Working hard is overrated
caterina.net
caterina.net
There are two kinds of "hard work": The type where you are busy and putting out continuous effort and the kind where the hard part is resisting stupid suggestions from other people, resisting what the crowd is doing, resisting temptation and so on to stick to your guns and do things the right way. That kind of work may not look like hard work to outsiders but in some ways can be harder than looking like you are working hard. I have found that second category of hard work to be more productive and valuable than the first. The first is more about appearances and about reassuring ourselves we are "working hard". The second is about doing the right things at the right time. It often involves a lot less physical effort and therefore often looks like "slacking" and "luck" to outsider observers when it is neither.
http://webweekly.hms.harvard.edu/archive/2003/4_7/student_sc...
The 50th anniversary of the finding of the DNA structure meant a lot of new documentary information on the background to the race to find the structure of DNA. Firstly it shows the high degree of competitive rivalry between the players (Chargaff, Franklin, Pauling, Watson/Crick and Wilkins) to find the structure of DNA.
The key to finding the DNA structure was not just a fact of experimenting but assembling the pieces of the puzzle to create a workable theory. Each player had different pieces required in the puzzle
* Wilkins: who's earliest X-ray diffractions meant the dimensions could be calculated & who supplied Franklin with DNA samples.
* Franklin & Gosling: the X-ray diffraction pattern clearly showing the structure.
* Linus Pauling: Who's triple stranded DNA idea which turned out to be wrong but tipped off Watson & Cricks idea of a double helix.
* Watson: who knew the base pairing (AT & CG) fit all the dimensions
* Chargaff: who deduced the DNA ratios of A, T, G, C are equal
Then there was the technique. There is no doubt Franklin was the more analytic and systematic scientist compared to Watson and Crick who bumbled around like many of the others in the field building models. But Franklin had two things going against her. Firstly she working in a male dominated field. But more importantly she missed out on the benefit of teamwork. A lot this appears to stem from the personalities of Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. They simply didn't gel as a team as well as Watson & Crick. [0]
So the winners in this case could have been any of these players but it was Watson & Crick who happened to be at the right place and time understanding the smaller picture but more importantly having the imagination and freedom to think about how the pieces fit. Others supplied the information, they found the right theory to tie the information into a coherent idea. Watson and Crick didn't get the Nobel prize for just doing the basic science of discovering the structure of DNA. The pieces of the DNA puzzle lay in front of them. They get the recognition because they re-organised what information they had around them, come up with a theory that matched the data and wrote it up.
[0] Cold Spring Harbor Lab, DNAi, "Finding the Structure, Players", http://www.dnai.org/a/index.html
Then they got a hold of Franklin's photograph of B-form DNA without her knowledge. Some sources say Wilkins, the guy who gave Watson & Crick the photograph stole it, others that he was just trying to be helpful, but they agree that Watson & Crick used Franklin's work without her permission to form their final model... with the phosphates where they belong, on the OUTSIDE, this time.
Franklin was very cautious and methodical: she wanted everything all lined up and double-checked before she published, and she didn't seem to realize just how important what she already had was. (She was after all a chemist, not a biologist). She wanted more data before she said conclusively what the correct model was.
Watson & Crick were rather impulsive, but courageous. Even though they were dead wrong the first time, they kept working and with Franklin's data managed to put together a cohesive, plausible model, which turned out to be right. They raced to publication, and didn't give Franklin any of the credit.
I'm not sure what you want to interpret from that about hard work, except that someone's hard work (in this case, that of Franklin) is usually required for a major success, and that if the hard worker isn't careful, he/she might not be the one to get the credit.
Sources: http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/KR/Views/Exhibit/narrative/dna.h... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_franklin
I couldn't help but think that it's easy for someone like Caterina Fake to keep cool and chill out: she's already made her millions from Flickr and she's got no one to impress. Her investors (if any) and colleagues already believe in her, she believes in herself, and quite frankly she doesn't have much to lose.
