering project)
• s5300 5y ago
  Oh PG. You're so damn loathsome
• deleted 5y ago
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• adamnemecek 5y ago
  Working hard is relatively easier if you care about the work.
• deleted 5y ago
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• ottoflux 5y ago
  or, you know, work hard when it's work time and take a life balance. your company isn't going to come to raise your children (if you have them) when you die, nor are they going to live a happy life for you. we have to stop thinking exploiting ourselves for someone else's gain makes us a better person. i'm not saying the author says the opposite, but i think in any discussion of hard work we need to bring up balance. a good part of Bill Gates success was the money infusion from his friends and a wildly asymmetrical deal with IBM and the writer of DOS on the other side. if we don't take a more nuanced approach we are (intentionally or not) perpetuating the myth of sacrificing your life for your company. i did that with my 20s and a chunk of my 30s. would not recommend. live your life, you only get one trip through and sometimes the body doesn't hold up well enough to keep enjoying all the things you love.
• _Nat_ 5y ago
  It'd be nice if articles about some common term, e.g. "work hard", would start out with a clear definition.
  • sidlls 5y ago
    That would mean putting effort ("working hard") at understanding something outside one's own thought bubble. PG's essays are exercises in narcissism and confirmation bias: they're the last place to go to for the kind of wisdom you suggest.
    • _Nat_ 5y ago
      Admittedly I'm a puzzled by the quality-level of these posts. A lot of stuff, like the lack of formatting and HTTPS, give off an antique feel, almost like a signal that they're not meant to be taken seriously. Ditto for the over-the-top arrogant tone and relatively sparse content. I might be off-base on this, but I sometimes wonder if these articles aren't like a honey-pot for non-serious YCombinator applicants. Like maybe people who resonate with these articles are flagged as non-serious applicants, to better focus the pool? Maybe we're all looking a little silly for commenting here at all, rather than moving on with our days and being more productive?
      • burntoutfire 5y ago
        > A lot of stuff, like the lack of formatting and HTTPS What's the point of HTTPS for a static website which doesn't convey any secrets? (that's a genuine question, I'm not a web expert).
        • _Nat_ 5y ago
          The reason I'd advocate in more public settings is that things ought to be secure-by-default, and that adopting security only upon realizing its necessity is a hazard-prone policy that constantly backfires. But for a specific example of something that could go wrong: someone could inject malicious content into a non-secure page. The original content might be plain-text, but a man-in-the-middle can still inject whatever they like regardless. As a common example of a simple attack: an attacker could man-in-the-middle people who connect to a nearby wireless network. Notes: 1. There're a bunch of ways that an attacker could get people to connect to their network. Examples: spoofing a legitimate network; setting up a password-less network; putting up a poster falsely advertising the SSID/pass to a network that falsely purports itself to be official; they're an actual employee of the establishment and just compromise the legitimate network; they're a remote-hacker who's exploited a vulnerability in the router. 2. The attacker could do lots of random stuff. Examples: they could inject malicious code; they could inject misinformation to facilitate scamming someone; they could insert ads; steal CPU-time/electricity for crypto-mining; they could just put gross porno on everyone's phone in a restaurant as a troll. Or something else. Or multiple things. 3. The original site being just plain-text doesn't really matter; the attacker can replace the entire thing without even contacting the real website. Or they can get the real website, then add other stuff to it. The simple rule-of-thumb for website-operators is to just keep everything secure(-ish, if we're being realistic). --- Further reading: 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BNIkw4Ao9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BNIkw4Ao9w 2. https://www.troyhunt.com/heres-why-your-static-website-needs-https/ https://www.troyhunt.com/heres-why-your-static-website-needs...
• nkotov 5y ago
  I started to work full time during the summers at 15 in IT - doing easy tasks like imaging laptops and setting up desktops for teachers my local school district. My friends would spend their time with video games, hanging out, etc. At the end of the summer, I asked if I could work part time after school for the district so that I don't have gaps on my resume. When I got out of high school, I technically already had several years of experience and I just started to apply for jobs instead of going to college. I hit over a decade of "professional" experience by the time I was 25. Do I regret working hard during those early years? Definitely not. It shaped me to be what I am today. I believe you should live your life that way you want to live it. You can't achieve great things by doing mediocre amount of work. Figure out where you are content with life and live it without regret of "what could have been".
• dahart 5y ago
  This only barely glances the number one way I’ve found to work hard: to work for yourself. Working on things other people want is, for me, more difficult than working on things I want. Working at someone else’s company is more difficult than working at my company. With my own company, when things were going relatively well, it was easy to spend every waking minute working. At other companies, putting in overtime is more draining, especially if the reasons for it are because things are late or something broke. I’ve put in a lot of overtime in my life, I tend to work hard, but there’s really no comparison between hard work with a boss and hard work as the boss.
  • borski 5y ago
    I echo this completely. One is invigorating, even when it’s tiring, and the other feels like slow death.
  • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    It's the old joke isn't it. A boss is out with one of his employees when they see a Ferrari drive past. The boss turns to his employee and says if you put in the hours and work really hard then one day I'll be able to afford one of those.
  • SlapperKoala 5y ago
    In my experience "working for yourself" means in practice "working for your clients." You still need an external party willing to give you money for your work. And they will have requirements about how it is done and when it is delivered that you won't necessarily like
    • dahart 5y ago
      Very true, being the boss is no panacea in terms of having to do work, it’s usually more work. But the intrinsic motivations really are very different when you are the one on the hook, when you decide which clients to take on, when you are building the company or deciding the dev or research directions, when you decide what happens with the revenue. I mean, for me anyway, but I know it’s true for at least some others too since many books have been written about this. It’s one of the reasons that a mentality of ownership is advocated even when you’re not the boss.
• Alex3917 5y ago
  > 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. Only a few people will have the right body type to be great at any given sport, but a lot will have the right body type to be great at at least one sport. E.g. if you don't have the right body type for basketball, you might have the perfect body type for ski jumping or whatever.
• jeffwass 5y ago
  “ There's a faint xor between talent and hard work.” I love this techie yet insightful quote.
• PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Long, Hard, Smart - pick 2 out of 3.
• SMAAART 5y ago
  I second this. Each and every time I met someone who lives by the motto "I work smart not hard" or a version of that, they ended up being lazy, or stupid, or - most often - both. We live in a world where the "average" is actually very high, so working hard, really gets us right around average; in order to break that barrier, in order to be >1 standard deviation from mean, we need to work hard and smart; and the road to >2 standard deviation is brutally hard.
• endisneigh 5y ago
  I hate the whole "hard work," but not "long hours" sort of discussion. Basically, if you work hard, but not long and succeed, then your hard work was "valid", if you work "long hours", which by some definition is "hard work" but don't succeed then it was just "long hours" and not "hard work." In other words, as long as you succeed whatever work you did is considered "hard work" or "working smart", etc. etc.
• a0-prw 5y ago
  This is absolutely insane XD I had so much fun and got into so much trouble in my late teens and twenties. I would be weeping into my scrooge money if I had worked like this essay advocates. I've also always had enough money and I've always had a little more than enough fun.
• antiterra 5y ago
  Reading about Bill Gates not taking a day off in his 20s doesn’t inspire me to work harder at all. If anything, it’s a miscalculation on Gates’s part, assuming he’d actually enjoy a day off. Would he have been materially less successful if he took a single day off in his 20s? Probably not. How about a week, or a week a year? Two weeks?
  • Gatsky 5y ago
    I don't think this is it - he is an obsessive person. He was working that hard because he wanted to. I mean look at him now, he isn't exactly playing golf or swanning about on yachts.
    • antiterra 5y ago
      I meant to allow for that with the ‘assuming he’d actually enjoy a day off’ caveat, but even so, there’s this, from Walter Isaacson: “Every spring, as they have for more than a decade, Gates spends a long weekend with Winblad at her beach cottage on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where they ride dune buggies, hang-glide and walk on the beach.” Yachts? How about this: https://moneyinc.com/a-closer-look-at-serene-the-330-million-yacht-bill-gates-chartered/ https://moneyinc.com/a-closer-look-at-serene-the-330-million... He also does play golf, is a member of Augusta National, and, apparently, has been living at a golf resort for months.
      • richardwhiuk 5y ago
        I just think that quote is a complete fabrication.
        • antiterra 5y ago
          Are you saying you think the interview Time magazine had with Gates was a complete fabrication, or that the author just randomly made up that bit? http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,137132,00.html http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,137132,... Or do you mean you think Gates actually took days off and the suggestion he didn’t is a fabrication?
• helen___keller 5y ago
  When I was an undergrad at CMU, I learned how to work hard. Really hard. After having coasted through too-easy high school, I spent all day every day at CMU either programming, doing mathematics, or thinking about one of those things (to great effect: often the trick to prove a theorem would pop into my head while showering or while taking a walk). I would fall asleep while programming in the middle of the night, dream about programming, then wake up and continue programming just where I left off. One thing from this essay really stuck out to me: > The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working without anyone telling you to. Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off. One thing that always happened at the end of a semester is we'd have a few days after exams but before flights back home. On these days I'd typically try playing a video game (my hobby before college) and every time I would stop playing after just an hour with deep feeling of unease at the pit of my stomach. "Alarm bells" is exactly how I would describe it - a feeling at the core of my psyche that I have been wasting time and there must be something productive I should be doing or thinking about. Years later, having tackled anxiety problems that had plagued me most of my life, I came to recognize that my relationship with hard work during my college years was not healthy and that this deep seated desire to do more work is not a positive thing, at least not for me. I've since reformed my ambitions, instead of looking to start a company or get a PhD in mathematics, I've decided that hard work is not the love of my life and instead I should focus on my hobbies while looking for a career path that can be simultaneously fulfilling but laid back.
  • YinglingLight 5y ago
    There's a time and place for everything. When I was an undergrad at RPI, I worked my ass off. Harder than I ever needed to in my working career. Now in my 30s my focus is more on family and housework, but I will always benefit from having been 'in the grinder' back then. I know my limits for hard work is great, should I ever need it again.
  • bradlys 5y ago
    I’ve heard this same mentality from many people who went to rigorous colleges or had a rigorous college experience. (It isn’t just prestigious schools that are like this - choose the wrong major at particular public schools and your life can be just as difficult) I’m of the same opinion. I still don’t know how to enjoy just existing - even small pleasures can be hard to do unless I think there is some kind of “work” aspect to it. Video games need progression or bragging rights, hobbies need skills that will make me better at something, and simple pleasures must be only to get me back onto the progression track. Recharging must be to get me back in the game and working hard again. Etc… I was overtuned in college to always be working on something because if I didn’t, I was going to flunk out. (Yay for bad professors and academia that cherishes weeding people out than growing what they have) I despise the way college trains people. Feels like capitalism training 101.
• matakozapanya 5y ago
  find it hard to take life advice from some dude who got lucky in the dotcom, has done nothing of note since and actively supports sexist, racist people as "he's not a bad guy". Find it even harder to take seriously a treatise on "work hard" when the underlying message is "make ME wealth, bitch ". Paul can go fuck himself.
• bloqs 5y ago
  No PG you are presenting speculative opinion as fact. Conscientiousness is a measured and well documented personality trait, it is also formed around age six. It also happens to be social in its construction. Software engineers typically report lower than average Conscientiousness, because the more complex the task, the less it has an impact. It's also negatively correlated with IQ. Suggesting it is a choice is demonstrably wrong. It is environmentally learned by the age of roughly 6.
  • bobobob420 5y ago
    Why do I have such low conscientiousness?
    • bloqs 5y ago
      Your childhood can be key. Your username makes me think you like to play with mind bending drugs that directly interfere with prefrontal cortical motivation.
