Hacker News Reader

Comment by Y_Y | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> It's like a cognitive defect, a disability except you're unable to not-do.

He specifically trained himself to have leisure anxiety and advises other people to do this as well:

>> 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.

It's certainly effective, but as you say, effective to what end?

I tend to agree, but I guess it depends on what you're replacing with work, and how you feel about the work. If you're replacing idle TV watching with a form of work you enjoy, great. If it's replacing time you might be watching specific shows with your partner/kids and with get-head-of-the-pack projects that stress you out, the trade-off will be far from universal.

But as usual, he's writing for a very specific group of people - young people with a strong urge to do late nights building something.

There’s also a conflation of working hard and working really long hours. Plus some cherry picked examples. Basically if you only need to find five or six examples of success you could probably defend any lifestyle to get there. For example if I didn’t have kids or need to coordinate with the west coast of the US this mode from Haruki Murakami sounds lovely.

> When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m.

> I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.

> But to hold to such repetition for so long — six months to a year — requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

I read a book on authors work habits and this pattern seems very common. Work for a relatively short period in the morning (by modern work standards) then spend the rest of the day at leisure.

Yeah I think for the sort of creative work I find myself doing that I don't really have more than 5-6 hours a day of it in me. Having the afternoon to recuperate and spend time idly thinking about the thing I'm trying to make would be great.

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.

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.

Yeah exactly. The trick is to not burn out early. I usually got burned out when I figured out the core (perhaps 20% of the work) and needed many days to grind out the final results, which I did not have the perserverance to complete. This is probably my worst shortcoming of life and I still can't get rid of it when I'm approaching 40.

It seems that the only way for me to finish something is to have the task coming from _someone else_, from a friend or from work.

I resonate with this completely. For me, it’s largely a result of ADHD. My solution has always been to partner with “finishers.”

I’m a spectacular starter, prototyper, and builder. But I cannot complete the damn project for the life of me. My best friend and first employee though? Thrives on that.

Thanks! Yeah it makes sense to partner with finishers :D

I'd go a step further and it sounds woefully disconnected from the joys of culture and life. For those it works for, I imagine that this seems satisfying but for the rest who work hard and don't hit acclaim and fortune (or at least not wild acclaim and fortune), they're going to have midlife crises when they realized they itemized away their youth... I'd guess.

The thing that most people seem to be missing is PG isn’t advocating for working hard just to work hard. He’s advocating for working hard at things that you love, because then it doesn’t feel like work.

He is also glorifying anxiety, which is unfortunate, and I think this essay stands stronger without those particular points.

But "working hard at things that you love" isn't much of a challenge. Your motivation is already there, and your simply overcoming a lack of skills or knowledge.

What's difficult, and more common amongst mere mortals is twofold; trying to find motivation to overcome difficult things, and learning the skills and expertise to accomplish these things. Love for those things isn't really a factor.

Graham really is trying to simplify things a bit too much, and recycling the tropes of natural ability, practice and effort.

It no feeling challenging doesn’t make the work itself any less hard; it just makes it more doable. That’s Paul’s point.

I agree with the rest of what you said, but it is orthogonal to the essay’s main point.

Rationality really only makes sense in relation to goals, as far as I can see. If your goal is to meet your basic needs, then it’s irrational to work all day. If your goal is market domination, then I’d say working all day is a very rational thing to do

If Bill Gates was so smart why did he have to screw so many people over? Remember how many other smart people and other companies he eat for breakfast? If Bill Gates had the right work ethic would he still be so rich?

He worked other people hard, which is really the only way to become very rich. One person can only do so much no matter how hard they work.

Further, the thing about Bill Gates is that he can't not be Bill Gates. Whatever drove Bill Gates to work as hard as he did, he probably had no real choice. If you have the drive of Bill Gates, then you'll work with the drive of Bill Gates. Simple!

Chris Williamson's video on this is really touching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbgkMhio3jY

Because he was trying to build one of the biggest/most successful companies ever? Some things are just hard regardless of how smart you are, building a mega company is one of those.

I suspect it's more likely to just be fiction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com