The lazy way to being outstanding: go after hard things

Isn't there an element of being in the right place / right time though? I sometimes feel like my side-interest niches fall into two categories: things I came late to the party to, or things I thought would be a good thing to get into but not enough other people cared.

> learn your way into the 20% of that field

Agreed, but how do you do that though? My experience is that there is only so much you can learn without the challenge

> For example, a few years ago I stumbled upon payment fraud as an interesting area to learn about and quickly became somewhat of an "expert" in the industry.

So "payment fraud" was the elephant problem you tackled when no one else in your company would?

Ha! Strong opinions!

I think my failure here is that I did not fully explain, that this applies mostly to the corporate environment of technology companies, where the risk of failure is much, much smaller and you distinguish yourself from the rest by having appetite for risk.

I of course totally forgot, that there is a whole startup world and convincing people to chase moonshots without any risk analysis should be indeed illegal. Young entrepreneur: YOU SHOULD WEIGH YOUR RISKS BEFORE YOU GO INTO THE WILD!!

There are problems and problems. I think the reader needs to adapt to their reality when reading the blogspot. Sometimes the reader needs to do some work and contextualize a piece of advice. I think the blogpost made total sense to me, in the context of my work. There is a (not-so-fine) line between embarking into a intractable or incredibly risky task and a hard problem that nobody wanted to do solve. Keep in mind that a hard problem is not necessarily what you find hard but what your colleagues find hard, that is the point. Go after something that you know can be done but nobody has ventured into. I enjoy a great amount of freedom at work because I've been tackling these hard issues. You see, when you address an elephant in the room, even after being solved, people will not venture to go there and they are happy to leave you alone since you are working on the elephant in the room.

Your friend can apply the 7 years of experience to something less risky.

Keep your personal burn rate low. Avoid debt. Maintain high savings and eventually financial independence to mitigate the downside of professional failure (ensure you won't starve or be homeless). Maintain good relationships with your family if you can if they would be willing to support you if necessary.

Figure out what failure would look like and plan for it. Does it mean losing your job? Ok, how long would it take you to find another one? Could you support yourself in the meantime? Does it mean declaring bankruptcy? What would you do to support yourself if you had to do that? Could you move somewhere cheaper? Take a lower paying job? In a professional sense there aren't a lot of truly catastrophic failures unless you're doing something illegal.

Sometimes these hard things are all or nothing where a switch has to be flipped with a very difficult but maybe not impossible way back.

In my experience, most of the time you can chip away at a hard thing, first in understanding it, then transforming it at its edges, getting a better understanding of what lies beneath, all the while taking small risks leaving what remains less hard and a smaller risk. At some point others can see the way through and you get buy-in for flipping that switch with certain precautions in place.

What I wanted to convey by quoting Seth Godin is that we should be more comfortable risking failure like embarassment, getting out of the comfort zone, etc.

Failure of burnout and loosing your time is the risk of LONG work - not the type I advocate. It seems that I did not explain this clearly, but I wanted to point out that "slogging through" is not the right approach.

> Right. So what happens when you do what OP suggests, and fail? This can happen, right, that's what "hard" and "risk" mean.

It's a cliche and I wish I would have a better explanation, but:

- Your failure is above everybody else's success

- You get instant respect and credibility because you tried

- You learn a shitton.

What if you keep working on the same "easy" things for years, and after all that, your career is still in the exact same place? Or the whole project or company fails anyway, because no one attacked the elephant problem?

Doing the "safe" things also carries a lot of risk.

The thing is sometimes hard things are actually easy because there is a simple solution that hasn't been tried because people haven't worked on the problem because it seems hard and they don't feel smart enough.

The trick is to recognize these situations.

Good review.

A related good piece of advice I got early in my career was to do the tasks no one else wants to do. Less risky than "do the hard things". You quickly become invaluable and those tasks become less painful the more you do them.

> This essay is a bit weird because it systematically avoids talking about the reason people (rationally, I might add) avoid hard problems: they are risky. Yes, the rewards are great, but so too is the risk of failure.

Thank you for pointing that out! This is something I completely failed to include in the essay. From my experience, when you tackle hard things in the organization, there is virtually 0 risk. The worst outcome for you is that you feel bad, but this is not going to diminish your chances in career, quite the opposite.

The situation is a bit like here: I failed to include this vital section about risk in an article that is getting traffic right now. It is embarrassing, but I doubt if this will have negative repercussions for me. (I hope )

Anyway - that is why feedback is so critical.

Ask for self directed learning time & use it to investigate, prototype and experiment. You can even tell your manager that you'll scope your learning material to things that could be useful for your job down the road... it's worth a shot.

Or is the main concern not the time to develop, but the actual deployment & interpersonal verification of the idea?

Repetition. Human communication is a lot dumber than we think. Repeat the message consistently and in simple terms, let it incept. Persuade through persistence and your commitment.

And this makes sense, if people just changed direction based on one interaction the system / org becomes chaotic. There needs to be some sort of function that once a threshold is passed then something happens (like action potential).

As an aside, I realized this both from work experience and taking guidance from marketing / propaganda.

In my previous work, I was developing training tools for new heavy machinery workers. I wanted to do everything in VR since we had the 3D models from all the engineers using all kind of CAD software.

My boss also wanted to improve our division offering but no one at the upper management approved. That was our hard thing.

So we did it slowly. At first, only see the 3D model in VR (so you can feel how it would look later) and feature by feature we kept developing VR. (While still working on all other tasks)

At the end, we became the VR division. And old documentation were to be converted to VR.

It was a lot of fun and a lot of challenge in the CAD<->VR space.

tl;dr; Start slow until you have enough mass to convience others it worth it.

I spent four years at an organisation rife with this. I found two major routes for getting to work on hard problems.

The first was joining initiatives that were in such utter disarray people were willing to take any risk to get out of the "someone's gonna get fired for this" hole. They were typically rich in hard problems (the chaos was usually caused by failure to address one or more of them) and people liked the idea that someone else was taking on responsibility and becoming the person who was most likely "gonna get fired for this". I was happy taking that risk, considering the payoff in getting to work on interesting problems worth it.

In the absence of disarray, I had to go down the much slower route of finding small things that received so little attention I could just do them; nobody cared about them enough to worry about success or failure, and the time input was small enough nobody got upset about it. Over time the cumulative impact would gain me enough trust to take on something bigger, and assuming that went well things would snowball from there. In this way I "trained" one of my bosses from flipping out at the most minor suggestion to pretty much leaving me alone to get on with what I felt like, on the basis I would usually find things to do that reflected well on him.

Unfortunately I never worked out how to get anywhere with the kind of person who benefited from the hard problems not being solved -essentially those profiting from either the prevalence of bullshit or non-essential things being done as per points 3 and 4 in the article's section on what happens when you do tackle the hard stuff.

I'd also caution in my experience it wasn't useful in advancing my career at the same company - I did see a big benefit in credibility but it was among peers and the people I depended on to "get a VIP pass around bureaucracy". This has been general across organisations in my experience: the career stage benefits only come when I move on and have a load of experience in problem spaces I simply wouldn't have encountered had I kept my head down and merely done my job.