      • bobobob420 5y ago
        Awesome thanks for sharing. I think for myself, it might be childhood since I was young I hated being forced to study and do work. Funnily enough I do all my day job while toasted cause its super fun, coding while sober seems so boring. I am trying to train myself to be more conscientious, I don't know why I did not pick it up as a child. My parents tried a lot with tutoring and studying.
        • bloqs 5y ago
          Many in the same boat as you - its probably why you ended up a programmer as well, as conscienciousness has less impact the more complex the job.
  • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    It's also negatively correlated with IQ. That's surprising, I wonder why.
• magicloop 5y ago
  "I never took a day off in my twenties" (Bill Gates) quote is a misnomer because what Bill Gates considers a day-off is something where you are just lying around doing nothing, such as lying on the beach. A two week sojourn into a set of books that interested him were not considered "days off". He did such activities yearly. Bill Gates wasn't in the office working a 7 day schedule for his entire 20s. So that is not the impression we should get from the quote at all. His productive time away has merit, and I have followed that attitude to reading myself, and recommend it to others. It would have been better if he had said "I never wasted a day in my twenties" which I think would be more accurate.
  • anthony_r 5y ago
    He got a lot of speeding tickets, look up the famous old mugshots. That's not something easy to obtain from inside an office. The man knew how to party, even if not too much :)
  • pydry 5y ago
    Bill Gates wants to be the hero of his own story. He's not going to claim that his success was the result of a few bets that paid off in spectacular fashion, strongarming OEMs and mommy being buddies with the CEO of IBM. It's going to be hard work, spectacular insight, old fashioned grit, persistence in the face of adversity, etc. - all the things Hollywood slavishly worships with either a clichéd montage or a poignant scene. It's how our culture frames laudable and justified success - of course it's how he will tell his story. Bill Gates more than most billionaires really wants to be seen as the hero, as a good guy. His charitable giving demonstrates just how much.
    • Joeri 5y ago
      Well, who doesn’t want to be seen as the hero in their own story? What I suspect is that it’s a case of “all of the above”. Yes, gates got lucky, but he was also talented, and he worked hard. To be an outlier you have to defy the odds, and luck, talent and grit are different ways of defying.
      • 5y ago
• tgtweak 5y ago
  This rhetoric furthered by Elon, Jack Ma and several others where working 7 days a week for 18 hours is "ideal" and that rest and relaxation are had at the expense of productivity/success is a real dangerous position. You know what happens to the majority of people when they get to a state of anxiety when relaxing and not working? Stress and burnout. Let's acknowledge that it may have been the path to success for SOME of the 0.1% who can work 18 hours a day nonstop for a decade with extreme natural ability and a fair amount of chance (confirmation bias aside) and not the end-all of being successful that everyone should strive for. Yes, there is certainly a correlation between working hard and being successful - regardless of your natural ability. Don't do it at the expense of living. Take it to the extreme: what happens when EVERYONE works that hard? You're back at your normal level of relative productivity.
  • wtetzner 5y ago
    Yeah, that's the thing. It can be good to work hard, but not necessarily long hours, or long stretches without breaks. I never feel more productive than when I just got back from a vacation.
  • cherrycherry98 5y ago
    Some people do enjoy their work and can be said to live for it. Marissa Mayer had an interesting take that burnout wasn't necessarily about working too much but resentment that they'd rather be spending more time on something else (like family). To paraphrase a similar view someone once told me: there's no such thing as work/life balance, it's all just life. That being said I think it's easier to live to work if you feel that your efforts are going to yield greater results. Putting time into study to get good grades and learn new skills, anticipating that this will yield better job opportunities? Sure! Working long hours on my startup that is taking off and could make me rich? Great! Having to work long hours and skip vacations to finish a project in a salaried corporate job? That'll burn you out because you're not directly benefitting from the sacrifice, which probably leads to some resentment towards your employer.
  • SlapperKoala 5y ago
    > SOME of the 0.1% who can work 18 hours a day nonstop for a decade with extreme natural ability I'm sceptical of whether they actually exist as described tbh. There's an obvious incentive for rich business people to emphasize the amount of work they put in, and I've not seen any independent verification of their supposedly high output
• bobobob420 5y ago
  This article is hot garbage and so is much else Paul writes. The comments were 10x better than the crap written in this article like seriously? You should write a motivation book too.
• david927 5y ago
  This falls into the Malcolm Gladwell genre of arguments made on top of specious anecdotal data. Paul's not wrong, per se, but it's not a well-formed argument. Bill Gates made his fortune by being in the right place at the right time with connections from his wealthy family, and software that he first sold and then went out and bought. If hard work helped him grow his empire, great, but I wouldn't use him as a great example of what hard work can bring you. PG Wodehouse is considered by most to be a great "fun commercial fiction" writer. Comparing him to, say, Joyce, says more about Paul than about either of these writers. For me, I prefer this quote by Calvin Coolidge: "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."
  • shmageggy 5y ago
    > This falls into the Malcolm Gladwell genre of arguments made on top of specious anecdotal data. Paul's not wrong, per se, but it's not a well-formed argument. That pretty much describes anything that he writes on his blog.
    • david927 5y ago
      Carrots are good for you. I had a friend who ate a carrots as a kid. He's a doctor now. I wouldn't have even written my comment but this was just a big talking point after Gladwell's 10,000 hours book a few years ago (which also speciously and strangely used Bill Gates as an example of effort). That Coolidge quote is 100 years old. I like us talking about things but let's endeavor to make it new things.
      • arkitaip 5y ago
        What I'm hearing is that you should startup a biz to sell those doctor-making carrots.
  • lanstin 5y ago
    And I think a strong argument can be made that if Bill Gates had taken a little time to look at the big picture in his early days, Microsoft might have had a more positive effect on the world, rather than become a company that valued crushing opponents over technical quality or real innovation. Imagine the quality of Linux with 10% of the money of Microsoft.
• justinator 5y ago
  It's very shocking to read this and not even mention how supportive the privilege of starting out wealthy is. Hard work looks different if there's no where to go up or out.
  • throwawaygh 5y ago
    > Hard work looks different if there's no where to go The essay assumes a lot about who the reader is and the type of work they're doing. This perspective on work is obviously utterly alien to a single parent who's a dental assistant, part-time wait staff, has two young kids, and is barely making ends meet. But that person works a hell of a lot harder than any startup founder I've ever met. For them, the answer to "how to do hard work" is simpler: remember your kids starve and go homeless if you don't. Then, get up, go to work, and do what you're told. Continue until you have enough to pay the rent, buy food, and pay the baby sitters. Remember how lucky you are to have a roof and food. Repeat. On one hand, I understand exactly what PG is saying -- the sort of work that requires high productivity without anyone telling you to work feels way harder than straight forward wage labor. There's a reason people drop out of phd programs and intentionally seek out specifically boring & predictable engineering/sales jobs (see: the post from the cmu undergrad). On the other hand, I completely understand how the idea that autonomy and ownership over your own labor makes work harder -- and bragging about working 7 days a week for two whole years -- must seem incredibly tone-deaf to someone who has no choice but to do long days for 7 days a week under abusive management for 18+ years, only to get a reprieve of merely working 8-10 hour days for the 25-30 years after the kids are grown up and move away. But PG isn't writing to that audience. The primary audience for many of his essays are people like him: guys who grew up geeky in upper middle class suburbs. There's nothing wrong with writing for the audience, but he does a kind-of bad job at signposting the fact that his advice is utterly irrelevant to the 50+% of the population that never have the opportunity to invest in themselves.
    • justinator 5y ago
      But PG isn't writing to that audience. The primary audience for many of his essays are people like him: guys who grew up geeky in upper middle class suburbs. There's nothing wrong with writing for the audience, but he does a kind-of bad job at signposting the fact that this is the target for his advice. If that's his audience, perhaps a better essay would be, "Look you've got it pretty easy in life already, don't blow it (and even if you do, you'll probably have a second/third/fourth chance)", not: "listen to me about how to work hard because I know", because I haven't been convinced that he knows. No need for navel grazing.
• xwdv 5y ago
  I gotta be honest, I hate working hard. At least for money anyway. I hate the amount of time and mindshare it takes and the way it's looked up to as some virtue by the rest of society; the hallmark of some truly good person. I'm sure there will be knee jerk reactions to downvote this just because of how programmed it is into society that hard work is a noble endeavor, and perhaps it is, for a certain class of problems that humanity occasionally faces where there is no easy way to solve them except by working hard. But making money and living a good life should not be one of those problems. You really don't know how pointless it is to work hard until you make easy money. It's not uncommon for my investment portfolio to have a gain or loss of $20-30k in a day, I've made over $200k in the past two months, not really doing anything. My job itself pays close to $200k a year, but I justify working it by the fact that it's fairly easy and really I only put in about 4 hours of solid work per day. I feel fairly secure in not being a very ambitious person anymore. I used to be, back when I was young and hopeful and immersed in the whole startup scene with hopes of making it big and changing the world for the better. But no startup I was ever part of ever made it big. Worse, as I got to know the world I didn't see the point in trying to change it. It is what it is and that's all it will ever be. So yea, I've accepted I'm not one of those people destined to save the world through hard work. Instead I'm here to savor the fruits of their hard labor, and my goal now is to live as richly as possible with the least amount of effort. There is so much to enjoy in life and not enough time to enjoy it if you spend all your time working hard. Nothing makes me feel as good as working smart, or even not working at all, and yet still producing the same amount of results as someone who has worked very hard. It is intoxicating, and knowing that others would be doing the same if I was working hard right now makes it very unappealing to work hard myself. I am cursed in that I will never be able to work hard again.
  • sydthrowaway 5y ago
    What is your investment strategy?
• WhompingWindows 5y ago
  Yet another Paul Graham stream of consciousness. He presents a thesis but forgets to support it as he streams out another essay. I take issue with this fundamental thesis: "There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort." He doesn't distinguish between practice and effort. In my view, practice takes effort and effort occurs during practice, they are two dimensions of the same thing, which is really just "experience." You don't gain experience without effortful practice. Furthermore, where is his mention of accountability to a team? One of the greatest motivators is having helpful allies who tell you what they want from you, provide tips how to do it (leveraging their experience), and then give you the keys you need to work hard and get great things done. Another lackluster article from PG that rockets to the top of HN within an hour. There are much better writers out there, I'm not sure why his work is so lauded.
  • richardwhiuk 5y ago
    Because this website is pretty much centered around people who read/liked PGs essays.
  • r0s 5y ago
    > Yet another Paul Graham stream of consciousness. Absurd to expect anything else. I missed the part of the essay where it pretended to be... whatever you seem to think it should. You're not sure why it's popular and here you are responding to it, attaching to it and reacting, building on it. It sounds like you did in fact get a lot out of the essay, just like the rest of the peanut gallery.
  • tim333 5y ago
    >rockets to the top of HN within an hour He gets extra credit on HN for creating HN
• whatdidinust 5y ago
  This article has more than quadrupled my existing opinion that the concept of hard work is largely a fabrication designed to show off to other people. If anyone’s seriously read this article end to end and didn’t conclude: “Wow, Paul is really struggling to back this up.” You might be in junior high. The reality is that inflation and monetary policy combined with degradation of schools means you have to play a completely different life game to succeed now. And “working hard” while being a waiter or bartender isn’t going to get you there. Paul is really trying to avoid the fact that unless you are gaining extremely highly valued skills in the exact right industry at the exact right schools at the exact right time, working hard is a complete waste of time. And everyone can feel it at a gut level. People know when their work isn’t going to be rewarded. And in this era, you won’t be rewarded 90% of the time for Most skills or most efforts.
• kaladin_1 5y ago
  Nice one! While you might not always agree with Paul but his writing usually reflects something that has been deeply thought out. I can almost see a man walking and thinking...
