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[Translation] How to Work Hard

13-minute read
CareerProductivity
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Paul Graham
Original: http://paulgraham.com/hwh.html It seems there’s not much to learn about how to work hard. Anyone who’s been to school knows what it means, even if they choose not to do it. There are 12-year-olds who work very hard. And yet when I ask if I know more about working hard now than I did in school, the answer is definitely yes. One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you’ll have to work very hard. I was not sure of this as a kid. The difficulty of the homework varied; one did not always have to work very hard to do well. And some of the things famous adults did, they seemed to do almost effortlessly. Was there, perhaps, some way to evade hard work through sheer brilliance? Now I know the answer to that question. No. The reason some subjects seemed easy was that the standards of my school were low. The reason famous adults seemed to do things effortlessly was years of practice; they made it look easy. Of course, those famous adults usually had a lot of natural ability too. There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, but to do the best work, you need all three: you need to be a good horse, and to practice, and to run as hard as you can. For example, Bill Gates was one of the smartest people in business of his time, but he was also one of the hardest-working. He said: “I never took a day off in my twenties.” “Not one.” It’s similar with Lionel Messi. He has a great deal of natural ability, but when his youth coaches talk about him, it’s not his talent they remember, but his dedication and his desire to win. P.G. Wodehouse would probably get my vote for the best English writer of the 20th century, if I had to choose. Certainly no one made it look easier. But no one worked harder. At 74, he wrote As I say, I have a feeling with every new book that this time I’ve picked a lemon in the garden of literature. I think that’s a good thing, really. It keeps a man on his toes, rewriting every sentence ten times. Or in many cases twenty. You might think that sounds a bit extreme. And yet Bill Gates sounds even more extreme. Not a single day off in a decade? These two had as much natural ability as anyone, but they also worked as hard as anyone. You need both. This seems obvious, but in practice we find it a little hard to grasp. There’s a faint whiff of a zero-sum game between talent and effort. It comes partly from popular culture, where it seems to run very deep, and partly from the fact that outliers are so rare. If great talent and great drive are both rare, then people with both are rare squared. Most people you meet who have a lot of one will have less of the other. But if you want to be an outlier yourself, you need both. And since you can’t really change how much talent you have, in practice the simple formula for doing great work, insofar as it can be reduced to a single statement, is to work very hard. If you have clearly defined, externally imposed goals, as you do in school, working hard is straightforward. There are techniques: you have to learn not to lie to yourself, not to procrastinate (which is a form of lying to yourself), not to get distracted, and not to give up when things go wrong. But this level of discipline seems to be attainable by fairly small children, if they want to. What I’ve learned since school is how to work hard on projects that are neither clearly defined nor externally imposed. If you want to do really great things, you’ll probably have to do that. The most basic level of this is simply to feel that you should be working without anyone telling you to. Now, when I’m not working hard, alarms go off. I can’t be sure I’m getting anywhere when I’m working hard, but I can be sure I’m getting nowhere when I’m not, and it feels awful. There was no sharp transition point where I learned this. Like most small children, I enjoyed the feeling of accomplishment when I learned or made something new. As I got older, this feeling turned into a sort of disgust when I wasn’t accomplishing anything. One precise, datable milestone I have is that I stopped watching TV when I was 13. Several people I’ve talked to remember getting serious about work at this age. When I asked Patrick Collison when he started to feel that laziness was repellent, he said Around 13 or 14, I think. I remember sitting in the living room, staring outside, and wondering why I was wasting my summer vacation. Perhaps something changes at puberty that makes this happen. Oddly enough, the biggest obstacle to getting serious about work may be school, which makes work (what they call work) seem boring and pointless. Before I could wholeheartedly desire to do it, I had to learn what real work was. That took a while, because even in college a lot of the work is pointless; whole departments are pointless. But when I learned the shape of real work, I found that my desire to do it was like a home for a desire that had been there all along. I suspect most people have to learn what work is before they can love it. Hardy wrote eloquently in A Mathematician’s Apology: I do not remember having felt, as a boy, any passion for mathematics, and the idea that I had any special talent for it never entered my head. I was a scholar, and I thought of mathematics as a subject in which I could beat other boys, and this seemed to be the most effective way of doing it. It wasn’t till he was in college and read Jordan’s Cours d’analyse that he really understood what mathematics was. I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that remarkable work, the first inspiration for so many mathematicians of my generation, and learnt for the first time as I read it what mathematics really meant. To learn what real work is, you need to learn to distinguish two different kinds of fakeness. One is the kind Hardy encountered in school. When subjects are taught to children, they’re distorted — often so distorted that they’re nothing like what actual practitioners do. The other kind of fakeness is inherent in certain types of work. Some types of work are intrinsically fake, or at best mere busy-work. Real work has a kind of solidity to it. It’s not all writing proofs, but it all feels necessary. This is a vague criterion, but it’s deliberately vague, because it has to cover a lot of different kinds of work. Once you know the shape of real work, you have to learn how many hours a day to spend on it. You can’t solve this problem by simply working every waking hour, because in many kinds of work there’s a point where the quality of the result will start to decline. That limit varies depending on the type of work and the person. I’ve done several different kinds of work, and the limit was different for each. My limit for the harder kinds of writing or programming is about five hours a day. Whereas when I was running a startup, I could work all the time. At least for the three years I did it; if I’d kept going longer, I’d probably have needed to take occasional vacations. The only way to find the limit is by crossing it. Cultivate a sensitivity to the quality of the work you’re doing, and then you’ll notice if it decreases because you’re working too hard. Honesty is critical here, on both sides: you