June 2021It might not seem there's much to learn about how to work hard.Anyone who's been to school knows what it entails, even if theychose not to do it. There are 12 year olds who work amazingly hard. Andyet when I ask if I know more about working hard now than when Iwas in school, the answer is definitely yes.One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you'llhave to work very hard. I wasn't sure of that as a kid. Schoolworkvaried in difficulty; one didn't always have to work super hard todo well. And some of the things famous adults did, they seemed todo almost effortlessly. Was there, perhaps, some way to evade hardwork through sheer brilliance? Now I know the answer to that question.There isn't.The reason some subjects seemed easy was that my school had lowstandards. And the reason famous adults seemed to do thingseffortlessly was years of practice; they made it look easy.Of course, those famous adults usually had a lot of natural abilitytoo. There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability,practice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, but todo the best work you need all three: you need great natural abilityand to have practiced a lot and to be trying very hard. [1]Bill Gates, for example, was among the smartest people in businessin his era, but he was also among the hardest working. "I nevertook a day off in my twenties," he said. "Not one." It was similarwith Lionel Messi. He had great natural ability, but when his youthcoaches talk about him, what they remember is not his talent buthis dedication and his desire to win. P. G. Wodehouse would probablyget my vote for best English writer of the 20th century, if I hadto choose. Certainly no one ever made it look easier. But no oneever worked harder. At 74, he wrote with each new book of mine I have, as I say, the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature. A good thing, really, I suppose. Keeps one up on one's toes and makes one rewrite every sentence ten times. Or in many cases twenty times.Sounds a bit extreme, you think. And yet Bill Gates sounds evenmore extreme. Not one day off in ten years? These two had aboutas much natural ability as anyone could have, and yet they alsoworked about as hard as anyone could work. You need both.That seems so obvious, and yet in practice we find it slightly hardto grasp. There's a faint xor between talent and hard work. It comespartly from popular culture, where it seems to run very deep, andpartly from the fact that the outliers are so rare. If great talentand great drive are both rare, then people with both are raresquared. Most people you meet who have a lot of one will have lessof the other. But you'll need both if you want to be an outlieryourself. And since you can't really change how much natural talentyou have, in practice doing great work, insofar as you can, reducesto working very hard.It's straightforward to work hard if you have clearly defined,externally imposed goals, as you do in school. There is some techniqueto it: you have to learn not to lie to yourself, not to procrastinate(which is a form of lying to yourself), not to get distracted, andnot to give up when things go wrong. But this level of disciplineseems to be within the reach of quite young children, if they wantit.What I've learned since I was a kid is how to work toward goalsthat are neither clearly defined nor externally imposed. You'llprobably have to learn both if you want to do really great things.The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be workingwithout anyone telling you to. Now, when I'm not working hard, alarmbells go off. I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm workinghard, but I can be sure I'm getting nowhere when I'm not, and itfeels awful.[2]There wasn't a single point when I learned this. Like most littlekids, I enjoyed the feeling of achievement when I learned or didsomething new. As I grew older, this morphed into a feeling ofdisgust when I wasn't achieving anything. The one precisely dateablelandmark I have is when I stopped watching TV, at age 13.Several people I've talked to remember getting serious about workaround this age. When I asked Patrick Collison when he started tofind idleness distasteful, he said I think around age 13 or 14. I have a clear memory from around then of sitting in the sitting room, staring outside, and wondering why I was wasting my summer holiday.Perhaps something changes at adolescence. That would make sense.Strangely enough, the biggest obstacle to getting serious aboutwork was probably school, which made work (what they called work)seem boring and pointless. I had to learn what real work was beforeI could wholeheartedly desire to do it. That took a while, becauseeven in college a lot of the work is pointless; there are entiredepartments that are pointless. But as I learned the shape of realwork, I found that my desire to do it slotted into it as if they'dbeen made for each other.I suspect most people have to learn what work is before they canlove it. Hardy wrote eloquently about this in A Mathematician'sApology: I do not remember having felt, as a boy, any passion for mathematics, and such notions as I may have had of the career of a mathematician were far from noble. I thought of mathematics in terms of examinations and scholarships: I wanted to beat other boys, and this seemed to be the way in which I could do so most decisively.He didn't learn what math was really about till part way throughcollege, when he read Jordan's Cours d'analyse. 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.There are two separate kinds of fakeness you need to learn todiscount in order to understand what real work is. One is the kindHardy encountered in school. Subjects get distorted when they'readapted to be taught to kids — often so distorted that they'renothing like the work done by actual practitioners.