• Sr_developer 5y ago
  > 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. This is not true, everyone who knows even just a little bit about football (I suppose not many people here) would know Messi was the preternatural talent (not like he has not worked hard, but his talent is by far his biggest asset), it is C Ronaldo in any case who is a totally dedicated person to training. You dont do this at 8-10 because you are a "hard-worker", you do it because you won the genetic lottery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j9POXpurPU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j9POXpurPU As always, the Gell-Mann amnesia effect in full effect.
  • ultrasounder 5y ago
    @senordeveloper Have You seen the training viedoes of Messi training with Barca and ARG? This guys trains like a maniac. CR7 IS a good counter-point to Messi's natural talent, but that doesnt take away the fact that the guys trains by practicing free-kics with a Robot Goalkeeper. Now enjoy Your time sink of the day; https://www.google.com/search?q=messi+robot+goalkeeper&rlz=1C1GCEU_enUS935US935&oq=messi+robo&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0l2j0i22i30l7.4542j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=messi+robot+goalkeeper&rlz=1...
    • Sr_developer 5y ago
      You cannot bring a variety-show video and be expected to be taken seriously. Messi is not sloth, but he has never ever distinguished himself for being a training freak like Ronaldo, Zanetti,Batistuta, etc, if anything when younger (18-23) he was very undisciplined in some aspects of his training, for example he had a crappy diet and was kinda weak and injury prone.
• nvarsj 5y ago
  Has hard work burned anyone else out? I spent my 20s working my ass off as an employee, and while it helped my career a lot, I am completely burned out now. All that creative work and effort which didn't end up amounting to much personally. Maybe the caveat to working hard is you should work hard for yourself and not others.
  • somethingAlex 5y ago
    I see a very common arch of "I want to achieve" -> "Okay, life is about more than that, I'm going to practice balance" in these comments. I have also gone through it. Around 19-24 years old I was working like a dog and making some great career progress. That helped me today, like you said, but I'm now the happiest I've ever been by enjoying this fine summer and working when I feel like working. I look back on those years and truly wish I saw the other things life has to offer at the time.
• kcatskcolbdi 5y ago
  No mention of the near slave labor in our agriculture system. No mention of the parents working two custodial jobs to provide for their children. No mention of the vast quantity of individuals working hard every day who don't get to become billionaires.
  • skapadia 5y ago
    Exactly. There are millions of people that work hard to provide their family a roof over their heads, food on the table, and a chance to go to school. Perhaps PG's article wasn't meant for those people, but it's so incredibly tone deaf.
• rmah 5y ago
  When I was younger, for some odd reason I thought it was important to convince people that hard work was important. But today, the more people I see commenting that "hard work" is essentially a scam -- or something to that effect -- the happier I become. It just means that there is less competition. Feel free to do your own thing, relax, skate along and enjoy life.
• fchu 5y ago
  There is something fascinating about this article, and it's not the tips about how to properly work hard, which aren't new or particularly insightful (otherwise reasonable and well summarized). It's the fact that throughout the article, hard work is an implied imperative in life, the main thing to do (otherwise it brings a "feeling of disgust"), without questioning if that's healthy, right, or so absolute. Maybe instead of the how, I was expecting something about the why, a reflection on the bad aspects of working hard too, and its associated costs on other parts of one's life, whether it's Paul, Patrick or Bill.
  • pornel 5y ago
    pg runs a business that depends on young people wanting to work their asses off for startups. IMHO the real "why" of this article is attracting the right people for Y Combinator.
    • dang 5y ago
      pg hasn't been running Y Combinator for over 7 years! You've got your causality reversed. It's not that this essay exists because of YC, it's that YC exists because PG is obsessed with the idea of doing great work. (There are other reasons too, of course, but that was one vector.) He was that way long before YC.
      • eloff 5y ago
        This is clearly true looking from the outside, but people seem so eager to attribute motivations to greed or self interest, and success to luck, inherited wealth, and connections for any famous and successful person. Is it just jealously and pettiness? Do people downplay the achievements of others to make themselves feel better about achieving nothing remarkable? There is a rarely used English word I learned for the first time the other day - compersion - which is the opposite of jealousy. When you take joy in other people's success. Let's do more of that as a community and as human beings.
        • luffapi 5y ago
• asimjalis 5y ago
  I have noticed that “what I work on” is more significant than “how many hours I spend working”. You have to be pointing the right way, not just going fast.
• arduinomancer 5y ago
  I feel like a big part missing from this essay is “Why should you work hard?” It seems to assume that working hard is a good thing. Are these essays implicitly aimed at startup founders? Because for the average engineer working hard doesn’t have much of a benefit. Optimizing for interviews is much more important than hard work.
  • lovecg 5y ago
    I’m guessing you’re new to PG’s writing? His whole thing is drop out, do a startup, work for yourself, work hard.
• CamelCaseName 5y ago
  This is the trait that I have found in successful people around me: > The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working without anyone telling you to. > Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off. I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm working hard, but I can be sure I'm getting nowhere when I'm not, and it feels awful. How does one cultivate this feeling?
  • manacit 5y ago
    Have an anxiety disorder and a fear of failure - you'll always be worried that by not working, you are going to fall behind or something bad is going to happen. I say this partly tongue-in-cheek, but I don't think it's altogether incorrect. Having a compulsion to work to the level of 'alarm bells' going off doesn't sound like fun to me.
• cm2012 5y ago
  Eh, I don't know. I came from a lower middle class background, but am now top 1% for my age and income + I probably have more wealth at this stage of my life than PG did. I love idleness and leisure. I only work to get more of it in the future. I do have a drive to do a job well, but not for the sake of achievement itself shudder. The idea of saying at age 13 "I hate leisure activities, its not productive" is really unsettling to me.
  • lovecg 5y ago
    It’s just not written for you. There’s a small percentage of people with whom this attitude resonates. This essay is advice on how to harness these personal tendencies in an effective manner, so it’s natural that it seems foreign to you if you don’t have this deep seated need to not be idle.
• jedberg 5y ago
  > The one precisely dateable landmark I have is when I stopped watching TV, at age 13. It frustrates me when people brag about this like it's a universally good thing. Imagine 100 years ago someone bragging that they stopped wasting time reading books. It's especially frustrating to see PG do it given that he's an artist (or at least used to be), basically putting down another art form. TV has good and bad things. TV can convey information. TV can be an art form, consumed passively like a painting. And TV can just be a mental escape, like reading a novel. TV is not good or bad, it's how you spend your time watching it that matters.
  • ryanSrich 5y ago
    This is because the word "TV" is essentially useless. It means different things to so many different people, and often "TV" is the word people use when they want to be critical of entertainment. I can't remember the last time I watched a TV show through a cable provider. But I can tell you the last time I watched a YouTube series. I'm betting PG only sees one of those as "TV".
  • extraduder_ire 5y ago
    TV sucks, I don't think anybody should watch it when a better alternative is available. Radio too. There might be good things shown on it occasionally, but there are better ways to get at them nowadays. Ways that don't require you to synchronize your watching with availability. Main appeal I see in TV/radio is the constant live-ish stream of content, and more access to hard-to-license content than competing livestreams.
    • criddell 5y ago
      These days I think watching TV means includes streaming and other types of on-demand services. I watch TV whenever I can and it's never synchronized with a broadcaster's schedule, except for sports.
  • igammarays 5y ago
    It frustrates me when people bring out the "it depends" card and because then you can't condemn anything. I condemn TV, as it is a waste of time for most people. More importantly, it is a waste of headspace and mental energy. Obviously this doesn't apply if your work is to be a filmmaker. But PG addresses this point well: if that is not your deep interest, then it's a waste of time. Most people don't watch TV out of deep interest and high motivation, except perhaps people like Christopher Nolan.
• edderly 5y ago
  I find the mentions of Messi, Newton, Mozart and Wodehouse bizarre. The essay is similar to Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour theory, whether you agree or not, at worst Gladwell is writing a journalistic think piece. Here though, is Graham credibly putting himself in the same category as Mozart? Dropping a reference to Patrick Collison, who no one outside of tech would have a clue who that is in the same breath as you namedrop Newton?
  • renewiltord 5y ago
    The better interpretation is: “I’m a successful businessman. This is how I acted. So did these other successful business people. And as a matter of fact, some of the greats of history in other fields also acted like this. Put together, I think that this behavior is conducive to success (in the way I define it).” Personally, I find it much more useful to go into each of these reads to find some piece of something I can incorporate into my life. I don’t think it’s particularly useful to disparage the author. In this case, I don’t think he has a megalomaniacal belief in his legacy as a luminary, but even if he did, I trust my ability to extract information from what he writes. There’s also a meta-discussion here. In human speech a common technique is to use X_j (j=1..n) diverse objects that each have k (k=1..m) characteristics Y={Y_jk} where for each j, there exists some k such that you can form a subset Z of Y which has the property that for any y_1, y_2 in Z, |m(y_1)-m(y_2)|<d, for some interesting measure of the characteristic m, and some small number d to illustrate an idea. Usually, the idea is that the diversity in X_j resulting in this form of Z points to some commonality among the elements of Z. The idea is usually not that all Y_jk are in an equivalence class but that the subset Z is in a single equivalence class. To put it more plainly through illustration: Messi, the fifty year old drunk Sunday leaguer, and I all choose to warm up before games to avoid injuries. This indicates that perhaps the warming up is a good idea. What it does not indicate is whether Messi, dad, and I are equivalent across all our characteristics. In fact, the interesting part is that we aren’t but that we share this.
    • pcbro141 5y ago
      > There’s also a meta-discussion here. In human speech a common technique is to use X_j (j=1..n) diverse objects that each have k (k=1..m) characteristics Y={Y_jk} where for each j, there exists some k such that you can form a subset Z of Y which has the property that for any y_1, y_2 in Z, |m(y_1)-m(y_2)|<d, for some interesting measure of the characteristic m, and some small number d to illustrate an idea. > Usually, the idea is that the diversity in X_j resulting in this form of Z points to some commonality among the elements of Z. The idea is usually not that all Y_jk are in an equivalence class but that the subset Z is in a single equivalence class. Never change, HN. Lol.
• defnmacro 5y ago
  My personal take is working hard is a precondition towards being successful but not necessarily a guarantee. Lots of normal people work very hard, many normal people I know outside of tech are working night shifts and a day job to just sustain their lives. Many of these people rarely have a full day off, rather they might scale back the night job in order to get rest, or rest whenever their scheduling allows for it. There probably working just as hard as a Bill Gates, but these people aren't exactly walking towards a path of riches. They're just sustaining and it's a very unfortunate reality of America today. Really success comes from the prerequisite of hard work, the aptitude of the individual in regards to the task, and the ability of the resulting work to pay off in convexity, similar to a call option in finance. Generally non-convex pay outs are also associated with risk, perhaps alot of it. So really success comes from working very hard, being smart about it and taking on risk.
• aroundtown 5y ago
  It is too common to see the well off capitalists extol the virtues of hard work, usually as a means unto itself, ignoring the reward. They often say, you peasants could be like me if only you understood how to work hard, while completely ignoring the fact that not everybody is fairly compensated for their hard work. I wish I was in such a good position that I could spend 5 hours a day writing about whatever self-indulgent topics I'm feeling while being able to pat myself on the back and call it a hard days work.
