But to be creative you need to do lots of hard work. For example being able to do a creative task like playing or creating a new song on an instrument requires practicing many hours on with different chords and positions to get good at the instrument.
Challenging, again, not hard. You have not tasted hard work until you have peeled 100 kg of potatoes. Or carried equivalent heavy load.
Repetition is necessary to a point, but that does not make the work hard by any means, especially if you enjoy it. Practice is not the same as hard work either.
Isn't that just splicing the definition of "hard" in "hard work"? Is peeling 100 kg of potatoes actually "harder" than actively practicing an instrument for an equivalent period of time? I'd argue that practice is harder, because (done right) it's extremely mentally taxing, as well as physically demanding, depending on the instrument.
I agree with your main point that the same task will be considered hard by someone who hates it, and easy by someone who loves it.
Yeah...I'm inclined to say the hardest working people are the ones that are juggling two minimum wage jobs, driving for Uber on the side, and a family to take care of. The idea that working "harder" correlates positively with income or wealth is a myth that needs to go away.
Growing up poor, and watching my dad work as a grade school janitor, I'm quick to tell people my dad worked for a living, but I don't - I just play with computers all day.
I also grew up poor, with my dad in construction and my mom a waitress. I push buttons and solve all sorts of interesting puzzles for a living.
Rather than racing the 100+ temperatures on a roof, I mosey to work before whatever scheduled meetings. Rather than permanently damaging my wrists from carrying trays overhead, I sometimes get a bit uncomfortable so adjust the height of my ergonomic desk and chair, maybe take a walk for a bit.
I value how easy I have it and put in extra effort to make sure it all persists.
While I agree, people who work hard do see the fruits of their labor, albeit not much. I went to visit my home country after 20 years and my family there has not advanced economically in 2 decades. They are some of the hardest workers I know and barely scrape by. I realized then that getting out what you put in is something not all countries have.
It feels like we can have a balanced approach - show appreciation if someone really went out of their way to do something, but acknowledge that it's not sustainable for everyone to put in 150%.
You can't just completely take out the human element here.
Nerds have been trying to seem edgy railing the "work smart not hard" mantra for decades. It's a nice way to seem clever and enlightened, but it doesn't really make any sense.
> Why am I celebrating mere effort? Celebrate creativity, insights, breakthroughs, rebellions, anything but mere effort
Uh, why not do both? You know who really succeeds? the person who has creative breakthroughs AND works harder than everyone else.
I guess that depends on the type of business you in. You can be successful being a professional and putting in your 40 hours a week. It's very hard to have a startup working 40 hours a week, in fact, I'd love to know who's done that, ever.
Successful startups are successful because the founders obsess about them, they think about them when they are going to bed and when they wake up; it consumes their lives. That leads to more than 40 hours a week.
There's something to be said for the quality of work too. For Jeff Bezos, like Steve Jobs, the value wasn't in long hours, but in quality decisions. That said, I'm sure they both worked very hard to build Amazon and Apple early on.
What makes people successful is _focus_ not hard work. When you focus on something fully, eliminating distractions as far as possible, you have the highest chance of that thing becoming a success, depending on your capabilities, because you've given it the depth of attention required to make it work.
People that work hard tend to spend longer hours on a problem so focus often comes as a side effect, which in turn leads to people correlating hard work with success.
But there are a ton of people "working hard" in the digital age and getting nowhere. If you see what they're up to, a big chunk of their time multi-tasking between random push messages and similar. What's missing is focus.
> But there are a ton of people "working hard" in the digital age and getting nowhere. If you see what they're up to, a big chunk of their time multi-tasking between random push messages and similar. What's missing is focus.
It's not just push messages, but a lack of clear organization. The bigger a company gets, the less organizes it seems to become, and while this is a natural law of growth, the amount of disorganization that seems to be the norm is inexcusable.
