Fuck Hard Work

People that work hard tend to spend longer hours on a problem so focus often comes as a side effect, which in turn leads to people correlating hard work with success.

But there are a ton of people "working hard" in the digital age and getting nowhere. If you see what they're up to, a big chunk of their time multi-tasking between random push messages and similar. What's missing is focus.

Of course, but results aren't entirely driven by creativity either -- sometimes you need to put in some work that isn't fulfilling in order to do things you are interested in.

Hard work is definitely overrated, but it does have its place. This just seems like an extreme position in a different direction.

Organizations don't tend to care about excellence because, when they have reached an appreciable size, hard work and innovation become threats to the cash cow that they've built. Making things more efficient can make other people's jobs obsolete, and by working hard, you might actually get too much work done and also threaten other people's jobs. If nobody is overtly threatened by you, hard work still probably won't benefit you because the pipeline of work will never end; if you get all your work done early, there's always more work to be done. Does this mean you'll get paid more for doing more work? A lot of the time, no. Some people get lucky, but don't count on getting a reasonable bonus or any kind of recognition.

I don't think there's anything wrong with this, by the way. It can make sense not to rock the boat when the cash keeps flowing. But typical company rhetoric and outdated advice from older generations are still convincing some people that being a "better worker" will advance them.

Hard work isn't everything, as lots of successful people were in the right place at the right time. I'm not just talking about multi-billionaires like Mark Cuban(who got lucky IMO), but I've known many executives in relatively small companies who got to where they were because they were either around since the beginning or knew someone else who recommended them for a position. Being executive is a difficult job and requires making difficult choices, but they don't necessarily ever work harder than people in other careers. More than likely, it's the quality of choices they made throughout their life that got them where they are. I'm not trying to say that working hard doesn't have a role, or that people should be lazy, but it's a smaller piece of the pie than many people think.

I really feel sorry for the people in my life whom I know work extremely hard and work more hours. They're not getting paid more, usually. If they worked less and spent the excess time coming up with other ways to make money, they might be in better positions in the long run; perhaps better than depending completely on employers and hoping that their 401k is going to allow them to retire comfortably.

On the flip side, why should anyone celebrate "Creativity, insights, breakthroughs, rebellions"? And why are those assumed to be something that have some inherent value? Why should I care if the cereal box has a new fancy design, or if somebody changedthe colour of a button from khaki to lemonchifon? The arduous task of assigning "value" to what we do is itself fraught with centuries old philosophical dilemmas that nobody has been able to settle. You gain nothing by belittling 'effort'.

It is far easier to perform a popular song on your guitar or whatever, that it is to write/perform a violin sonata. The person who plays the violin had to do repetitive boring practice for years and years before they got even half good to play in an orchestra. Boring repetitive work has 'value' too.

Also, atleast in science, you don't get to insight without the boring work. We have technicians in our lab who run gels/assays/tests day-in day-out. Their work is not "creative" by peoples standards, but its actually very critical work that allows scientists to experiment with various processes and ideas and _derive_ insights from the drudge work. It is important to celebrate the technicians effort, even if they weren't the ones who created the insight.

I generally love my career and consider it more a hobby than a job, so I "work" very hard and I don't mind doing that. However in my life the most money I've made and what most people would consider to be successful, is when I worked the least. Which is appalling and baffles me since it hurts the values I was raised with and struggle to keep believing in.

I could convince myself that at those times I was reaping the benefits of my previous hard work but honestly I know that I had the luck to work in a team where people worked steadily in moderation or little, and had the opportunity to make some good decisions in a favorable environment.

We should stop listening to all these egotistical stories of success and humblebragging tainted by survivor bias. Most of the time they provide useless or wrong advice and make more harm than good. I think we should focus more on presenting fair points of view, learning and teaching others about healthy work habits and financial decisions, and in the process have a bit of more empathy to everyone successful or not.

Picasso didn’t become a world-class painter without decades of practice. Stanley Kubrick didn’t become a world-class filmmaker without decades of practice. Ditto for basically every artist, filmmaker, philosopher, craftsman, architect in history.

Maybe quality isn’t important when you’re running a project management SAAS, but if your chosen skill requires time and effort to master it, you will have to put in a lot of hard work.

You can't just completely take out the human element here.

I would be curious to know: what great things were accomplished without hard work? Note that this is different than the mere notion of "success"; there are certainly plenty of "rich" people who have not worked hard.

We say "work hard" but what we mean is "persist" in attempting difficult things that are valuable. These aren't the same.

This blog rant is low quality, and attacks a straw man; that what people who encourage hard work are praising is the toil and not the persistence. Shame on him.

Successful startups are successful because the founders obsess about them, they think about them when they are going to bed and when they wake up; it consumes their lives. That leads to more than 40 hours a week.

There's something to be said for the quality of work too. For Jeff Bezos, like Steve Jobs, the value wasn't in long hours, but in quality decisions. That said, I'm sure they both worked very hard to build Amazon and Apple early on.

I have a minimum wage job where I perform the same repetitive manual labor tasks every single day.

Effort isn't accomplishment but for some people it's all they have. I wouldn't be so quick to devalue the pride my coworkers put in their hard work.

It's easy to be smug about not working hard when you don't have to worry about starving or being homeless.

Those "hard workers" that are successful usually had serious connections, money, and luck to start with. Most actual hard workers end up poor and ignored.

- Thomas Jefferson

TJ was pretty succesfull...

But is DHH trying to get us to believe that he made Rails without working hard? He just fell into auto racing and a lavish lifestyle without hard work in the earlier days of 37Signals/Basecamp and instead relied on his "creativity, insights, breakthroughs, rebellions" without ANY head-bashing and getting stuck trying to make Rails 1.0 a great system for web development in Ruby?

This may be the greatest example of Survivorship Bias I've seen in recent history.

But. As a programmer and as a founder of a digital (non-physical) company, DHH is in a bubble. He's living closer to that future than billions of his fellow humans.

The idea that "hard work" is correlated with success comes from the context where papers don't sort themselves, bricks don't build themselves, and water doesn't pump itself. In that context, working hard for someone else's benefit signals that you care about them, and working hard alongside someone else strengthens your relationship. All those associations with hard work are deeply ingrained in us.

It's only when people have access to systems which do function on their own that they can "work less". Those systems are still being built (and debugged!), and not everyone has access to them, or the time/tools/knowledge needed to build one themselves.

This post seems like it's an expression of DHH's frustration, but it's a message that needs to be targeted to a particular audience: leaders of large corporations. It's too easy for them to weigh the costs and benefits of scaling up a low-paid, hard-working work force (and being rewarded for "creating jobs"), vs. taking the risk of jumping to a new and expensive technology or system (which might not even work out!), and opt for the former. These business leaders aren't necessarily risk takers, but they should be, and we should reward them for that.

As a random postscript, I'd like to point out also that "hard work" isn't always time-correlated, but also effort- and energy-correlated. For instance, moving a heavy sleeper sofa up a narrow staircase with a low ceiling and a right-angle turn could take only 10 minutes but requires a lot of strength and energy.

> Why am I celebrating mere effort? Celebrate creativity, insights, breakthroughs, rebellions, anything but mere effort

Uh, why not do both? You know who really succeeds? the person who has creative breakthroughs AND works harder than everyone else.