• nineplay 5y ago
  One of my greatest regrets is how much time I wasted on 'work' in my 20s and 30s. I was an engineer, I made a comfortable salary, but I rarely took a vacation, I never traveled outside the UI, I took days off reluctantly with a vague feeling that I was letting someone down. "Later", I told myself. When I'm successful, when I'm stable, when I have the money to travel in style and not backpack around and stay at hostels. Then I can take a break and have the adventures I want. My in-laws confirmed this attitude for me - they retired in their 50s and traveled the world. What a great life goal! Guess what, life happened. Health issues. I'm never going to travel the world. All that time in my 20s in 30s - I was healthy, I was happy, I was carefree, and I didn't appreciate it and threw all that time away sitting at a desk looking at a screen. Today, now, that's about the only thing I'm fit to do. Don't listen to PG, kids. Live the life you want to have now, not the life you think you'll want to have several decades out.
  • herodoturtle 5y ago
    > I never traveled outside the UI Beautiful typo :-)
    • guhsnamih 5y ago
      And I outside the terminal!
  • bhupy 5y ago
    > Don't listen to PG, kids. Live the life you want to have now, not the life you think you'll want to have several decades out. Isn't there an in-between? My wife and I both delay a little bit of gratification with the expectation that we'll have a better life in our mid-30's or early 40's. In other words, we're choosing not to live the life we want to have right now, because we're trading that off for a potentially better life X years from now (where in our case, X = 5-10 years). X can be whatever you want, and it's up to individuals (or families) to decide that for themselves. But once you do, delayed gratification is an important social concept; as evidenced by the marshmallow test administered in children. For adults, "rejecting the marshmallow" can mean working a little harder in your '20s, so that you may get 2 marshmallows when you're in your '30s — which for a lot of people is important as that's the age when they have children.
• canada_dry 5y ago
  > natural ability, practice, and effort I'd argue that perseverance (vs practice) is a better partner in that combination. Practice suggests doing the same thing over-and-over. Perseverance is never giving up when there are road blocks.
• guhsnamih 5y ago
  Am I the only one who is having to work hard to understand the article?
• tester756 5y ago
  Consistency is a key That's what games taught me, weird.
• cwhittle 5y ago
  Someone needs to write a compelling article on "Why to work hard". Just because you should isn't a good enough.
  • zdbrandon 5y ago
    That answer is different for everyone. Maybe the article should be “How to determine whether you should work harder”, but at the end of the day I’m not sure anyone can be convinced by an article. If you don’t have any anxieties based in the lack of having attained something specific, then you probably won’t (and maybe shouldn’t) work hard at all.
• abxytg 5y ago
  The older I get and the more I read this stuff... I just think man PG... your priorities suck!
• adv0r 5y ago
  This is the first essay by PG which I find somehow misleading. It took me a couple of years after quitting my frenetic goal-driven life to be able to sit back and enjoy. I was the kind of person that have a task on Trello to shave and shower. If you feel that doing nothing is wasting time, I feel there is a good chance you need to look deeper within yourself and see what your REAL drive is. Why you do what you do? Why you can't sit in peace? Why do you have FOMO? Why looking at the TED talk by 10-year-old-genious millionare makes you feel miserable? You try to compensate by keep moving, never stopping, and sedate your anxiety and fear with a ... job. Something you can be very good at, something that can be meaningful, yet you are in autopilot. If you can't turn it off because you feel discomfort, well, maybe you are missing out on your inner voice. You can go by probably for decades ignoring it, and actually use ""FOCUS"" as mean to procrastinate/getting distracted from thinking about your human condition. But I'm just me and he is PG. So maybe listen to him
• ryanSrich 5y ago
  - Working on a computer all day, from the comfort of my house - Being able to tend to work issues from my phone - Getting intellectual stimulation from my work - Getting to work with really really smart people - Getting to see the joy customers get from using a product you helped build These may not seem like much. They might even seem like a burden to some. But I've worked horrendous jobs in the past. Not just brutal manual labor, but mindless factory jobs that practically turn your brain into mush. Working on things I actually enjoy, in an enjoyable environment, for 12-16 hours per day is a life I'd take any day of the week over life's I've lived in the past. I'd say overall, working hard pays off if you have a strong impact on the business and own a good chunk of it. If you're working at BigTechCoFaang I'd slack absolutely as much as possible. Just riding the border between hired and fired.
• jp42 5y ago
  While going through the comments on this thread, I remembered a chapter in language textbook while I was in school, the name of the chapter was 'Charchasatrat hawaraleli mhatari'. It was about people discussing a well known parable. This chapter portrayed how people discussed everything except the message of the parable. Similarly, I feel majority of the comments in this thread talking everything except message PG trying to convey.
• grouphugs 5y ago
  socialize or die you fucking nazis
• prettycolors23 5y ago
  I think "natural talent" is sort of a false concept. After time, hard work and practice often turn into talent. When you train hard at something and improve your skills enough, an outside observer will label you as talented. The better your skills, the more talented. You are the only one that knows you didn't start with those skills. I wrestled competitively for 20 years. By the end of my career, people would talk about how naturally talented I was. But I knew that everything they were talking about came about through two decades of practice. People talked about how fast I was. But I spent years doing plyometrics. I was slow before that. People talked about how strong I was; I was doing pushups and pull ups every day with my dad starting at 8 years old. People just saw the results of 20 years of practice, and didn't see where I started out, so they called it talent. I think to be extremely successful at something, you don't need talent. You can build talent in yourself. There is something to be said about people who are naturally very bad at something. Those people might never appear talented at something they are naturally very bad at. But then again, given enough practice over time, they might. If you look at anyone who is a true master of a skill, their mastery lies not in their natural talent, but through their years of practice, their drive and their passion for what they are doing. Talent plays a small role over time. It mostly plays a role in the beginning. For something like sprinting or weight lifting, I will give that natural ability is important. There are only so many people that can be as fast as Usain Bolt. But for sports that are more skills based, like martial arts, or other activities that are skills based, like coding, talent only takes you so far. After a certain point, talent becomes insignificant compared to all of your hard work.
  • burntoutfire 5y ago
    > I think "natural talent" is sort of a false concept. You've never heard of child prodigies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_prodigy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_prodigy)? They clearly possess natural talent.
• etherio 5y ago
  The attitude of feeling guilty when you're not working can be useful to motivate yourself, but I think it s also something to be careful of. Indeed, sometimes this time of pressure can grow so pervasive it becomes impossible for you to relax, and humans aren't endlessly working robots: we need to also have time where we calm down, which PG explained. However, he didn't warn of developing too much of a work ethic to the point relaxation itself is something you don't enjoy.
• SeanFerree 5y ago
  Great article!!
• cryptica 5y ago
  These days, it's not difficult to create products that are far better than your main competitors' products in every respect. The hard part is merely getting the attention of customers so that they know that your product exists... It's extremely difficult to create this scenario whereby a prospective customer will actually compare your product against a competitor's product. If people were more open to experiment, it would be easy but network effects are just too strong. Likely propped reinforced by endless money printing. Infinite money printing just allows the economy to maintain its structure forever. The winners always get bailed out so they always stay winners and the losers always have their competitors bailed out so they always stay losers.
• skapadia 5y ago
  Maybe PG should include some draft reviewers who are hard working but not rich. Seems like an echo chamber to include the reviewers he does. Unbelievable.
• tempson 5y ago
  Created this account to reply to this thread. In my opinion, this article could be much better if it accounted for few additional perspectives. 1. There are people in this world who do better with consistency over volume. Dedicate 1 hour every day on your subject of interest. You are bound to get really good at it in few years. The challenging part is “1 hour every day.” 2. Work-centric life shouldn’t be celebrated to this extent. It just doesn’t do good at the end.
• rllearneratwork 5y ago
  Very few people regret on their deathbed that they simply did not work hard enough. What they typically regret is not trying things and not spending time with family. Yes, trying things could mean work very hard, like starting a startup but it also often means not backpacking in Europe, not sailing around the world, not opening their own bakery, etc.
• dougb5 5y ago
  Today's Ezra Klein podcast has an excellent interview with James Suzman who gives a historical perspective on why we work hard: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-james-suzman.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
• gxs 5y ago
  To me this article describes how to get on target. Once on target, I do think you go balls to the wall as long as it's sustainable while getting good results. On a side note, I really dislike this style of writing where it tries to be psuedo technical and even uses psuedo technical terms. I realize this isn't necessarily Paul's shortcoming, but rather my own subjective preferences.
• tempson 5y ago
  Really happy to read that most readers are critical about this article. This article is extremely shortsighted! Kids don’t fall for this trap. Life is about people and relationships. p.s. Steve Jobs is already forgotten. Bill Gates will be joining that list too. Now that we know his dirty secrets, fastet than expected.
• theptip 5y ago
  I think the Hamming piece that circulates here infrequently is very insightful: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html > Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office! > What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this. On the other hand, I would also recommend caution here -- I strongly believe that some people simply have a much higher capacity/tolerance for work. John Carmack appears to have been able to sustain 80-hour weeks without burning out. I can't. I don't feel bad about this gap. This observation is pretty mundane; it's exactly the same way that the average person's psyche or physique simply can't tolerate the training workload of an olympic athlete. "Work harder" might be the right advice for someone who has excess capacity that they are not using. It might be terrible advice for someone who is already trending towards burnout working 50-hour weeks when their capacity is 40-hour weeks. There's an element of self-knowledge required to honestly evaluate yourself and determine exactly how capable you are. (Of course -- push yourself sometimes. You might surprise yourself. I personally think it's a good experience to have pushed up against burnout on a project I care about, to know what my limits are. But I don't aspire to ride that line in perpetuity.)
• ttiurani 5y ago
  > [E]ven in college a lot of the work is pointless; there are entire departments that are pointless. I find it interesting PG thinks that dismissing entire branches of science without specifying which ones nor justifying why, is a) a good take or b) makes his essay better.
• void_mint 5y ago
  I came here to rip apart this post and PG for propping up hustle culture bullshit, but am actually pleasantly surprised at his takes. I would reword most of his post to be more about "being engaged" instead of "working hard", because "work" has so many flavors and misconceptions. > My limit for the harder types of writing or programming is about five hours a day. Whereas when I was running a startup, I could work all the time. At least for the three years I did it; if I'd kept going much longer, I'd probably have needed to take occasional vacations. [5] Most programmers don't have the ability or scope to be engaged in the way that he's talking about wrt his startup, so most programmers should stop working as soon as they're at their "productivity threshold" throughout the day and have fulfilled their remaining busywork duties. I really wish tech "influencers" like PG would post more about that - when to put the mouse down and go for a walk or watch a movie. I actually think the "best" take would be "Every individual should work exactly as hard as they believe they should". I think it's a reality, in that most people are unwilling to work any harder than they want to, but also I think context is probably the most important factor in terms of "work", "output" and "success". If you don't feel like you should work hard, or don't need to, you're either working on something that isn't worth your time, or you don't feel engaged at all. Both are fine, but both also signal you should move on. This post turned into kind of a ramble. Apologies.
  • joe_the_user 5y ago
    Just quoting Gates as model is swallowing gallons of the "Koolaid" in my opinion. Other have gone into that in more detail here. When asked the secret of his success, An insider who leveraged a monopoly position to get more of a monopoly position, said "hard work, relentless hard work, nothing but hard work!"
    • quickthrower2 5y ago
      Yes and the other problem is using Gates as an example is the problem of extrapolation from an outlier. Taking a survey of 100 YC participants would be more interesting.
  • pm90 5y ago
    This is a beautifully written post and definitely not a ramble, thanks for sharing this. I would take this a bit further that being happy or feeling fulfilled is really the best way to have an open mind to do things differently. If you're stressed out from working all the time, you have little chance of appreciating "problems" as more than things that must be dealt with rather than as opportunities for learning.
• oriettaxx 5y ago
  in Italy you would say: "ma va in miniera!"