It amazes me how people will have no idea who knows what, who is in charge of X, or where feature requests are coming from. All these tools we use to manage "tickets", notes, roadmaps, and documentation don't seem to be helping that much. They're mostly a veneer to cover people's general carelessness. For years, I've been wasting time bouncing between parties trying to figure out who wants what and why, often running into the roadblock of two parties of interest looking at the same "ticket" and coming to a completely different conclusion about what it means and its scope. Planning is almost always an exercise in bullshit, and is a glorification of receiving a cargo container of new "tickets". I won't get into feedback processes that really just lead to an indefinite cycle of backseat-coding.
For people who aren't lazy, lots of time gets wasted because of the effort-debt created by carelessness and poor communication practices. All it takes is 10% of team members to be careless and a system of unclear webs of power to cause bottlenecks for the people who get most of the work done. The mental overhead caused by confusing systems almost completely destroys the ability for someone to get in the zone and actually focus. Focus isn't even respected a lot of the time. In meetings about improving developer experience(which never change anything), I've brought up the focus factor multiple times, only to be met by blank stares.
At that point, you've just got to accept that your work is going to be needlessly complicated and stressful, and that there's only so much you can do about it. Muting as many push notifications is one thing that can be done, and so is never working harder or longer than you are being paid to. Sadly, this borders on disengagement.
Almost every company that I've worked for didn't actually value hard work or excellence. I think the only one I worked for that did was a model shop that built music boxes, since you can't build pieces of shit that don't work and expect your customer to come back to you.
Organizations don't tend to care about excellence because, when they have reached an appreciable size, hard work and innovation become threats to the cash cow that they've built. Making things more efficient can make other people's jobs obsolete, and by working hard, you might actually get too much work done and also threaten other people's jobs. If nobody is overtly threatened by you, hard work still probably won't benefit you because the pipeline of work will never end; if you get all your work done early, there's always more work to be done. Does this mean you'll get paid more for doing more work? A lot of the time, no. Some people get lucky, but don't count on getting a reasonable bonus or any kind of recognition.
I don't think there's anything wrong with this, by the way. It can make sense not to rock the boat when the cash keeps flowing. But typical company rhetoric and outdated advice from older generations are still convincing some people that being a "better worker" will advance them.
Hard work isn't everything, as lots of successful people were in the right place at the right time. I'm not just talking about multi-billionaires like Mark Cuban(who got lucky IMO), but I've known many executives in relatively small companies who got to where they were because they were either around since the beginning or knew someone else who recommended them for a position. Being executive is a difficult job and requires making difficult choices, but they don't necessarily ever work harder than people in other careers. More than likely, it's the quality of choices they made throughout their life that got them where they are. I'm not trying to say that working hard doesn't have a role, or that people should be lazy, but it's a smaller piece of the pie than many people think.
I really feel sorry for the people in my life whom I know work extremely hard and work more hours. They're not getting paid more, usually. If they worked less and spent the excess time coming up with other ways to make money, they might be in better positions in the long run; perhaps better than depending completely on employers and hoping that their 401k is going to allow them to retire comfortably.
This is a beautiful description of why it is desirable and important (for certain personalities) to work at a growth company as opposed to a stable one.
I was once hired by a company as a Unix admin. I was asked to audit users who had x properties/privileges etc. I immediately started writing a script for auditing that. I was reprimanded, "Don't do that." That evening I was fired. For writing a script. :)
"This obsession with “hard work” is founded in a pessimistic view of natural state of humanity being lazy loafers. That unless we constantly reinforce the virtue of “hard work”, we’re all just going to slouch on the couch. Nonsense. The drive for creativity and creation is innate."
Of course, but results aren't entirely driven by creativity either -- sometimes you need to put in some work that isn't fulfilling in order to do things you are interested in.
Hard work is definitely overrated, but it does have its place. This just seems like an extreme position in a different direction.
I think "hard work" for me correlates with two important things: desire and humility. Desire leads to hard work because you just want to do something so badly; Humility leads to hard work because you understand that it is just so challenging to do anything of worth, esp. given that there are plenty of other people in the world.
I would be curious to know: what great things were accomplished without hard work? Note that this is different than the mere notion of "success"; there are certainly plenty of "rich" people who have not worked hard.
First off, I agree; this is the attitude of the ideal future, the one that we aim for when we make "progress" as a society.
But. As a programmer and as a founder of a digital (non-physical) company, DHH is in a bubble. He's living closer to that future than billions of his fellow humans.