Also, I did not find the description of Watson and Crick to be particularly surprising, nor the implicit comparison to her current founding team particularly valid. Anyone who's done serious research (or undertaken a major creative endeavor) knows that you need to give yourself time to breathe, be creative, and think about the big picture. Ironically, as I write this, I'm beginning to think the comparison may be more valid than I first gave it credit for ...
Finally, I was reminded of a Steve Blank quote something along the lines of "In uncertain times, people tend to look down at their business cards and do whatever it says on the title line." I think as founders, when all else fails we fall back on doing that thing. Those of us who are technical founders will write code and create features; those of us who are more business-oriented will build new strategies and obsess over details of the business; those of us who have to do both will, well, do both — and not particularly well.
(1) we often make things out to be bigger than they really are. This is the case in many situations, just because we don't want our lives to feel dull, so even some of the small problems can be blown a little out of proportion.
(2) Time off is time well spent. It's called incubating in design, and it's where the brain is actually at its most creative. Just a gentle reminder that while we claim to work 120 hour weeks, not all 120 hours are spent furiously pounding out code or designs over a computer.
"Putting creativity on a pedestal can also be an excuse for laziness. There is a lot of cultural belief that creativity comes from inspiration, and can't be rushed. Not true. Inspiration is just your subconscious putting things together, and that can be made into an active process with a little introspection. Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better."
I'm a fundamentally lazy person who does nothing all day and has enough frequent flashes of brilliance to get away with it. Friends of mine have told me that they're not capable of working like that, though I have my doubts: I've always been curious if my method of productivity can be replicated, and one day I think I'll put an effort into figuring that out. But what's clear is that two people working in radically different ways can produce as much in the end.
The point of the post wasn't "Oh, look at me and how smart I am." The point was, "Smart people can do the same task in different ways."
This month, as an experiment, I started a blog without any publicizing, to see how well I could grow something without any promotion. Three weeks in I have over a hundred readers and am currently growing at the rate of seven or eight readers a day. Now I'm experimenting with a collective, because I want to see how well I can divert those readers towards other people if I care to.
I know it's out of fashion to say this, but I believe in the long tail. I'm able to publish anything I can imagine without consulting other people first, and if I can find a thousand people to buy whatever it is I'm making, then perhaps I'm not yet rich, but I'm financially free to do what I like. I've still got three years, and I'm utterly confident of finding an audience.
I think you'll find that as you continue on in your area, the competition grows significantly.
I'm curious. Competition with who? I don't know anybody who writes the way I do, or makes things look the way I do, or plays music how I do, or takes photos the way I do. Art's a great field in that there's no competition unless you go the route of searching for grants and entering contests, and I dislike both. I'd never live a lifestyle that relied on the good will of a panel of judges—though if it comes down to it, I can compete.
If you're able to make a comfortable living doing what you like, then that's fantastic. (No sarcasm or irony intended.) But the assumption I had was we were talking about success at the top levels of a field, be it art, science or business. Any time you have multiple people doing similar things, competition develops.
I'm a Ph.D. student, and the ideal is we do interesting things and tell interested people about what we did. The reality is that the conferences we submit to can only accept a finite number of papers. Hence, there is a competition. Similar rules apply to things as basic as getting funding and getting a job.
As for "top levels", I don't know how to determine that. I hold Vimeo in higher regard than I do Youtube, for instance, even if Vimeo is much smaller. I'd rather work on CollegeHumor than on Saturday Night Live, since they do better work, though I'd much rather start my own group and make something even better. The musicians that I like are frequently obscure or weird or simply unpopular; I'd say that I'm more impressed with Frank Zappa as an artist than I am with Paul McCartney (the Beatles aside), but McCartney's certainly the more famous of the two. My favorite handful of musicians/directors/authors aren't big names, even within any niche. I still think they're the best people I've found, though. So even if I'm not famous for what I do, as long as I'm doing the best work I consider myself the victor.
I'm past the point where I believe success has "levels". If you're not satisfied with what you're doing, you haven't succeeded. Once you are, then you're just as much a success as anybody.
To bring us back to the original point, I would be shocked if the artists that you consider best in class did not work hard.