• janj 5y ago
  I took extra classes and worked hard in college to get a CS degree because I loved it. I was so excited to start a career because the internships were fun and exciting. I graduated in 2001 right after everything dried up. The only place hiring was Raytheon, there was no way I'd step foot back in that place to work on weapons. I asked a friend what to do, "Why don't you move to MT and snowboard", so I did. Seven years of my 20's in MT, the first five snowboarding and climbing, the last two figuring out how to get back into tech while snowboarding and climbing. I'm now in my 40's married to someone I met in MT with two beautiful kids and good career in tech. I don't spend much time thinking about what I might've been able to achieve had I spent those years in my 20's working hard in tech. I'm just very grateful things ended up the way they did. We need people who want to achieve great things, especially now with the urgent problems we've created for ourselves. But it's just fine to not be one of those people.
  • leafmeal 5y ago
    Thanks, this is inspiring to read. Booking my ticket now... ;)
  • jeffbee 5y ago
    Reminds me of my intern at Google. PhD CS, had been an intern at Google 9 summers in a row. Spent remainder of year skiing. Smart and contributed a lot, also seemed happy.
    • wanderer2323 5y ago
      Stories like your intern skiing for 9 years or the GP ‘5 years snowboarding’ usually omit describing rich parents in the background picking all sort of tabs.
      • janj 5y ago
        I won't fault you for the not unreasonable assumption but not the case for me. I have fond memories of sleeping behind a friends couch while securing a job at the ski resort. Initially working at the resort from 4 to midnight so I could ride every day. Sleeping in dorm style housing slightly worse than freshman year of college. Working my way up to running the ticket office. Somehow not blowing all my money on new gear, saving just enough to buy a $59k condo at the base of the resort which I still have. No financial safety net, no savings, but also no dependents and nothing to lose living in one of the greatest areas of the country.
• throwaway123qq 5y ago
  What ability is required at a factory, you know, these useless workers producing means of subsistence, like food, homes, equipment? I think these workers make awesome things, well, because I need food, etc for living. It is only thanks to them you able to do what you want - what you call work, while they work 12 hours a day for very little. There is huge difference between their work and what you do. With all respect, but I will recommend you changing the subject to something else, but not "hard work". May be "making profit hardcore XXX.".
• andagainagain 5y ago
  So many things annoy me about this sort of self-help guru vagueness. "One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you'll have to work very hard" - this is not true. You have to work, but the "hard" part implies that stress is important. Stress is incidental - everyone experiences stress regardless of work. I learned years ago that high achievers don't experience more stress... an in fact they tend to rephrase problems to give them LESS stress. They work, but they purposely make those things less stressful. The work itself, from their perspective isn't "hard" at all. "There are three ingredients to great work: natural ability, practice, and effort". These aren't separate things! Natural ability is learned just like anything else. It's a set of skills that you develop through building your own ways of thinking. You get those through practice. And for some, that effort is often negligible for one reason or another - experiences and thoughts that they have because of emotions or places they grew up or what context they relate to. I could go on for hours about this specific topic. "And yet Bill Gates sounds even more extreme. Not one day off in ten years?" - A surprising number of people do this anyways. If it's not stressful to them, it's not effort... it's just what you do. By the way, most of these people don't become rich. Why? It's not because of "natural ability" or "lack of practice and effort". It's because their daily work covers things that aren't, directly, money. "Cows got to get fed" or "lawn has to be mowed" or "kids need to be watched" or "spend a bit of time on something that I actually like". For Bill Gates, that "just what you do" was probably "work on microsoft". And if it failed, he's publically said that yeah, his backup plan was to go back to Harvard, becuase that was of course an option for him. Relatively speaking, it wasn't a super high risk decision. "Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off. I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm working hard, but I can be sure I'm getting nowhere when I'm not, and it feels awful". This sounds, honestly, quite unhealthy. It's "feel pain now because reasons. I have multiple theories on how this sort of thought process comes around. For example, When we can't relax during our downtime, or we don't actually get the rewards of our labor. But you notice that outside of constructed work environments (like school, or any job where you have a direct boss), this doesn't happen. Those who practice violin practice until they're done practicing, then they relax, then they come back later and practice some more. They don't half-ass practice, because there isn't a point to that. If you're practicing, it's not "so that I can work hard, and if I don't I feel guilty". Instead it's "I need to polish this one part of the song" or "I'm struggling with my fingering here" or maybe even "I'm going to play with this section of the song, it seems fun". Note - it's not pointless work. So "I'm working, but not working hard" just... doesn't happen. Because why would it? That doesn't make the song better, it doesn't make you better. The more I go through the article, the more I just think the goals are getting tripped up by a combination of external forces that take up mental resources, and a mental model where the stress of the situation determines the quality of the product. I have tons of suggestions (I trimmed this comment down and rewrote it 3 times already). The big one though I think is learning to roll with what matters. Do everything you're doing, and then take a break, and then do it again. Honestly, unless you get into the nitty gritty details, It's really a lot simpler than people think.
• rakhodorkovsky 5y ago
  I admire pg; I don't admire his essays, even though in broad strokes I agree with them. I feel his choice of style works against him; that's where I disagree. Write like you talk, but if you talk like pg writes you lose your audience. His essays check out line by line, paragraph by paragraph, but they fail to drive at some deeper, more subtle point that can capture the imagination of an audience. I'm sure pg is nothing if not imaginative, but his essays aren't. Another comment criticizes this essay as just another pg stream of consciousness; I feel it's the opposite: short on many of the details, digressions and emotions that can make an essay come alive, that can give you sense of the author and his world. Often when I read an essay that's what I'm interested in most and I don't think I'm alone in this. I think I understand why pg has chosen his style; the principles and aesthetic sensibilities that went into his choice and I agree with them. Nevertheless I think it's a poor choice. I hope pg reads this and reconsiders. Innovate!
  • personlurking 5y ago
    In the past I read a lot of his essays but I can no longer stomach his obsession with (high) school. He overanalyzes it and relates almost every essay to how things are in school and I'm certain someone has made it into a drinking game by now. Sadly, my tolerance for that kind of game is quite low these days. Due to having enjoyed his essays 5+ years ago, I still open the new ones and start reading them but I can't help but preface that desire by skimming them for school references now. Additionally, if they're congratulatory of people similar to himself - which they often are - then I also have to say 'no, thanks'.
    • mabub24 5y ago
      In the last 20-30 years, American parents and adults have put an enormous amount of focus and pressure on students for educational achievements as indicators for future successes. It's likely because of inequalities in the quality of education between schools, and inequalities of opportunities from schools. Get to a good school -> get good job because went to good school-> get good life. Otherwise, you're a failure. Education is seen as the lynchpin in social mobility. The lack of social safety net, and a desire for their children to become successful, creates an all or nothing focus on educational achievement.
• mapgrep 5y ago
  > I had to learn what real work was before I could wholeheartedly desire to do it. That took a while, because even in college a lot of the work is pointless; there are entire departments that are pointless. In other words, "the work I want to do is real but the work you want to do is trivial and pointless." I really genuinely have enjoyed Paul Graham's writing over the years but moments like this seem arrogant and tend to spoil some of the enjoyment. I'd be genuinely curious to know what departments he finds pointless, and why, in the grand scheme of things, they have no "point" in comparison to computer science or whatever. While it's true that computer science can be used to enable, for example, much cheaper air travel, or important forms of cancer diagnosis, it's also true that a great many computer scientists work on less crucial problems like optimizing ad targeting or enabling scams. Similarly, while many English lit majors may end up contributing little most of us find valuable in that field, there are some who will become authors who genuinely help other humans find more meaning in life and feel less alone, and others who will shed new light on history and thiis contribute to the understanding of our present. I'm not saying fields can't be compared. Maybe the average engineer's college studies help society "more" (for some definition) than the average humanities major's studies do. Fine. What I'm saying is - it takes a lot of arrogance to cast aside entire college departments as worthless.
  • rakhodorkovsky 5y ago
    Perhaps arrogance should be added to what it takes to be successful. I'm only half joking; I do think a certain kind of arrogance is conducive to success. Not the kind that screams insecurity and turns off your teammates, rather the kind that goes: "Perhaps I really am the first person who can do this." and then does it.
  • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    I think your reading is not just uncharitable, but wrong. > In other words, "the work I want to do is real but the work you want to do is trivial and pointless." No, "the work you want me to do is trivial and pointless". And the context is college, and even more so high school. It's not a news flash that the work they want you to do in school isn't "real". It's exercises designed to teach you, not actual work that needs done. > Similarly, while many English lit majors may end up contributing little most of us find valuable in that field, there are some who will become authors who genuinely help other humans find more meaning in life and feel less alone, and others who will shed new light on history and thiis contribute to the understanding of our present. Given that Wodehouse was one of PG's positive examples, this also seems to me to be missing the point of the essay.
• chevill 5y ago
  PG takes a lot of peoples' claims for granted when they are probably exaggerations. Gates: >I didn't take a single day off in my 20s. Most likely this is only technically true because its almost certain he took multiple days off in his 20s. We'd have to look at what Bill means here by working every single day. If he counts spending at least a couple minutes on something work related every day its far more believable than him spending approximately 3650 consecutive days working 8-12 hours or more. Wodehouse: >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. This claim is even more unbelievable. I'd bet the average sentence he wrote wasn't rewritten at all, let alone 10-20 times. I think what he actually means is that sometimes he would have to re-write a sentence 10-20 times.
• jthornquest 5y ago
  There are a lot of very good notes in these comments about our relationship with "work" and excellence. I currently operate from the perspective of creating something I'm proud of for myself, and I'm relearning the joy of leisure. My own life isn't defined by my greatness, my productivity, or my output. I've learned to realize that the "alarm-bells" that clattered in my head were more of an anxious, awful self-perception that my value was tied to my output. A few weeks ago, I found a bit of recent scientific learning that gave me a renewed context around passion and pursuit. It turns out that research is showing that bodies and brains don't typically begin to degrade in their capacity for training muscle-memory skills until our sixties. For someone like me, who is anxiously accounting for how to try a lot of different pursuits (music, illustration, and especially relevant here, a constantly tenuous relationship with computers) this is a comfort. I was so motivated by a rush to get my foundations down by the time I was thirty, because the capitalist culture I'm steeped in says that's my deadline. I had it ingrained that my teenage or twenty-something years were the time to plant the seeds, and it's all downhill after that. Besides the wisdom shared on the contrary (both in these comments and elsewhere), dipping this wisdom in research I didn't know about before empowered me further. I appreciate that Paul adds a bit about how our focus doesn't often become clear until we're older, that our childhoods tend to distill topics in ways that can initially bland them to our taste. Nevertheless, I want to stress that you've got a lot more time to do something to your best ability. Even as you age beyond sixty or seventy, I've seen so many folks brush off the bit of extra physical or mental challenge that they face, and do great things anyway. Your twenties won't make or break you. You have so much more time.
• zz865 5y ago
  Does PG ever spend time with his children? I always feel I should be working harder which makes spending time with family difficult.
  • dang 5y ago
    He is an extremely dedicated father. Much of his Twitter feed is about things he does with his children.
    • tptacek 5y ago
      He should let much more of that into his writing, because he could have written this post in 2007 and it would mostly read the same, and he's not the same person he was back then. Also, in sort of the same way that pg-writing-about-lisp is one of the harder pg's to dislike, dad-mode pg is probably his most likable and persuasive mode.
  • hundt 5y ago
    One possibility is that he "works hard" at that, too, e.g. by consciously thinking about what the best things to do with them are and endeavoring to spend as much as possible doing them. Perhaps if you internalize the idea that spending time with your family is in fact work, of a different but also valuable nature, then you will not find it as difficult.