The idea that "hard work" is correlated with success comes from the context where papers don't sort themselves, bricks don't build themselves, and water doesn't pump itself. In that context, working hard for someone else's benefit signals that you care about them, and working hard alongside someone else strengthens your relationship. All those associations with hard work are deeply ingrained in us.
It's only when people have access to systems which do function on their own that they can "work less". Those systems are still being built (and debugged!), and not everyone has access to them, or the time/tools/knowledge needed to build one themselves.
This post seems like it's an expression of DHH's frustration, but it's a message that needs to be targeted to a particular audience: leaders of large corporations. It's too easy for them to weigh the costs and benefits of scaling up a low-paid, hard-working work force (and being rewarded for "creating jobs"), vs. taking the risk of jumping to a new and expensive technology or system (which might not even work out!), and opt for the former. These business leaders aren't necessarily risk takers, but they should be, and we should reward them for that.
As a random postscript, I'd like to point out also that "hard work" isn't always time-correlated, but also effort- and energy-correlated. For instance, moving a heavy sleeper sofa up a narrow staircase with a low ceiling and a right-angle turn could take only 10 minutes but requires a lot of strength and energy.
I generally love my career and consider it more a hobby than a job, so I "work" very hard and I don't mind doing that. However in my life the most money I've made and what most people would consider to be successful, is when I worked the least. Which is appalling and baffles me since it hurts the values I was raised with and struggle to keep believing in.
I could convince myself that at those times I was reaping the benefits of my previous hard work but honestly I know that I had the luck to work in a team where people worked steadily in moderation or little, and had the opportunity to make some good decisions in a favorable environment.
We should stop listening to all these egotistical stories of success and humblebragging tainted by survivor bias. Most of the time they provide useless or wrong advice and make more harm than good. I think we should focus more on presenting fair points of view, learning and teaching others about healthy work habits and financial decisions, and in the process have a bit of more empathy to everyone successful or not.
The problem with this reasoning is that it assumes “financial success” is the one and only form of success. A common mentality, indeed so common that to even suggest that you are okay with being financially unsuccessful (if it means you can achieve some other form of success) is usually met with blank stares.
Picasso didn’t become a world-class painter without decades of practice. Stanley Kubrick didn’t become a world-class filmmaker without decades of practice. Ditto for basically every artist, filmmaker, philosopher, craftsman, architect in history.
Maybe quality isn’t important when you’re running a project management SAAS, but if your chosen skill requires time and effort to master it, you will have to put in a lot of hard work.
Look: I'm all for working sustainably and creatively. "Hard work = effort" as a sole proxy without targeted, deep practice is suboptimal.
But is DHH trying to get us to believe that he made Rails without working hard? He just fell into auto racing and a lavish lifestyle without hard work in the earlier days of 37Signals/Basecamp and instead relied on his "creativity, insights, breakthroughs, rebellions" without ANY head-bashing and getting stuck trying to make Rails 1.0 a great system for web development in Ruby?
This may be the greatest example of Survivorship Bias I've seen in recent history.
>Effort is not accomplishment. If you repeat the same lesson a hundred times over, you’ll be left behind on the path to insight by the person who advances through a hundred different lessons.
On the flip side, why should anyone celebrate "Creativity, insights, breakthroughs, rebellions"? And why are those assumed to be something that have some inherent value? Why should I care if the cereal box has a new fancy design, or if somebody changedthe colour of a button from khaki to lemonchifon? The arduous task of assigning "value" to what we do is itself fraught with centuries old philosophical dilemmas that nobody has been able to settle. You gain nothing by belittling 'effort'.
It is far easier to perform a popular song on your guitar or whatever, that it is to write/perform a violin sonata. The person who plays the violin had to do repetitive boring practice for years and years before they got even half good to play in an orchestra. Boring repetitive work has 'value' too.
Also, atleast in science, you don't get to insight without the boring work. We have technicians in our lab who run gels/assays/tests day-in day-out. Their work is not "creative" by peoples standards, but its actually very critical work that allows scientists to experiment with various processes and ideas and _derive_ insights from the drudge work. It is important to celebrate the technicians effort, even if they weren't the ones who created the insight.