I guess it depends what you mean by working hard. Pretty much all the artists I consider best in class put themselves in positions where they could work on whatever they wanted without distraction. I don't consider that working.
You are talking about success by other people's measures: getting your paper accepted, being rated as "top" by other people, best in class this, accepted that.
He is not talking about those things at all.
You are never going to see eye to eye if you can't both A) see you are talking about entirely different things, and B) meet somewhere in the middle.
It's not working hard to work 12-14 (or more) hours a day, that's just foolishness. Working 12+ hours a day does have the side effect of making it very unlikely that you're working on the right problem; in software, you're not adding functionality at that point, you're just dealing with the bad code and design you implemented when you were half asleep from burnout at 2am the night before. That's not getting the job done, it's putting in hours for the sake of putting in hours.
What she is saying is that working hard may not be necessary, and certainly is not sufficient. Anyone who invests in startups knows that she's right: the market is the most important. Getting to product/market fit is important. The first you can't control at all; the second may not take forever/a ton of effort if you really understand the market.
Working hard, in this construct, is essentially just "keep trying new things until you get to product/market fit". Sure, in that case, working harder means you get to try more things in any given period of hours/days/weeks/months.
But if you're in the wrong market, or you can't get to product/market fit, no amount of hard work will lead to success.
Every front page article on HN gets a lot of hate, regardless of topic or viewpoint expressed. I hope nothing I write ever gets to the front page here.
Just think about it for a second.
Someone who has had pretty big success wrote something that contradicts the many-times-chanted mantras of large groups of people yearning for success, who haven't found it yet.
She just shot down their personal god.
And what do beliefs do when they come under attack? Counter-attack!
If Caterina's essay were all about how hard work is the god she worships, everyone would have loved this article. The dissenters would be few, and gentle. Because the realists, who are anti-hard-work-pr0n, on HN are the philosophical type. They have had more experiences to weather their blind devotion to any mantra and are more likely to say waffly things like "Well, good for him, but that's not true for everyone. Remember..."
Using index cards and typewriters to compose documents is certainly harder work than using a word processor application on a PC. Nobody would ever say there was greater merit in the old way (well, nobody worth paying attention to). It's the distinction between "working hard" and "working smart."
So "hard work" in the classical sense seems to mean "sit down, head down, move the pencil, move the pencil, move the pencil." That's toiling. That's not thinking of more efficient ways to "move the pencil". Working hard is a productivity enhancer, but only in a linear fashion. Technology is a productivity multiplier.
I refer you to the Robert Heinlein short-story "The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail," which is provided in his magnum opus "Time Enough for Love". We should be "working hard" on finding ways to be lazy. It's through the pursuit of technologies that allow us to be as productive as we are on less effort that make the big advances in productivity, not "working hard".
I hadn't heard of that but I like the title. It reminds me of some personal experiences I've had where I listen to how other people handle certain problems and then think to myself something like "I don't have the time or energy to do things so inefficiently/ineffectively."
The only reason the Caterina people knew what to work on this time is because of the hundreds of hours of experience they got building flickr.
The importance of hard work to success is extremely well documented: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/08/02/...
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/05/13/success-motivation/
http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/21/magazines/fortune/talent_col...
http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwel...
I've spend a tremendous amount of time learning those fields that I enjoy and am successful at. But a lot of that time has felt more like 'play' or 'exploration' or curiosity than 'hard work'.
Hard evokes doggedly trying a thousand elements with only the hope that they might create light.
I am sure that Tesla spent at least as much time and energy as Edison in pursuing his field. It also seems he brought more play and imagination to it. And Tesla's inventions were the big ones that made electricity practical - the electric motor, the generator, alternating current, etc.
I think that argument isn't so spending time and energy but rather against thinking that merely putting forth time energy is enough....
[1] http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...
The danger of saying, "I don't need to work too hard," and scaling back on things that seem like dead ends is that they impact immersion. Dead ends are often useful in intangible ways.
Trevor Blackwell calls this tinkering (http://tlb.org/busywork.html)
Secondly, every single successful entrepreneur succeeded by working hard. It's easy to say "work on the right things" but my feeling is the "right thing" only emerges because you are working hard.