• MarcelOlsz 5y ago
  I worked hard in my 20's with nothing to show for it. Not born into connections or money. I know almost nobody that has a degree. Spent years on my own startup with my ex-ceo being a code monkey for him whos richer and more connected than me. Poof, 4 years of income and work gone. Now I can't even find a job. How exactly, am I supposed to "work hard"? It is a complete meme. Also funny he uses Gates as an example, a man born into wealth. I tried working hard and wasted 100% of every day of my 20's. No memories formed, no money made, just "working hard". Here's how you work hard: grow up in a stable life with money and connections and win the mental health lottery.
• TameAntelope 5y ago
  This feels like the kind of essay describing a thing that, if you have to be told about it, you don't have it. I'm on HN during my work day. People who "work hard" probably aren't. They probably only know about pg through direct connections, not through idly scrolling the Internet bored one day.
  • asdfman123 5y ago
    The thing about finding motivation is that you don't actually find it. There are certain things you want out of life as a human being, and if believe your work is aligned with that, you'll pour your soul into it. On the other hand, if you see work as a distraction from the rest of your life, working will be an uphill battle. I guess it's important to find work you care about, or find a deeper, more meaningful reason to do work.
• bachmeier 5y ago
  > 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. I can assure you, there are many kids that practice harder than Messi did when he was young. He is not a great player because of hard work, he is a great player because of luck. I know the VC thing about the importance of hard work. They love to promote hard work because that's how they make money. It's just plain silly to attribute Messi's greatness to anything other than luck - both his physical abilities and the environment that taught him how to fine tune his abilities. Hard work is useless without that special precise knowledge of which work you should be doing. Few young soccer players know how to practice in a way to become Messi, even if they have the right body to do it. It's useless without being in the right environment too. > Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off. I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm working hard, but I can be sure I'm getting nowhere when I'm not, and it feels awful. That, my friends, is what a VC would love for you to believe. There's nothing sincere when someone in his position writes something like this. Because hey, if you're the 0.1% of the time that it works out, he gets rich. And if you're the 99.9% that wastes their time (like all the kids that never play soccer at the highest levels) he loses nothing. I used to enjoy PG's writings. He's crossed a line where he believes that the only thing good in the world is what is best for VCs.
  • eloff 5y ago
    PG says: > There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, 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. I think that's the fundamental secret to success at anything. If you want to compete at the top level you have to have all three. It's not sufficient to just work hard, or just have natural ability. You need to fully apply yourself aligned with your natural talents. Hard work is a necessary but not sufficient requirement.
    • bachmeier 5y ago
      Without luck, you will not get to the level of Messi. Without knowledge, you will not get to the level of Messi. Without living in the right environment, you will not get to the level of Messi. The "natural ability" thing is just a spin on the same idea. Work hard to recognize your natural ability. Be realistic about it. In that view, natural ability is not a matter of luck. It is still a story about doing the right things so that you deserve all the credit if you are successful, and more importantly, so that you can blame those that didn't.
• asdfman123 5y ago
  Paul Graham has really good stuff to say about things he knows about. (And really bad stuff to say about things he doesn't.)
• SerLava 5y ago
  Billionaires absolutely love talking about zero work life balance. Makes it seem like having rich parents, stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars of computing time, committing federal crimes, abusing patent law, and blatantly violating antitrust weren't the important parts. Because they only want you to do the overwork part.
• GeorgeTirebiter 5y ago
  Interestingly, also published today: Why Do We Work So Damn Much https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-james-suzman.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas... "...hunter-gatherer societies like the Ju/’hoansi spent only about 15 hours a week meeting their material needs..."
• deleted 5y ago
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• didibus 5y ago
  I hate this obsession with "hard work". "hard" is a weasel word, it means nothing concrete, it's not quantifiable, and even as a quality it's unclear, what is the emotional feeling attached to it? "work" has two meanings: 1. activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result 2. a task or tasks to be undertaken; something a person or thing has to do So what are we even talking about when we say "hard work"? If you take the first definition, adding the "hard" qualifier makes no difference, because what makes an activity "hard" is that it requires mental and/or physical effort to accomplish. So in that sense, work is inherently effortful, and thus "hard". Maybe what people mean when they say "hard work" is sustained effort exertion? If you take the second it makes more sense, but then it would imply that "hard work" is about the choice of task you undertake. If you choose to do harder tasks, you'd be "hard working". The issue here though is that it's not clear what makes a task "hard". I think the risk of failure is possibly the best way to qualify it here. If you're likely to fail the task, it is thus "hard" to you. But is that really what people mean when they evangelize "hard work"? To always work on tasks you are likely to fail at? Since PG's example was how Bill Gates took no vacation in 10 years, I'll conclude that he's trying to suggests that "hard work" means have a "high rate of work per week". So he seem to imply "hard work" is when most of your week is spent exerting mental or physical effort towards a result or purpose. And that's where I hate the framing of "hard work", it's just "work", adding "hard" is just a pretentious qualifier. P.S.: I really doubt Bill Gates success is attributable to not taking 15 days of time off per year for 10 years. That is not a lot of time, maybe if he worked 80 hours week, but as research shows, real physical and mental effort is unsustainable beyond some level, and rest is needed.
• dimitrios1 5y ago
  > how to work toward goals that are neither clearly defined nor externally imposed. This is the crux of the entire article, in my opinion. Still haven't figured this out after all these years. How?
  • zdbrandon 5y ago
    The framework that I have for myself, is to figure out which letter from MAPS [1] is missing from the work, and then figure out how to fill it. I’ve found that if I have all 4, then it’s much easier to work hard without asking myself “why” every day. [1] Usually known as CAR, but I find MAPS more helpful: Mastery: Do you enjoy geeking out about the subject matter? When others correct you, or show you a better way to do something, are you annoyed or delighted? If annoyed, this may be something you should be delegating if you can. Autonomy: Do you feel sufficiently powerful enough to accomplish the tasks you deem necessary for your goals, and in the way you want to accomplish them? Purpose: Is this goal helpful to anyone? Is anyone counting on you to accomplish this? Social Interaction: Do you enjoy spending time with the people you’re working with?
• amelius 5y ago
  For most people, the challenge is not how to work hard. The challenge is how to work hard and get compensated for it properly.
• HellDunkel 5y ago
  This is some next level clickbait and we all fell for it. With „hard work“ he is touching on somthing we all can relate to. So we read the thing. What he is trying to get across is: a) i know hard work, that is why i „made“ it. b) it takes hard work to make great things c) this proves i made great things. This is not a philisophical reflection. It is marketing BS. I am not a hater. Just trying to give name to the elephant in the room.
• didibus 5y ago
  What I'd like to see first is: "Why work hard" To me, it seems that if we've put ourselves in a society that requires hard work, we've failed somewhere along the way, when do you run a business and value making things harder for customers? So if we've made societal success hard, we've kind of failed as a society in my opinion.
  • zdbrandon 5y ago
    “Societal success” in this sense is relative to others’ performance, and as such will always be “hard”, because the person aiming for this success is by definition aiming to be a statistical outlier.
    • didibus 5y ago
      > “Societal success” in this sense is relative to others’ performance That's only true because we failed to offer something better. Societal success should mean: "economic security and independence, and the pursuit of happiness", where happiness is defined as one's wellbeing. And that shouldn't require hard work. If it was the case, than people could choose to work as hard or as easy as they want to achieve anything grandiose and ambitious, but they wouldn't have too, they'd be free to choose too or not. At least it is my opinion that a society should try to eliminate the need for physical and mental exertion from its citizens, while providing them with their needs met, and thus setting them free to do as they please. What they please to do could be to work on extra hard problems, or to put hard work 24/7 on some goal, even if it's a stupid one, like a world record at cherry pit spitting. The way it is now, "societal success" comes from being an outlier in being able to have this freedom to choose to continue to work hard or not. People basically aspire to achieve societal success by performing better then others financially and getting themselves into a position of inequality where they hold the big end of the stick. And the messaging is that to achieve this privileged position, you need to put in "hard work". And I feel this is the wrong outcome of society.
• fierro 5y ago
  Reading this makes me think of the quite "If you're so smart, then why are you unhappy?"
• coldtea 5y ago
  >One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you'll have to work very hard. Says the guy who made it big in his 32th year by selling a company he had just founded 2 years before. An aspiring message to single mothers working two jobs and barely making rent and all other kind of working stiff working their arse off to keep the lights on, the buildings clean, the power running, the cables installed, the food served, the minerals for the PCs mined, and so on, in the backbone of the "digital" economy... >Bill Gates, for example, 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. Well, that's because he never "worked" the way 99.9999% of the people he is lecturing do: he did what he wanted to do, running his own company, bossing other people below him, and making billions whole at it. If Bill Gates tried working as an employee on someone else's business, with BS bosses and middle managers running you around, and not making anything to write home about, we'd see how fast he would have wanted a day off... (Not that there's any reliable way to cross-check whether he really "never had a day off" in his 20s, or what his work day actually amounted to)...
• agomez314 5y ago
  The correlation between working hard and being successful is a necessary but not sufficient cause.
• rendall 5y ago
  Meh. This isn't a guide on how to work hard, tbh, unless "wake up at 13 with the will to work hard" is a guide. "Be like Bill Gates" is no guide. Give me a guide by someone who grew up a slacker, fucked off deep into adulthood and then learnt or taught themselves the hard lessons on working hard. What to do when you want to sleep in, when you want to stay out late, when you have such aching, gnawing anxiety about going to class that even looking at the textbook is ... hey look, Witcher Season 2 is on. A person who had been through that shit can talk about "how to work hard"
• kaimorid 5y ago
  wow
• ipnon 5y ago
  pg's writing is still improving. That's impressive for someone who has been writing as long as him.
• innagadadavida 5y ago
  I'm not qualified to give advice to someone like PG. But millionaires and billionaires need to get some perspective and get out of their bubble before spouting nonsense advice to common people. For most normal people, it is about surviving and finding a profession that can pay the bills. At least acknowledging your role and place in society before focussing on some rarefied advice will be more useful (not to mention may also generate more clicks). So as a challenge to PG: if you believe in yourself so strongly, prove it. Just freeze your billions and mansions for 6 months. Downgrade your life to live like a normal person. Get some perspective and write again. You'll probably become even more successful in the process (not that you care for it).
• sjg007 5y ago
  The other thing that I found interesting was this: "What can one do in the face of such uncertainty? One solution is to hedge your bets, which in this case means to follow the obviously promising paths instead of your own private obsessions. But as with any hedge, you're decreasing reward when you decrease risk. If you forgo working on what you like in order to follow some more conventionally ambitious path, you might miss something wonderful that you'd otherwise have discovered. That too must happen all the time, perhaps even more often than the genius whose bets all fail." I'm not sure the things we view as safe, such as, medical/law/grad school/mba are really hedges. You could go to medical school as a safe path but be interested in tech. I thought about this but the medical gate keepers didn't value the tech when I was applying ... Today we see ambitious medicine/tech convergences which arguably present a path there. I think there is a bigger issue is that we don't know what the jobs of the future will be. But we do know they will be organized around disciplines but not exactly what they are. They will most likely have a technology component because tech is what enables growth.
