Every time I hear someone say "life is hard, just push through it, embrace the difficulty", I hope they understand there are different levels of hard.

It's absolutely true that if you want to accomplish almost anything you need to endure some levels of suffering. There are a lot of people who just need to hear "quit complaining, quit trying to make it easier, and actually try". There are a lot of people who fail to achieve their goals because they don't try, they're too lazy and they're too nervous to push themselves.

But if you just try to push yourself as hard as you can for the sake of it, you'll waste your effort and burn out. Success requires effort but it's only means to an end: e.g. the success from releasing a product isn't the crunch time you put into it, it's the actual product. Hard work alone won't get you far, you also have to work smart. This is why IMO "embrace the pain" sends the wrong message, "accept the pain" might be better.

Furthermore, everyone has a limit and you have to understand yours. Too much suffering won't make you stronger, it will actually break you. A cruel realization is that there are poor people and laborers who've went through more suffering than you can imagine, and they don't have anything to show for it.

> It is all around us. > People no longer willing to work.

What? What planet is this? What I have seen is people rearranging their lives by changing their careers, which is hard. Being aware of the gaps in your life and then changing to fill them is extremely hard. Giving up money and prestige to spend time with kids who are not always grateful, at least at first, can be extremely difficult. The big trend I am seeing is people starting their own businesses instead of letting themselves be satisfied with being a corporate tool.

Going a step further, whatever metric this person is using that leads to such grand trivialization is likely to make them insufferable and impossible to reach. Have some feedback about what might make their latest offering more desirable? Sorry, too busy working hard to listen to your weakness based complaints.

Especially in the tech world my experience is that what really wins is being lazy and then extending that to allow others to be lazy. Always be alert for sharp edges can and should be sanded down to leave room for other stuff whether that is beach time, family time, or development time for the next big thing.

I've been poor and rich, insanely busy and idle.

Wealth removes the day to day stress, and that goes a long way. But it doesn't bring happiness itself.

Same with work. Idleness is fun for a short while, then awful. We all know too much work is awful.

Feeling like you have a purpose is the most important thing. I think the formula for happiness is something like: avoid poverty but recognize there are rapidly diminishing returns on wealth, don't be idle but work on something purposeful, if you cannot find purpose in work find it elsewhere.

Oh and take care of your body!

I think this article is disingenuous, because not all things are difficult for all people. Some people really do work a few hours per week and still live a comfortable lifestyle, whether because they had a lot of help getting a comfy job (wealthy parents, lots of tutoring, nepotism, etc.) or maybe won the genetic lottery, while disadvantaged people may see it as not only difficult but maybe impossible to attain the same without any of that help. I think it comes down to inequality, not laziness.

I don't know what the solution is; inequality shows no signs of abating, disadvanted people find it difficult to get assistance, and there is a culture driven by articles like these that support the notion that "if you grind hard enough you'll succeed." Personally, I think we should be more sympathetic/empathetic to the plight of these people

I believe that while there is some inner truth in the article, that you could push harder and go farther than you could ever believe, there must be a big warning sign too.

If you push yourself hard, then you should also rest hard. You can burn yourself, you can destroy your immune system with stress and die from cancer in your 30s.

I know because I have worked the hardest a person can and gotten nowhere while watching other people succeed with little effort and have learn a lot from those guys.

Then I became much more successful doing much less effort.

I have seen people literarily kill themselves through work and getting miserable. Don't do that.

You must enjoy your wealth while you create it. Enjoy your journey, enjoy the process and things become easier.

Learn basic physics, learn productivity. The more output with the smaller effort, the bigger the efficiency. Master efficiency. Learn Pareto' principle. Learn habit formation so things become automatic and easy. Learn psychology so you understand people.

Learn your limits, pick the battles you could win and win big. Do NOT do work that brings you little while requiring significant effort.

If you work too much in the wrong things you will be miserable anyway.

I'm not a fan of the criticism of people's disposition towards corporate work in this piece (ie. Not wanting to work for a company).

You know what form of ease I have given up? The one where I am trapped in a cage, working on someone else's vision, just for a regular paycheck. I choose to work as hard as I can. To suffer brutally. To not know if I will have money coming to me. I grow my own food. I make my own clothes. I 3D print all my tools, and assemble them from PCB level parts up (Hoping to be able to print basic circuit boards with conductive filament soon).

I consciously made the choice of radical freedom. I am going to be a Nietzsche Ubermensch, and I want to elevate everyone in my field in accordance with good faith and genuine love. We now have to tools to be genuine and part of society at the same time, we just have to get a critical number of people to choose this way of life and educate.

Doing hard things improves you, but ultimately your personality is largely defined by the time you stop being a child. Industriousness is very much a personality dimension and it is very hard to change. Industriousness is a measure of how satisfied you are doing nothing. Highly industrious personalities are the most prevalent factor with success across the lifespan (in Western economies) and also seem less likely to develop in Western Democracies where life outlook is stable, nutrition is good and creativity encouraged. but the cause is currently a few avenues of speculation. Personality dimensions are mostly impossible to change meaningfully, but it seems psychadelics and traumatic brain injury seem to be the only two things capable of doing so on a permanent basis, but both have a high chance of causing negative/catastrophic consequences.

I’m not surprised that this was written by a self-described serial entrepreneur. It has all the hallmarks of a “capitalism isn’t all that bad, it turned out great for me!” type of view.

From a philosophical standpoint I do agree with the author that difficult, deep work is spiritually enriching. But most bullshit jobs that people work for their 9-5 are not that.

I think people are not sick of work in general, but rather are sick of that bullshit work. Working for subsistence, in a way that is obviously exploitative, to enrich corporate elites who actively seek to keep conditions worse for the working class. The grift is much more out in the open now than it used to be.

The conditions of the working class in America are not ordained by God, but rather maintained by the people who are heavily invested in keeping the system the way it is. We could have much more leisure time, like most other industrialized countries. We could have socialized healthcare, like most other industrialized countries. But we don’t, and when people get fed up with it, we got a slew of blog posts like this explaining that those grievances are all bullshit and they should just shut up and enjoy their work.

I made a few million in crypto a few years ago. My wife is submissive and intelligent. Life is very easy and I have no difficulties. I have absolutely no need for external validation. It is like paradise and totally worth achieving.

Whatever your opinions are, I appreciate you all reading and having a civil discussion. You all rock!

>> We become artificial automatons and driven drones.

Yeah, those Buddhist monks who don't try to achieve anything and yet are happiest creatures on Earth are indeed drones.

Anecdotal: the richest self made people I know work the hardest, the poorest don't work at all or as little as possible, by choice (state pays). People who inherited wealth are the unhappiest and the people who do well but not enough to be rich (I guess some type of middle class) whine about it all and want to be rich to vacation the rest of their life (but will probably never get there as they never run, just chug along and keep whining).