There is no substitute for hard work
notoriousbfg.com
notoriousbfg.com
> To be really good at anything means doing it a lot
True, but working smart is figuring out another way to do it that doesn't require skill.
For example, I could spend years and years studying chess to become a skilled chess player. Or I could spend a month or two writing a chess playing program that'll do even better.
Or I could train and train and get my 10 km jogging time down. Or I could get smart and get a bicycle.
is applicable to everyone.
> working smart is figuring out another way to do it that doesn't require skill
is applicable to the creative types. Ones who have the time and luxury to think and ponder, an increasingly difficult thing to do if you are economically dis-advantaged.
Doing smart work requires a lot of creative problem solving skills. And those skills are developed when there is a lot of input to the brain. And that requires a lot of time.
In the modern age, true poverty is the lack of time to sit and think.
You might want to revise that. Here in Seattle, with homeless living in tents on the streets, they have plenty of time to sit and think. They don't have jobs. Many spend their days in the public library, surrounded by resources for sitting and thinking.
The context of homelessness changes the dynamic quite a bit. Sure, you have lots of time to think and ponder. But, you have no work. So the question of smart work is moot. Also, those who are homeless, are extremely stressed and constantly worrying about their next meal or next shelter. It's not fair to equate the time they have to the time they can spend doing productive or creative thinking.
Be my guest and do it the hard way!
> True, but working smart is figuring out another way to do it that doesn't require skill.
There's also the old line "There are people who have ten years experience, and there are people who've had one years experience ten times over."
There's a big difference between "doing something a lot" and "deliberate practice" where you actually plan to progress and improve and excel at what you're doing.
I'm not any better at, say, washing dishes or vacuuming floors that I was 20 years ago. But I'm way better at programming, riding motorcycles, making espresso, and a bunch of other stuff I care enough about to "do it a lot" properly.
I hear "working smart" a lot and I think it's a bit of a fallacy. I think choosing what you do for a living or work on isn't particularly smart; it's just common sense. Find me any expert in a given field and tell me they didn't spend years honing their skill.
The people I have known who think it is one or the other never got beyond middling. This can carry you to a successful career, even at FAANG, but if you want to be an owner and not trade your time for money there are no 'smart' approach to do it without hard work
What a nonsense statement.
I've drilled a hole in angle iron with a hand drill. That is dang hard work. The smart way is to instead work to earn enough moolah to buy an electric drill, then drilling holes in metal is easy & fast.
Working smart is what lazy people do.
It's pointing out the meaninglessness of assuming you know why people are doing what they're doing. Training to run faster is a stupid way to travel 10km faster, if your need/motivation is just to get somewhere and not to get fitter.
Being fit for health reasons doesn't require that much exercise. I jog for health reasons, and there's no health benefit past a certain point (and in fact, you're wrecking your body if you do). I don't time my jogs because there's no purpose to going faster. If I need to get there faster, I'll bike or drive.
This whole protestant rooted idea in our culture that working hard is what yields results, even happiness, is misguided. Working hard is something you can control and dedication can set you apart/add advantage, but as you point out, strategy, and I'll add luck, add significantly to your success for a lot of ventures you may take on life. If you enjoy working hard then by all means do it but don't think it is any sort of assured pathway to success or even happiness.
Maybe the satisfaction and pride of clever work that saves us from the hard work? Animals do hard work too; grazing pastures all day, hunting for caloric surplus, living hand to mouth. It was the satisfaction of inventing tools that made humans humans. Maybe the real hard work is in thinking things through? Maybe what OP calls shortcuts are the optimal paths, and maybe finding the optimal paths are more important than wandering around?
> This is an innate, selfish need we all have but one that belongs entirely to us and us alone.
Or it is protestant work ethic overgeneralized. And it has failure modes, namely not all hard work is blessed, or it was not the case that "arbeit macht frei".
> To be really good at anything means doing it a lot.
If that was the case, for complex skillsets like being a software engineer, tenure would automatically mean promotion. Sure, it does somewhat correlate, but not everyone who does a thing a lot gets equally good at those, and those who get good at a thing did not do that thing in the same quantity. So there ought to be really good substitutes to hard work after all.
> Or it is protestant work ethic overgeneralized.
The Protestant view would be that the "innate, selfish need we all have", as OP put it, is to serve in some way; and what differentiates people from one another isn't whether we serve, but whom we serve.
> And it has failure modes, namely not all hard work is blessed, or it was not the case that "arbeit macht frei".
Work is and always will be inherently hard or toilsome in some way. We may not have sweat on our brow, but we all do have hard and frustrating aspects to the work we do... I don't think protestants would call all work "blessed".
> The Protestant view
While the “Protestant work ethic” concept holds that the ethic it describes is a consequence of certain Protestant (more specifically, Calvinist) beliefs, it does not intend to describe a general “Protestant view”.
Hard work is hard if you are not sure whether the work performed contributes to progress or not.
I think that puts most people off.
