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Comment by nineplay | Hacker News Reader

I stopped praising hard work some time ago when I really started to look at society around me. I don't want my kid to think that hard work is the key to happiness. Satisfaction is an admirable goal, pride in ones work is an admirable goal, staying up late and working all weekend for an A is not an admirable goal.

Call us cynical but we've started teaching our kids a gamer attitude towards school. There are 'tricks' you can learn to get an A that aren't staying up all night reading every single page in your Physics textbook.

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At its core, hard work is what provides self-satisfaction, I think. If you work hard and appreciate the effort you put in, it will feel like a success.

Efficiency or effectiveness of a solution is what elicits external satisfaction. Others appreciate you for your efforts when it benefits them greatly.

I think both sides are necessary! Some people naturally favor one vs. the other, too, and respond better to one of these two types of feedback.

I'm an engineer. If I'm designing "X", I'm much more satisfied if I can find a way to do it in a day modifying "Y" than if I spent two weeks building up "X" from scratch.

Hard work also depends on the context and again we're talking about school where students have limited choices over what they're working on. I hated writing. I still hate writing. Spending long hours writing an essay on Camus didn't make me feel satisfied, it made me feel drained. Even if I'd gotten an A ( I can't remember, I might have if only because no one else was dumb enough to take on French extisentialism ) it wasn't satisfying because I didn't care if I was a good writer or not.

You seem to forget that no matter how much effort and success we have it's always the bosses son who gets the reward. And that sure doesn't feel like success.

Resiliency is becoming more important in our increasingly feudal society. Learn to roll with the punches and don't expect hard work to be rewarded.

Sorry to say but what you describe is definitely not new to human society… that’s been the way since the beginning of time, and will always be the way.

It's also often wasteful. You can claim that "there's always more to learn in any subject", but if someone legitimately knows the material, any activity is more meaningful including playing video games or TV.

I suspect many of these people would also misjudge hard work, for example when people self-teach out of interest, well that's just them having fun. The many hours sports star spent on the playground were just playing.

The idea in some mind is you have to take the hard way (no short cuts!). I can just feel how smug people are when they say this. So the idea of someone not grinding fills them with blind rage.

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