• mgh2 5y ago
  > There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort. There is one essential factor that if someone does not have, everything else mentioned here does not matter: luck or provision (scientifically speaking, luck does not exist). Every entrepreneur knows that no matter how hard they work, at the end of the day if they are not in the right place, at the right time, with the right people, success is not guaranteed. This view is biased towards certain kinds of people. Yes, these three ingredients might increase your success chances, especially in the US (being born is the US is luck). This is why so many 3rd world country people want to emigrate, for better opportunities. Even with this premise, you probably know of someone who worked incredibly hard only to be screwed by their boss, or the privileged kid who got a foot in the door at an Ivy League or a job. People in Silicon Valley and tech live in a bubble - the danger of this is to attribute your success to hard work, when in fact everything was given (yes, even your opportunity to work hard or ability to be self-motivated was provided). Examples of SV's bias: "Everyone should learn how to code" (not everyone has a coder's mindset). "Universal Basic Income" (pandemic checks, people become lazy) With this said, it is still our responsibility to work hard at everything we do. > It comes partly from popular culture, where it seems to run very deep, and partly from the fact that the outliers are so rare. As an outlier, you are the lucky few, don't forget that. Perhaps the greatest myth in American popular culture comes from the belief in free will, which makes hard work seem like the most plausible explanation for someone's mis/fortune: https://m-g-h.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale-4fecf8095812 https://m-g-h.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale-4fecf80...
  • zdbrandon 5y ago
    Would it have soothed you if he began the article with: “Though the advice in this article is necessary, it alone is not sufficient to achieve success. Luck also plays a large factor. You need both. You will also need to obtain financial leverage. Hard work at McDonald’s is not the type that this article addresses.”? It seems unnecessary to me, particularly because he’s already written articles on these subjects. [1] [2] Also, as another person that doesn’t believe in free will, I find it interesting that you thought it necessary to critique the way PG handled this subject matter, as if he had any choice. But then again, neither did you. Edit, forgot to link the articles. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html
• JGM_io 5y ago
  I'm a bit wary of this essay even though I'm a fan of PG. With neoliberal rhetoric like this: "Like most little kids, I enjoyed the feeling of achievement when I learned or did something new. As I grew older, this morphed into a feeling of disgust when I wasn't achieving anything." I wonder if we're not forgetting to just chill. Can he just chill? I dunno, something that's been on my mind
• nathan_compton 5y ago
  Huge surprise that the quintessential capitalist _just so happens_ to write an essay suggesting that you should never stop working at any moment of your entire life.
• umvi 5y ago
  It's one thing to learn how to work hard on tasks you love to do. It's quite another to learn how to work hard on tasks you hate to do (but still need to be done). I suspect a lot of people that "work hard" programming would not be able to work hard doing manual labor (i.e. digging sprinkler trenches or painting a fence in the hot sun) and would quickly rationalize hiring someone else to do it for them.
• mdoms 5y ago
  Every person I've ever met who claims to be one of these hard workers who puts in 70 hours a week and never takes time off always seem to be taking mid-week holidays to Bali, golfing on sunny Tuesday afternoons etc. It's all a big show.
• burlesona 5y ago
  > Knowing what you want to work on doesn't mean you'll be able to. Most people have to spend a lot of their time working on things they don't want to, especially early on. But if you know what you want to do, you at least know what direction to nudge your life in. This is the hardest part for me. The stuff I dream about, my deepest “deep interest,” I don’t think I could make a meaningful dent in without substantial capital. And I didn’t come from a background with any kind of money. In my early twenties I spent years, largely wasted, chasing these dreams with the idea that I could find a less capital-intensive path or somehow get someone to invest in me. Eventually I realized it just wasn’t going to happen, and I needed to find an alternate interest that could feed me and my family. At this point I see it as, if my alternate career pays off then perhaps I can circle back to my dreams in (hopefully early) “retirement,” when I have enough resources that I could live for a long time without income - or, better, enough capital to invest directly, but that seems unlikely. Until then, I just do my best to enjoy the challenges of my alternate career path.
• pm90 5y ago
  > Some of the best work is done by people who find an easy way to do something hard. This is a pretty good insight. Every time I’ve been somewhat successful it’s been because I discovered a different approach which made the problem approachable. When I tried to understand math by rote memorization it was boring. When I understood it as a tool to make predictions about systems, it seemed much more useful. Learning the equations became a side effect of another thing I was trying to do.
• imafish 5y ago
  This post was too long compared to its substance. tldr: To do great things, you need to be both hard-working and smart.
• aerosmile 5y ago
  A common tension we experience with PG's recent essays is that they make you wonder if you fit into his world (the way that Patrick Collison, Kyle Vogt, Sam Altman and other well-known founders do). Those stories usually contain elements of above-natural raw talent combined with insane amounts of hard work and the foresight to channel all that talent and effort into development of highly valuable skills. There are a good amount of people like that out there, and his writing deeply resonates with them. At the same time, there are many more people out there who quickly discover that their lives have very few overlaps with PG's narrative. For example, perhaps they started a startup and got burned (contrary to PG's narrative). Or they never cared for any skills that one traditionally needs to build a digital product (primarily programming, design, and the intercept between the two in form of a well-rounded PM). Or worse yet, their career took them into the analog world, with all the pros and cons of that universe. Last but not least, perhaps they just simply value the benefits of starting a family and providing for them with a low-to-moderate but predictable and stable income. If you belong to that latter group, no way that PG will resonate with you, similar to how Karl Marx won't be a favorite author for a monarchist or Rush Limbaugh for a Democrat. Or those people right or wrong? It depends on who you ask. It's the same with PG - we just have to come to understand that the startup world is a polarizing ideology that works for some and not for others. I bet you that any founder out there that made money with a startup is quite likely to like PG's writing. Conversely, if you tried and didn't succeed (or never even wanted to give it a shot), it would be more difficult for you to align your thinking with PG's.
• theshadowknows 5y ago
  There’s that line from COD that I’m sure is from somewhere else - amateurs practice until they can get it right, professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong. That’s sort of how I look at it. It’s served me well so far.
• fleddr 5y ago
  The article isn't wrong or incorrect in itself, but since the definition of "doing great things" once again centers on extreme Bill-Gates-level success, I take issue with two points: In these extreme examples (Gates, Bezos, Musk, etc) the environment is the true differentiator to go from success to extreme success. Not talent, not working hard. Doing the right thing at the right time in the right environment creates the snowball effect. It still requires hard work, but hard work is not rare or unique. Bezos is about a 100.000 times richer than a "plain" successful millionaire, so surely hard work is not the game changer here. Success requires hard work, extreme success requires luck or foresight. In the case of Gates clearly luck, as he pretty much missed every single tech trend in the decades to come. He has zero foresight, but I'm sure he worked hard in his most energetic years, like pretty much everybody. I protest against leaving out the luck factor as these people and their admirers truly believe they are some god-like character, a 1000 times smarter than everybody else. There has been an entire industry trying to replicate the success of Jobs, for example. As if you can replicate that. You can't replicate any of these outcomes as they are time-bound. You can do exactly what Jobs did and the outcome would be shit, no matter your talent or how hard you work. The second part of my protest is completely leaving out the enablers of your success: workers. 99.9999% of your wealth in the case of extreme success is delivered by them, not you. Not even mentioning that is classic hero admiration. And this doesn't even go into how often the relation is highly exploitative. We know the issue with Amazon workers, as well as the true reason of Microsoft's success: the merciless elimination of competitors in criminal ways.
• rgifford 5y ago
  I worked my way through college as a mover (and came out the other side with high 5-figure debt). Many of the older guys I worked with had drug habits. I worked 16-hour days with those guys. They'd get on me for not running up stairs, for packing with too little paper around glass, for setting things down more than once. None wrote articles entitled "How to Work Hard." None knew Warren Buffet as a child (see Gates). None attended the most expensive schools, if they had they certainly wouldn't have chosen to drop out because they got bored or were unfulfilled (see Graham and Zuck). Take a look at the top 10 highest valued YC startups. All their founders came from schools with less than 10% acceptance rates. Privilege is what I'm getting at. Having an income 300:1 your lowest paid employee is disturbing. Making millions or billions off speculative, debt-fueled VC is disturbing. Proselyting your brand of success is disturbing. Recommendation: every time a founder, investor or businessperson starts to wax poetic on virtue, look for an angle. Why do founders want to appear virtuous and hardworking? Why do we need that from them? How else can they justify making sometimes up to 50% of their companies entire payroll? How emotionally satisfying must it be for Graham and his ilk to tell you why they got what they have? What if most of serious wealth and success is decided at birth?
  • CheezeIt 5y ago
    It isn’t, obviously, because look at the example of Bill Gates: starting a business as a 20-year-old college dropout puts you at a big disadvantage compared to people with more life experience.
    • j-krieger 5y ago
      The difference being that gates was never in any real danger. His credits didn't disappear. He lived in a paid for apartment. He did not have to worry about money, and if he chose, he could've gone back to college at any time. It only puts you at a 'disadvantage' in business circles, because there's a slight chance that people with more experience will not take you as seriously
    • rgifford 5y ago
      Take a look at the faces on the Forbes list and get back to me. Just how white, male and western are they exactly? It's not that Gates wasn't smart or hardworking. It's just that it's easy to be hardworking and ambitious when you had books growing up, proper nutrition, when your parents stayed together, when you're in good health, when you got tutors and went to great schools, when you were engaged in extracurriculars, when you lived in an affluent society, when your parents were well connected, and on and on and on. Are his contributions to humanity worth 60B+? Scientific discovery springs up in a bunch of places simultaneously and organically. I have to assume his contribution to society would've too, maybe with a smaller amount of value extracted to his personal fortune? He's a philanthropist now, so that's good. I would be too the way social and political tides are turning. Funny how philanthropic the wealthy become. Even Epstein.
• aabajian 5y ago
  Paul Graham makes a few points that show why medical training needs reform. There's a disconnect between hard work and income in medicine: i. You work hard throughout residency, yet your salary is fixed. The hardest-working neurosurgery resident gets the same check as the coasting primary care trainee. ii. Trainees are praised for their academic knowledge and their academic output, yet the highest-earning physicians are in private practice. iii. Physician jobs in desirable areas are scarce, and they pay the least. Hard-work improves your chances of getting a job in a competitive market, but at a lower salary.
• Aerroon 5y ago
  Is the ability to work hard also a "talent"? ADHD seems like it impairs most of the (useful) hard work somebody could dedicate themselves to. Could there also be a scale of this that's unrelated to ADHD?
• danielmarkbruce 5y ago
  Is anyone else surprised there isn't more discussion of focus? I know many people (myself included) who work hard but on too many things simultaneously and the results aren't as good as folks who seem to just keep plodding along on one thing. Two of my friends who are extremely successful seem less interested in the field they are in, and while intelligent not outrageously so, and don't work super hard. But they just keep at one thing without distraction. Over 10-15 years it's added up. And it's not an easy thing to do. Sticking at one thing 50 hours a week for 10 years is intolerably boring for many people.
  • varispeed 5y ago
    Sometimes I have an ability to hyper-focus on some task and make it in one or two days rather than weeks, but after that I feel so exhausted mentally, that I cannot do anything sensible for a week or two. What I am getting at, is that often it doesn't matter.
    • danielmarkbruce 5y ago
      I'm not sure I follow - what doesn't matter?
• mjh2539 5y ago
  It's like the Protestant work ethic, but denuded of any religious connotations.
• fellowniusmonk 5y ago
  For people with my upbringing its even harder, because hard work often does not pay rewards, so you have to intentionally reject the feedback loop that nature and reality is throwing in your face. There is a whole class of incredibly hard working people that never receive, are actively denied reward or are effectively punished for their hard work. Hard work without dopamine reinforcement takes extreme mental toughness.
• hindsightbias 5y ago
  Live-to-work or work-to-live. There are probably few on HN (in the US) who don’t have either option. Figure it out now or let your boss decide for you. And if you think you can do a startup and work-to-live, you’re an idiot. So start over now.
• fungiblecog 5y ago
  The problem with these kind of essays is that - like the whole 10,000 hours thing - people take away the "Work" part but miss that the "work" has to be intentional. There's no point putting in 14 hour days on busywork that gets you nowhere. Unfortunately that's where a lot of people end up.