But hard work helps you get a bigger dividend out of luck.
I spent a lot of time reading (easy), some time developing social skills (somewhat difficult but not work), then got an opportunity (the exact opposite of hard) and it worked out.
I agree that there’s no substitute for hard work. It’s its own thing. I disagree that it has some sort of inherent moral value or virtue, as far as I can tell that’s a line invented by management to make you feel better about not receiving a tiny fraction of the money you generate for your company.
I recommend starting your own business, where you get to keep 100% of the profit.
Edit: To clarify, seriously no I do not “work hard.” Running my business is so, so much easier than building a deck or carrying sliding glass doors on my back 4+ stories. I got lucky in that I found myself in a situation where I fell ass-backwards into a bunch of clients wanting something that I can do easily (general IT and website stuff) that I learned as a kid (stuff I learned while also not doing hard work.)
I am literally just lucky.
There’s literally nothing about me that’s special, least of which my work ethic. I’m very happy about where I’m at in life but I have no illusions about how I got here.
I wasn’t born remotely wealthy and didn’t have all the advantages that many others have but I did not get to where I am through “hard work.” I got lucky.
I have friends that are smarter than me, harder workers, more creative, more entrepreneurial, better communicator, etc that have had a worse professional experience than I have. I literally just met the right people at the right time.
The only contribution that I can seriously point to that I did objectively was just being a nice person at the right time in the right room, without knowing what was going on.
> I was lucky that my childhood interests gave me a basic skill set
Normal childhood interests can lead to lucrative careers, if one decides to follow those interests. These days, that's only a google search away.
You don’t make luck. Luck happens to you.
There are a few things that make it more likely to be able to take advantage of an opportunity, but those are available to a huge number of others who are not as lucky.
And there's no guarantee that what you're doing will prepare you for the opportunity at any given time.
Suppose next 20 years 2/3 middle managers will get replaced by AGI. They may have been lucky before but it does not hold. Combine with people who lost a lot of resources by investing. There is an old adage about not investing what you cannot afford to lose, they thought you could not lose that job, but it happened anyway.
Nobody likes to hear about hundreds of thousands of losers every day, who will be then unable to follow up on opportunities.
Unlike games of skill, life is much more of a game of chance with a lot predetermined from outset. It's closer to a deck builder but sometimes you just get trash picks.
Nobody said anything about a guarantee. It's all about making choices so luck can find you.
Do you really believe that you're just as lucky to find opportunity by staying home and playing video games vs getting educated and visiting trade shows, etc.?
Do you really believe that you're just as likely to get lucky with investments by never investing in anything, vs doing some research and doing investing?
I’m highly educated in several fields that have exactly 0 overlap with my business, so reading all that Kierkegaard and Pharmako/Poeia over the years didn’t serve to make me any “luckier” when it comes to my professional life.
If I hadn’t been “staying home and playing video games,” I would have never met my partner. That’s luck. If I hadn’t been doing nothing in the middle of what should have been a workday for most people, I wouldn’t have been available to do a friend a favor that turned into a job that turned into a business. That’s luck.
I’m not advocating for everyone to just do nothing — many people find that excruciating. I’m just saying that good luck and bad luck can happen to anyone at any time in any way.
I personally find it just downright odd when human beings decide that they’ve somehow gamed the RNG in life rather than just uh… getting lucky.
For example, by my estimation “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne is not representative of reality. People cannot actually manifest things, however nice it must be to feel that one can. There’s a whole lot of randomness in the universe and I’m not in the habit of thinking that I have conquered it.
No amount of "oh you just worked hard" will convince me I got that. I'm 100% sure it was not only luck, but the fact that also I was the only one who applied because they mislabeled the position in a major city like 150 miles away haha.
For example, if you have no coding skills, nobody is going to invite you to join their software startup.
That said, yeah, just putting your ass in the chair, staying proximate to the problem, is a job well done, and worth doing. It's just not everything.
There are plenty of things where people don't care for the process -- they just want the results, whether it's money, fame, body, or what not. And to that: there's plenty of substitutes for hard work.
But I do think there are plenty of things where the deliberateness of the journey is the reward. For plenty of runners who run a marathon, the payoff isn't checking it off the todo list but the exercise of willpower. Same goes to hobbies, same goes to skills -- and honestly people tick in different ways. But I do think the OP just wants us to enjoy the journey and be invested in it.
I guess my point is that if you get lucky or are willing to bend the rules or are super talented, hard work indeed is not necessary. I’m none of these and for me, there has been no substitute.
People who play it safe rarely get very far.
Most people don't recognize Opportunity because it comes disguised as Hard Work.
Prime example of generalizing from the (singular, personal) experience.
The author should spend some time with non-neurotypical people (ADHD, ASD) and ask them how they experience the effects of hard work.
I recall some parents who hooked up a bike to a dyno, which powered a TV. The kids could watch TV as much as they were willing to pedal.
Their taste in TV shows improved dramatically.