But nobody wants to admit that, not to themselves and surely not to other people. Because "hard work" is the ethic that makes you virtuous in America and among "startup wonks."
So, even when the truth is "I got rich by accident" or "luck," it always comes out the mouth of the entrepreneur as "hard work."
The desire is to look virtuous and deserving. Humans are justification machines -- if we have something, we have to justify why we have it. If we don't, we have to justify why we don't. If you want insights into this topic, read Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), Predictably Irrational and On Being Certain.
Even more than that, there are people who got rich by having the right insight at the right time, and acted on it. That often doesn't take hard work.
Those people, too, want to view themselves as triumphant as opposed to lucky. They want to pretend that they have something to impart, so that others can "learn" from their success.
Beyond that, most people are horribly incapable of analyzing their own actions, and of analyzing real-world cause and effect, and "hard work" is a verbal tick -- like the "um" of the business memoir world.
There is a cult here -- and everywhere young coding hotshots think they will get rich -- of "entrepeneurpr0n."
And while Caterina and 37Signals might be contributing to the pr0n collection, they are contributing to a totally different stack than the "Work hard and you'll get rich" stack.
And that, in my opinion, is worthwhile.
There are two types of people in the world: people who think that success is due to learning and work and people who think that success is due to luck.
The side-effects of these belief systems are very important.
If you think success is due to hard work and knowledge, you are likely to work hard and keep learning. If, on the other hand, you think it's luck, you are likely to resent those who are luckier than you and to feel like success is a rigged game.
I think you can err too much on either side here. What's the truth? The truth is that you can learn and work and increase your chances from 1 in a million to maybe 1 in a hundred. Perhaps better. Given these odds, some folks try a few times and make it. Some try once and make it. Some try dozens of times and don't make it. Usually looking back, as you point out, the story is about skill and hard work, even though luck probably had a lot (but not all) to do with it.
You can look at this as a reason not to work or try hard, or you can look at this maturely as simply the way life is played. Personally I think the best strategy is to balance learning/working with increasing the frequency of your startup attempts. If you could fail a dozen times in one year, within ten years you're likely to do well. [insert black swan reference here]
Or perhaps a third type who simply think that success is due to "being right," no matter how you get there.
If you want to boil down the whole world to "hard work makes Johnny rich," by all means, go ahead.
But, as I said, many many people have gotten rich without hard work at all.
To deny reality is to deny yourself those "learning experiences" you are talking about.
I never said that hard work can't pay off. I never said that you can't create your own luck. I never said that if you are not lucky so far, give up and resign yourself. You seem to be assuming that because I said "lots of rich people actually didn't work hard," that I am somehow saying those other things -- but I am not.
I'm just a true lover of reality and reason.
Hard work doesn't necessarily pay off, and Caterina's essay made many very good points.
So learning any new skill, or negotiating new situations can feel like hard work. Imagine how you conscious you had to be of what you were doing when you first learned to drive a car. Making your first startup a success will definitely feel like hard work, as you would have to be learning so many things, and be in situations that you (or many) have not been in before.
Once you have succeeded (and looking in the rearview mirror), you will realize that a lot of the hard work was not really required because it is easy to see (or believe) after the fact what actually contributed to the final outcome that is considered as success.
I've seen all four combinations of frantic/measured and smart/stupid startups, and I think that measured + smart is the way to go. But I also think that this is one of those lessons you have to learn from experience.
Just cutting out the stupid make-work doesn't take something from being ridiculously hard to being easy.
If a relationship requires hard work, then you have not the right partner to you, it's just natural, like hiking.
I think is way harder and unnatural to spend your time programming in front of a machine that hiking and loving someone, but maybe that's me.
That's like saying, "Much more important than breathing is having a beating heart."
Theroem: Working hard and working on the right thing are both necessary but not sufficient conditions.
Corollary: Working hard on the right thing is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
According to modern resuscitation guidelines this is actually true and meaningful statement.