[3]The otherkind of fakeness is intrinsic to certain types of work. Some typesof work are inherently bogus, or at best mere busywork.There's a kind of solidity to real work. It's not all writing thePrincipia, but it all feels necessary. That's a vague criterion,but it's deliberately vague, because it has to cover a lot ofdifferent types.[4]Once you know the shape of real work, you have to learn how manyhours a day to spend on it. You can't solve this problem by simplyworking every waking hour, because in many kinds of work there's apoint beyond which 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 limits weredifferent for each. My limit for the harder types of writing orprogramming is about five hours a day. Whereas when I was runninga startup, I couldwork all the time. At least for the three years I did it; if I'dkept going much longer, I'd probably have needed to take occasionalvacations.[5]The only way to find the limit is by crossing it. Cultivate asensitivity to the quality of the work you're doing, and then you'llnotice if it decreases because you're working too hard. Honesty iscritical here, in both directions: you have to notice when you'rebeing lazy, but also when you're working too hard. And if you thinkthere's something admirable about working too hard, get that ideaout of your head. You're not merely getting worse results, butgetting them because you're showing off — if not to other people,then to yourself.[6]Finding the limit of working hard is a constant, ongoing process,not something you do just once. Both the difficulty of the work andyour ability to do it can vary hour to hour, so you need to beconstantly judging both how hard you're trying and how well you'redoing.Trying hard doesn't mean constantly pushing yourself to work, though.There may be some people who do, but I think my experience is fairlytypical, and I only have to push myself occasionally when I'mstarting a project or when I encounter some sort of check. That'swhen I'm in danger of procrastinating. But once I get rolling, Itend to keep going.What keeps me going depends on the type of work. When I was workingon Viaweb, I was driven by fear of failure. I barely procrastinatedat all then, because there was always something that needed doing,and if I could put more distance between me and the pursuing beastby doing it, why wait? [7]Whereas what drives me now, writingessays, is the flaws in them. Between essays I fuss for a few days,like a dog circling while it decides exactly where to lie down. Butonce I get started on one, I don't have to push myself to work,because there's always some error or omission already pushing me.I do make some amount of effort to focus on important topics. Manyproblems have a hard core at the center, surrounded by easier stuffat the edges. Working hard means aiming toward the center to theextent you can. Some days you may not be able to; some days you'llonly be able to work on the easier, peripheral stuff. But you shouldalways be aiming as close to the center as you can without stalling.The bigger question of what to do with your life is one of theseproblems with a hard core. There are important problems at thecenter, which tend to be hard, and less important, easier ones atthe edges. So as well as the small, daily adjustments involved inworking on a specific problem, you'll occasionally have to makebig, lifetime-scale adjustments about which type of work to do.And the rule is the same: working hard means aiming toward thecenter — toward the most ambitious problems.By center, though, I mean the actual center, not merely the currentconsensus about the center. The consensus about which problems aremost important is often mistaken, both in general and within specificfields. If you disagree with it, and you're right, that couldrepresent a valuable opportunity to do something new.The more ambitious types of work will usually be harder, but althoughyou should not be in denial about this, neither should you treatdifficulty as an infallible guide in deciding what to do. If youdiscover some ambitious type of work that's a bargain in the senseof being easier for you than other people, either because of theabilities you happen to have, or because of some new way you'vefound to approach it, or simply because you're more excited aboutit, by all means work on that. Some of the best work is done bypeople who find an easy way to do something hard.As well as learning the shape of real work, you need to figure outwhich kind you're suited for. And that doesn't just mean figuringout which kind your natural abilities match the best; it doesn'tmean that if you're 7 feet tall, you have to play basketball. Whatyou're suited for depends not just on your talents but perhaps evenmore on your interests. A deep interest in a topic makes peoplework harder than any amount of discipline can.It can be harder to discover your interests than your talents.There are fewer types of talent than interest, and they start tobe judged early in childhood, whereas interest in a topic is asubtle thing that may not mature till your twenties, or even later.The topic may not even exist earlier. Plus there are some powerfulsources of error you need to learn to discount. Are you reallyinterested in x, or do you want to work on it because you'll makea lot of money, or because other people will be impressed with you,or because your parents want you to?