  • quickthrower2 5y ago
    Username checks out
• dusteater2 5y ago
  Anyone who claims that their success is due entirely to hard work doesn't understand probability.
• deeblering4 5y ago
  How to write an article best displayed at 640x480
• crossroadsguy 5y ago
  Duh. This is just a “hard work propaganda” piece. Some parts just read like “Believe in Jesus or your limbs will start melting away!”. Just like that. Is this how venture capitalists have always functioned, or is it a new kind of initiative? Is there some kind of threat they perceive seeing many people, organisations, and even some nations talk about work-life balance (et cetera)? Besides, is this what pg essays are all about? So much brouhaha for this? I have read one more of these 1-2 years ago or so and it was the same feeling. No wonder I’ve never encountered these writings or talk about them anywhere out of the HN.
• contingencies 5y ago
  It all boils down to motivation and what you want out of life. Compound interest is great but health and youth never return, and the opportunities of today are not always here tomorrow. (That said, I have been at it since 4:30AM today and working on a single venture for six years in extreme adversity. Anything else would be boring!)
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• maerF0x0 5y ago
  One meta comment I would like to make is that taking the advice of people looking backwards can be terribly misleading as people re-encode memories as they recall them, often to highlight the positives and to move goal posts towards what actually happened. Someone who says "I'm so happy I moved to <place> in my 20s because <life event> happened" fails to highlight 2 things. 1) What were they aiming at and did they accomplish _that_ and 2) what were the multitude of true opportunities they turned down and would they actually be materially happier had those happened. Not would their current self prefer it, but if we could some how numerically rate the happiness of folks who go through alternate universes... The good news is that there's a good chance you'll look back on your life events with mostly good feelings, regardless of what happens, because you'll heal and move on from the bad parts ...
  • redisman 5y ago
    I just started reading Fooled by Randomness and Taleb makes this exact point. People just make up a story afterwards about why they were successful but it’s completely meaningless fiction and Cherry picking
• neilv 5y ago
  If this piece had section headings, I would've read more of it. Perhaps I missed the meta, and PG wanted the reader to work hard to read it?
• momirlan 5y ago
  People might really believe that this is all it takes. However we know there's a secret sauce : luck. You can work as hard as you want, if luck is not on your side you won't get far.
• quickthrower2 5y ago
  Just want to comment to say it’s totally ok not to work hard (nebulous definition but let’s say hard = forgetting your mum’s birthday hard) I think articles like this imply (whether intentional or not) that our existence need to be driven towards some big goal. Reading a lot of this worldview on HN and other similar places can make one feel that living a normal life is somehow not enough. That’s the trap I hope people don’t fall into. Don’t cargo cult bill gates! If you want to work like a dog, fine, but as long as it’s an internal decision not to please the expectations of others.
• Sophistifunk 5y ago
  When people like PG give this advice, it serves two purposes; makes them feel a little better about everybody they ignored growing up, and makes you feel like maybe you'll be a billionaire one day if you just put in 80 hour weeks for this other billionaire. You won't.
• hellbannedguy 5y ago
  I think Paul Graham is a brilliant programmer. This site coded in Lisp is unbelievable. I'm being honest. One of my current goals is wanting to learn Lisp, and I thank Paul for that. He's a C writer though. (We all can't be good at evertyhing. Personally, I have never met a person from a wealthy upbringing who could write well.) It's too long, and I'm still not sure what he is saying? I can offer this, but it's for ambitious poor/middle class people. Work hard at getting ahead. I worked through school, and got out with a B average. If you are poor getting through college, or starting a business, will not be as easy as the guy who has the wealthy sympathetic father, or mother who sits on the company Board of Directors when they are buying your company. (Easy shot a Bill Gates?) What am I saying? If you are poor, life will be harder. You know it already. You know you can't make too many mistakes early on. You know there will be no one to help when the chips are down. You won't be offered jobs, or perks in life because of your family name. You know you will need to work harder than Biff, or Charles. I did everything I was suspose to do in college. I made every class count, even though I knew most of it was a joke. I then had a nervous breakdown. Looking back, I think I should have concentrated on socializing a bit more. I should have networked more too. In all honestly, I didn't like kids from wealthy families. I found them boring, and unimaginative. Those wealthy kids usually become wealthy adults though, and those connections will be important later on. I still want to upchuck even thinking about using a person to get ahead though.
• adverbly 5y ago
  Good read! Great points Paul! Thanks for taking the time to write this up and share your thoughts :D As someone who leans towards "Work Smart, Not Hard", I had the following thoughts while reading this: > Bill Gates... Lionel Messi... These are very interesting examples, and I don't think I actually would have said that either of them actually did any "great work". What they have in common is what they are both "top of their field" in fields which are highly competitive/winner-take-all, and therefore get an insanely disproportionate amount of compensation. When I think "Great Work", I think of scientists and inventors. Interestingly enough, many scientists and inventors were "all over the place" with their careers - many of them being polymaths who pursued a number of diverse hobbies. They often also spent time "idle", or "thinking"(Feynman was a good example of this), which is how I find that I do my best thinking as well. I see creative work as benefiting significantly from "not work" activities such as idleness. Steve Jobs had a similar line of thinking: > Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. In summary, although hard work can capture more value in winner-take-all environments, I think creative work creates more value, and creative work requires taking frequent breaks, and yes, a healthy amount of idleness.
• mohanmca 5y ago
  Since many comments mentions that hard-work alone doesn't matter. According to Daniel Kahneman, mere hard-work doesn't click unless we have access to expert feedback in the domain we work. He used to compare hard working f1-formula-driver without any input from past drivers vs driver with input from expert. Hard work without mentor won't click. Environment and people around us also matter as much as the hard-work we do.
• human 5y ago
  “ Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off. I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm working hard, but I can be sure I'm getting nowhere when I'm not, and it feels awful.” I recognize this feeling, but oh god, it’s a perfect recipe for a burnout.
• graycat 5y ago
  It appears to me that Graham's essay is missing information and emphasis on one more crucial input to doing "great work" or being successful at all. That input is the importance of and good approaches to ===>>> Good Problem Selection <<<=== including good initial problem selection.
• codeisawesome 5y ago
  Mods are doing a good job these days putting up two articles talking about opposite-ish viewpoints on the front page it feels very intentional and it is interesting.
• lugged 5y ago
  Please stop using invisible grey.
• silviot 5y ago
  As others have already pointed out this will go down in history as the "Let them eat cake" of our times. The disconnect with the real life of billions of people is astonishing.
• nickd2001 5y ago
  I think this is a fantastic discussion, one of the best I ever read on HN. :) Its a provocative article, for sure! Very good for people to ask whether they should work hard, why they should work hard, and at what. A good recent example I feel of someone who works extremely hard and its 100% worth it, is Prof Sarah Gilbert, the person behind the Oxford-Astra-Zeneca covid vaccine, which BTW has a Malaria vaccine on the heels of it which would be amazing.
• oolonthegreat 5y ago
  urgh all this "working very very hard" glorifying talk makes me feel nauseated. science and creativity stems from leisure and idleness. not working very very hard.
• danielkyne 5y ago
  PG never misses
• silent_cal 5y ago
  The "hard work" meme always made me feel awful, and I never knew why until I read "Leisure: the Basis of Culture". It's a philosophical book that explains the origin of this impulse to work for work's sake. It's a modern phenomenon, and it's not good.
• jodrellblank 5y ago
  I often think about this The Onion article[1]: https://www.theonion.com/97-year-old-dies-unaware-of-being-violin-prodigy-1819571799 https://www.theonion.com/97-year-old-dies-unaware-of-being-v... A tragedy that she never discovered her violin talent. All that life and she never wowed audiences or had a TV show special or met the Pope. All she had were these poxy supportive family, friends, and community experiences. Who could be satisfied with merely that? [1] it's fictional/satire, just to be clear.
• doublejay1999 5y ago
  america has a chronic work fetish
• ok_coo 5y ago
  I do not dream of labor.
• peter_d_sherman 5y ago
  I would like to start out by saying that I am a great fan of Paul Graham, his work, his essays, YCombinator, HN, etc., etc. However, I have to sharply, and I mean sharply disagree with this one essay... You see, I will put this essay against one from antiquity, and that one is the 5th Labor Of Hercules: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Herakles/stables.html http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Herakles/stables.html >"Hercules went to King Augeas, and without telling anything about Eurystheus, said that he would clean out the stables in one day, if Augeas would give him a tenth of his fine cattle. Augeas couldn't believe his ears, but promised. Hercules brought Augeas's son along to watch. First the hero tore a big opening in the wall of the cattle-yard where the stables were. Then he made another opening in the wall on the opposite side of the yard. Next, he dug wide trenches to two rivers which flowed nearby. He turned the course of the rivers into the yard. The rivers rushed through the stables, flushing them out, and all the mess flowed out the hole in the wall on other side of the yard." PDS: See, King Augeas was expecting that Hercules would clean up the stables the old-fashioned way -- by using his strength to clean them out manually. King Augeas was expecting that Hercules work hard for him. Hercules did work hard, but additionally, Hercules also worked smart -- by digging only what was necessary to direct the river or rivers -- and letting the flowing water, letting nature itself -- do all of the work! Now compare this to MapReduce. Compare this to Jeff Dean of Google, and all that he does. Jeff Dean and MapReduce leverage computation power (think of them as the streams of water) -- to do all of the "Heavy Lifting". They work hard -- but they also work smart. They utilize an infrastructure (Hercules with the water from a river, Jeff Dean wtih the power from distributed computing/distributed queries/MapReduce, etc.) which when skillfully directed, at their hands, performs all of the hard work for them... They work smart. Now this being said, I'll close by saying that I am Paul Graham's greatest fan -- I think he is one of the greatest intellectuals in the world today! And I agree with 99.44% of everything else that he has so wisely and eloquently said or written in the past! And I love his essays, YCombinator, HN, etc., etc.!!! But we slightly disagree -- on this one! <g> In a friendly way, of course! <g>
• jstrebel 5y ago
  I am always amazed at how well-received Paul Graham's blog entries are here on Hacker News, despite their thinly veilled underlying message: "Start a company, work hard, get rich". All of his writings center around this topic in one way or another and glorify it in various way. I always take his writings with a big grain of salt, because I know that his sweet message might not be right for me.
• sunstone 5y ago
  Think of how astonishingly amazing it is to be a sentient being in a universe of 100's of billions of galaxies! What could anyone ever do to come close to justifying such a privilege? Sure, work hard if you like but don't forget what an astounding trip existence is. Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water.
• adminscoffee 5y ago
  i might need to read how to relax
• amai 5y ago
  Rich people who work hard are the exception. Most of them just inherit hard ( or marry hard ).
• amai 5y ago
  Professional athletes often train 30 hours a week. They cycle between easy and hard training days. If they would workout hard every day their performance would stall or even plummet.Nutrition and sleep is also very important for them . I don't understand why the lessons from pro sports are not taken into account also for work. In both cases it is about performance after all.
• simonebrunozzi 5y ago
  Any discussion about hard work should have a mention of "in praise of idleness" [0]. In addition to that, let me tell you this. The famous writer Andrea Camilleri [1] (author of Inspector Montalbano, an Italian TV series which became an international success [2]), in an interview years ago recalled when as a kid, spending Summers in his native Sicily would entail things like spitting on a coin and waiting for hours until a fly would get stuck in the saliva - essentially, being idle. And this idleness, in his view, had a tremendous value. Praise hard work, sure. But don't think that you can escape the big questions about life, or that hard work is the only way to achieve greatness. [0]: https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/ https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Camilleri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Camilleri [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_Montalbano_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_Montalbano_(TV_serie...
• tony2016 5y ago
  I have a wide screen. His left side smaller width articles are freaking annoying!! Inconvenient to read.