“I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have”
but I do completely agree that its easy to go back into a safe little world of "oohh im busy coding new feature X", when in reality it isnt needed, its just delaying you from doing the important(and hard) things.
If you have a lot of your working hours available, there is a greater chance that you'll waste them on useless crap like freaking out and stubbornly making useless misguided things.
It's better to be a bit lazy and treat your work as scarce resource and think about ways to allocate it better.
"If you work hard, you can do it."
Of course, with the Japanese recession and "lost decade" there is less noise about Japanese work habits and so forth. But I have kept thinking about this, because it is important, and a couple of years ago had a slightly different take on it; You can do it if you will do it, and if it isn't worth working hard at, then maybe it's not worth doing in the first place. At the very least, even if you decide later that your goal is mistaken, if you worked hard at it, you will have taken less time to discover that and move on to something else.
ADDED: Working hard also helps you to keep up your enthusiasm and momentum on a project. You can rest and relax and catch up on all your other stuff between projects.
Not a bit if you are doing the wrong things, as you may learn from many startup failures.
Working on which right things is not very elucidated in the essay, but part of that is asking yourself, "What is the write thing for ME to be working on?"
This is a very good essay.
For example, forcing myself to continue working at my computer when I don't feel like it will lead to eye strain, back pain and anxiety. I will often wake up with a headache after such marathons. I refer to this as burnout. Burnout is very real.
In my early years of programming I could work non-stop because I was doing something new almost every day. And for someone that likes new experiences, it was exciting. But after years of experience, programming in-and-of itself feels more and more like labour.
Don't get me wrong. I still love programming, in general. I've just become more focused on the end-results of programming--of what it makes possible, what it does for people. The act of programming itself, while being something that will always be a significant part of what defines "what I do", is no longer something that can sustain my interest full time.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090901/the-way-i-work-marc-lor...
In french school, it is typical to learn "le lievre et la tortue" a fable from la fontaine (sorry i failed to find a english link on it) .
- This advice will be much more believable if Hunch even scratches the surface of Flickr's success.
[The last time I put something like this on HN - something anecdotal and mildly negative - it was about Billy Mays, and he died a few days later. If Watson dies this week, it's not my fault...he's old.]
You need to work hard to understand the little things and incrementally advance towards the solution, or the right thing. You might discover something on a day in which you did little work, but surely you have been working for many years perhaps to arrive to that day.
Working hard is if anything underrated as society puts more emphasis on talent and innate ability. It is hardly over rated and as our society becomes complex by the day, it will perhaps never be overrated.
Edit: Please note that I have quoted Edison many times when encouraging people to not give up in the face of failure. So I am not against the idea that one needs to keep working at some things. But the idea of "keeping at it" can be a trap that prevents you from reassessing your approach and finding something better.
This is the quickest way to lose any debate...
and besides: it's often the most obvious that escapes us. Smart people fall into these kinds of traps all the time. I found the post to be enlightening in that regard.
Personally I would not mind reading some of pg's articles as although some may contain obvious information, they usually have been thought through and synthesised to create new knowledge. This article however is simply stating the obvious as much as an article suggesting that you should eat everyday would be suggesting the obvious. I do not think it has escaped by anyone the fact that they need to work on the right thing, nor as the above comment suggests, that sometimes they may be 'traped' by focusing too much on a certain thing. If the article was about research findings on how to organise your time, how to manage tendencies towards perfection, how to recognise when you are spending time on something you should not, then perhaps the reader would have learned something. The article however is superficial and typical of a wider trend on the internet where opinions are the norm and currency rather than imparting knowledge on the readership.
Perhaps to suggest that what the article contains and the one who wrote it is dumb - within the confines of this specific article - might be perceived as derogatory and uncivilised, yet I do not think that one should refrain from speaking their mind. I found the article dumb, I could have said pointless, yet I thought dumb describes it better because it is so obvious, the title is misleading and hardly supported in the article and the article itself has not been thought through at all, let alone the title. If the writer wants me to hail her as a beacon of truth then she should try much harder rather than think that she is having a chat with her friend while drinking a coffee about what she thinks of hard work.