[8]The difficulty of figuring out what to work on varies enormouslyfrom one person to another. That's one of the most important thingsI've learned about work since I was a kid. As a kid, you get theimpression that everyone has a calling, and all they have to do isfigure out what it is. That's how it works in movies, and in thestreamlined biographies fed to kids. Sometimes it works that wayin real life. Some people figure out what to do as children andjust do it, like Mozart. But others, like Newton, turn restlesslyfrom one kind of work to another. Maybe in retrospect we can identifyone as their calling — we can wish Newton spent more time on mathand physics and less on alchemy and theology — but this is anillusion induced by hindsight bias. There was no voice calling to him that he could have heard.So while some people's lives converge fast, there will be otherswhose lives never converge. And for these people, figuring out whatto work on is not so much a prelude to working hard as an ongoingpart of it, like one of a set of simultaneous equations. For thesepeople, the process I described earlier has a third component: alongwith measuring both how hard you're working and how well you'redoing, you have to think about whether you should keep working inthis field or switch to another. If you're working hard but notgetting good enough results, you should switch. It sounds simpleexpressed that way, but in practice it's very difficult. You shouldn'tgive up on the first day just because you work hard and don't getanywhere. You need to give yourself time to get going. But how muchtime? And what should you do if work that was going well stops goingwell? How much time do you give yourself then?[9]What even counts as good results? That can be really hard to decide.If you're exploring an area few others have worked in, you may noteven know what good results look like. History is full of examplesof people who misjudged the importance of what they were workingon.The best test of whether it's worthwhile to work on something iswhether you find it interesting. That may sound like a dangerouslysubjective measure, but it's probably the most accurate one you'regoing to get. You're the one working on the stuff. Who's in a betterposition than you to judge whether it's important, and what's abetter predictor of its importance than whether it's interesting?For this test to work, though, you have to be honest with yourself.Indeed, that's the most striking thing about the whole question ofworking hard: how at each point it depends on being honest withyourself.Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It's a complicated,dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point. Youhave to understand the shape of real work, see clearly what kindyou're best suited for, aim as close to the true core of it as youcan, accurately judge at each moment both what you're capable ofand how you're doing, and put in as many hours each day as you canwithout harming the quality of the result. This network is toocomplicated to trick. But if you're consistently honest andclear-sighted, it will automatically assume an optimal shape, andyou'll be productive in a way few people are.Notes[1]In "The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius" I said the three ingredientsin great work were natural ability, determination, and interest.That's the formula in the preceding stage; determination and interestyield practice and effort.[2]I mean this at a resolution of days, not hours. You'll oftenget somewhere while not working in the sense that the solution toa problem comes to you while taking a shower, or even in your sleep,but only because you were working hard on it the day before.It's good to go on vacation occasionally, but when I go on vacation,I like to learn new things. I wouldn't like just sitting on a beach.[3]The thing kids do in school that's most like the real versionis sports. Admittedly because many sports originated as games playedin schools. But in this one area, at least, kids are doing exactlywhat adults do.In the average American high school, you have a choice of pretendingto do something serious, or seriously doing something pretend.Arguably the latter is no worse.[4]Knowing what you want to work on doesn't mean you'll be ableto. Most people have to spend a lot of their time working on thingsthey don't want to, especially early on. But if you know what youwant to do, you at least know what direction to nudge your life in.[5]The lower time limits for intense work suggest a solution tothe problem of having less time to work after you have kids: switchto harder problems. In effect I did that, though not deliberately.[6]Some cultures have a tradition of performative hard work. Idon't love this idea, because (a) it makes a parody of somethingimportant and (b) it causes people to wear themselves out doingthings that don't matter. I don't know enough to say for sure whetherit's net good or bad, but my guess is bad.[7]One of the reasons people work so hard on startups is thatstartups can fail, and when they do, that failure tends to be bothdecisive and conspicuous.[8]It's ok to work on something to make a lot of money. You needto solve the money problem somehow, and there's nothing wrong withdoing that efficiently by trying to make a lot at once. I supposeit would even be ok to be interested in money for its own sake;whatever floats your boat. Just so long as you're conscious of yourmotivations. The thing to avoid is unconsciously letting the needfor money warp your ideas about what kind of work you find mostinteresting.[9]Many people face this question on a smaller scale withindividual projects. But it's easier both to recognize and to accepta dead end in a single project than to abandon some type of workentirely. The more determined you are, the harder it gets. Like aSpanish Flu victim, you're fighting your own immune system: Insteadof giving up, you tell yourself, I should just try harder. And whocan say you're not right?Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, John Carmack, John Collison, Patrick Collison,Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.
