The Risk of Working Hard | Hacker News Reader

The Risk of Working Hard

ben.casnocha.com

29 pointsrobg15 comments

Another risk of working hard is that it requires tunnel vision. Narrowing your perspective makes you vulnerable and requires faith that it will pay off and you won't get burned by something that happens while you have your head down. I guess this doesn't apply to people who work with their heads up, but it certainly applies to a lot of technical folks.

Agreed. Its definitely hard to convince yourself to go heads down and full steam ahead on a good bet, when there is a chance that there are better bets somewhere out there.

"In other words, if you work hard and fail, there's the presumption that you're innately not very talented. If you don't work hard and fail, you can credibly preserve the belief or illusion that had you only put forth 100% effort, it would have worked out."

This may be a common viewpoint, but it's unhealthy. Why lie to yourself? If you work hard and fail, maybe you're untalented, but it's good to know that and change directions. Or maybe you picked a bad goal and should pick a new one.

On the other hand, if you don't work hard and you fail, you haven't learned anything.

Also, "fail" is too broad. Maybe you worked hard, taught yourself to code, and built a website that got no business. OK, so your business failed, but in the process, because you worked hard, you learned how to code. Hooray!

What gets me, everytime I procastrinate along lines similar to those described in the article, is that the implicit assumption is always then that you're not very talented.

You can develop your talent, or you can sit around and think you're stupid.

Talent IMO is an epistemological quagmire you'll never get out of any other way than by quitting on it. As a sociologist, I like to remind that it is a relational concept - it doesn't refer to a 'thing' but to a way of defining yourself in relation to something.

I'll put a positive spin on this: Replace "fail" with "not successful yet". Replace "not talented" with "not as skilled as I will eventually be". Now working hard uncovers weaknesses and things to improve.

I tend to think that value is measured in failure.

I know that I tried to teach this to my kids. That failure isn't a judgement its a result. Learn and re-attempt. If you fail several times then succeed it feels (to me at least) much better having succeeded than just succeeding right off the bat.

The place where this gets dicey is the test scenario where you have only 'one chance'. When its possible to do test runs that you can fail at and practice it seems to help.

I agree. What you wrote helped me remember a useful saying: "you always pass failure on your way to success."

In the school setting that he's giving the example in, I see it like this (on a personal level):

On a 4.0 scale here in Canada, 90+ is a 4.0. This means regardless of whether you get a 90 or a 100, you still end up with the same GPA.

I make an explicit effort not to get above or under 90. 91 and 92 is unavoidable at times, but when I get a 98 or 100, I feel like I've just wasted a bunch of time. If I didn't study much, I shouldn't have studied at all. If I didn't study at all, I probably should have gone to the exam late, etc.

In an ordinary context, I think a lot of us understand the balance between reward and effort. And of course, reward tends to come with diminishing returns as a function of effort. I really think that's the reason we all don't try very hard for everything.

...Unless there's a lot of money involved... then it's different.

I don't really see the point in making an explicit effort to avoid doing meaningful work. If your GPA is really the only reward you're getting in all of your classes, maybe you're going to the wrong school. Sure, I lazed off in Computing Ethics because it was a total joke (easy A, unqualified prof, poor course design). But I definitely got more than a letter grade out of my classes on algorithms, GUI design, best development practices, etc. For the courses with real value, I might as well get as close to 100% of that value as I can, even if I only get `credit` for the first 90%. Maybe it's just because I come from a working class family, but it seems so wasteful to throw that last 10% away on purpose. (University doesn't have a lot of money involved...?) Yeah you can learn it later in your own time, but why not just learn it right away and spend that time later diving deeper or exploring other areas?

I think it's true that a lot of people sabotage themselves this way. A more productive defense mechanism would be to tell yourself you could always have tried harder when you fail, even if that's not necessarily true.

On a related note, some folks think this is why LeBron James played terribly in the 4th quarters of the Finals games vs. the Mavs.

And, you can work at 100% and have it not work out for external reasons which have nothing to do with you.

In other words, if you work hard and fail, there's the presumption that you're innately not very talented.

Work by its definition is something that you don't enjoy doing. The real risk is that you spend a lot of time doing something that you don't enjoy when you could have been working less and enjoying yourself more.

google cached http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TN1Cg1X...

Hard work is defined as measure of success, if you succeed you worked hard, else it becomes a foolish effort.

When I've worked hard on a project that could fail, I've usually had the mindset, "if it fails, at least we'll know it wasn't because we didn't try".

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