have to notice when you’re being lazy, but also when you’re working too hard. If you think there’s something admirable about working too hard, get that idea out of your head. You’re not just getting worse results, but getting them because you’re showing off — if not to others, then to yourself. Finding the limit of working hard is a constant, ongoing process, not something you do once. The difficulty of the work and your ability to do it vary from hour to hour, so you need to be constantly judging how hard you’re pushing yourself and how well you’re doing. Working hard doesn’t mean constantly pushing yourself to work. There may be some people who do that, but I think my experience is fairly typical, and I only have to push myself occasionally, when I’m starting a project or when I’m faced with some sort of check. That’s when I’m in danger of procrastinating. But once I get going, I tend to keep going. What keeps me going depends on the type of work. When I was working on Viaweb, I was driven by fear of failure. I procrastinated very little then, because there was always something that needed to be done, and if I could get one step closer to success by doing it, why wait? What drives me to write essays now is the flaws in them. Between essays I fuss for a few days, like a dog circling before it decides where to lie down. But once I start one, I don’t have to force myself to work on it, because there’s always some error or omission that’s pushing me. I do make some effort to focus on important topics. Many problems have a hard core at their center, surrounded by easier stuff at the edges. Working hard means aiming for the center as much as you can. Sometimes you may not be able to; sometimes you can only do the easier, peripheral work. But you should always be aiming as close to the center as you can without stalling. The bigger, life-sized version of this problem is the question of what to work on. There are a few important problems at the center, which tend to be hard, and a lot of less important ones at the edges, which are easier. So in addition to the daily, small-scale adjustments involved in working on a specific problem, you’ll occasionally need to make big, life-sized adjustments about what type of work to do. The rule is the same: working hard means aiming for the center — for the most ambitious problems. By center, though, I mean the actual center, not just the current consensus about the center. The consensus about which problems are most important is often wrong, both in general and within specific fields. If you disagree, and you’re right, that could represent a valuable opportunity to do something new. More ambitious work is usually harder, but while you shouldn’t deny this, you also shouldn’t treat difficulty as a reliable guide to what to do. If you find some ambitious kind of work that’s a bargain, in the sense that it’s easier for you than for other people, either because of some ability you happen to have, or because you’ve found some new way to approach it, or simply because you’re more excited about it, by all means work on that. Some of the best work is done by people who find a simple way to do something hard. In addition to learning the shape of actual work, you need to figure out what kind of work you’re suited for. This doesn’t just mean figuring out which one your natural abilities match best; it doesn’t mean that if you’re 7 feet tall you have to play basketball. What you’re suited for depends not just on your talents, but perhaps even more on your interests. A deep interest in a topic makes people work harder than any amount of discipline can. Discovering your interests is harder than discovering your talents. There are fewer types of talent than interest, and they start to be judged early in childhood, whereas an interest in a topic is a subtle thing that may not mature till you’re in your twenties, or even later. The topic may not even exist earlier. Plus there are powerful sources of error you need to learn to discount. Are you really interested in x, or do you want to work on it because you’ll make a lot of money, or because other people will be impressed with you, or because your parents want you to? The difficulty of figuring out what to work on varies from person to person. This is one of the most important things I’ve learned about work since I was a kid. As a child you get the impression that everyone has a calling, and all they have to do is figure out what it is. That’s the way it works in movies and in the streamlined biographies that are fed to children. And sometimes it works that way in real life. Some people know what to do as children, and do it, like Mozart. But others, like Newton, shift restlessly from one kind of work to another. Perhaps in retrospect we can identify one as their calling — we can wish Newton had spent more time on math and physics and less on alchemy and theology — but this is an illusion caused by the bias of hindsight. There was no voice calling to him that he could have heard. So while some people’s lives converge fast, there are others whose lives never converge. For these people, figuring out what to do is not so much a prelude to working hard as a constant, component of it, like one of a set of simultaneous equations. For these people, the process I described earlier has a third component: in addition to judging how hard you’re working and how well you’re doing, you have to consider whether you should continue in this field or switch to another. If you’re working hard but not getting good enough results, you should switch. It sounds simple, but it’s hard in practice. You shouldn’t give up on the first day just because you’re working hard and getting nowhere. You need to give yourself time to get going. But how much time? And what if a kind of work that was going well stops going well? How much time do you give yourself then? What counts as good results? That’s really hard to decide. If you’re exploring a domain that few others have worked in, you may not even know what good results are. History is full of examples of people who misjudged the importance of the work they were doing. The best test of whether it’s worth working on something is whether you find it interesting. That may sound like a dangerously subjective measure, but it’s probably the most accurate one you’re going to get. It’s you who are doing this stuff. Who is a better judge than you of whether it’s important, and what better predictor of its importance than whether it’s interesting? For this test to work, however, you have to be honest with yourself. And in fact that’s the most striking thing about the whole question of working hard: how at every point, it depends on being honest with yourself. Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It’s a complicated, dynamic system that has to be tuned at every point. You have to understand the shape of real work, see clearly what kind you’re best suited for, aim as close to its real core as you can, accurately judge your performance at every moment, and put in as many hours a day as you can without degrading the quality of the result. This network is too complex to trick. But if you’re consistently honest and clear-sighted, it will automatically assume an optimal shape, and you’ll be productive in a way few people are.

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