The problem seems to be one of language. When encouraging people to work hard, what is often meant is not that they should toil for the sake of toiling. Rather, in examining excellence, what we observe is persistence.
We say "work hard" but what we mean is "persist" in attempting difficult things that are valuable. These aren't the same.
This blog rant is low quality, and attacks a straw man; that what people who encourage hard work are praising is the toil and not the persistence. Shame on him.
This! So much this! Can we please put away the Puritan bullshit ethics in the US that clearly keep getting exported? Those people were booted out a few centuries ago for a reason.
Those "hard workers" that are successful usually had serious connections, money, and luck to start with. Most actual hard workers end up poor and ignored.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 79.6 ms ] threadRepetition is necessary to a point, but that does not make the work hard by any means, especially if you enjoy it. Practice is not the same as hard work either.
I agree with your main point that the same task will be considered hard by someone who hates it, and easy by someone who loves it.
"If you just work hard you'll be successful" is one of those middle-class values. The upper-class equivalent is "collect rent on something."
Rather than racing the 100+ temperatures on a roof, I mosey to work before whatever scheduled meetings. Rather than permanently damaging my wrists from carrying trays overhead, I sometimes get a bit uncomfortable so adjust the height of my ergonomic desk and chair, maybe take a walk for a bit.
I value how easy I have it and put in extra effort to make sure it all persists.
You can't just completely take out the human element here.
> Why am I celebrating mere effort? Celebrate creativity, insights, breakthroughs, rebellions, anything but mere effort
Uh, why not do both? You know who really succeeds? the person who has creative breakthroughs AND works harder than everyone else.
Successful startups are successful because the founders obsess about them, they think about them when they are going to bed and when they wake up; it consumes their lives. That leads to more than 40 hours a week.
There's something to be said for the quality of work too. For Jeff Bezos, like Steve Jobs, the value wasn't in long hours, but in quality decisions. That said, I'm sure they both worked very hard to build Amazon and Apple early on.
People that work hard tend to spend longer hours on a problem so focus often comes as a side effect, which in turn leads to people correlating hard work with success.
But there are a ton of people "working hard" in the digital age and getting nowhere. If you see what they're up to, a big chunk of their time multi-tasking between random push messages and similar. What's missing is focus.
It's not just push messages, but a lack of clear organization. The bigger a company gets, the less organizes it seems to become, and while this is a natural law of growth, the amount of disorganization that seems to be the norm is inexcusable.
It amazes me how people will have no idea who knows what, who is in charge of X, or where feature requests are coming from. All these tools we use to manage "tickets", notes, roadmaps, and documentation don't seem to be helping that much. They're mostly a veneer to cover people's general carelessness. For years, I've been wasting time bouncing between parties trying to figure out who wants what and why, often running into the roadblock of two parties of interest looking at the same "ticket" and coming to a completely different conclusion about what it means and its scope. Planning is almost always an exercise in bullshit, and is a glorification of receiving a cargo container of new "tickets". I won't get into feedback processes that really just lead to an indefinite cycle of backseat-coding.
For people who aren't lazy, lots of time gets wasted because of the effort-debt created by carelessness and poor communication practices. All it takes is 10% of team members to be careless and a system of unclear webs of power to cause bottlenecks for the people who get most of the work done. The mental overhead caused by confusing systems almost completely destroys the ability for someone to get in the zone and actually focus. Focus isn't even respected a lot of the time. In meetings about improving developer experience(which never change anything), I've brought up the focus factor multiple times, only to be met by blank stares.
At that point, you've just got to accept that your work is going to be needlessly complicated and stressful, and that there's only so much you can do about it. Muting as many push notifications is one thing that can be done, and so is never working harder or longer than you are being paid to. Sadly, this borders on disengagement.
Organizations don't tend to care about excellence because, when they have reached an appreciable size, hard work and innovation become threats to the cash cow that they've built. Making things more efficient can make other people's jobs obsolete, and by working hard, you might actually get too much work done and also threaten other people's jobs. If nobody is overtly threatened by you, hard work still probably won't benefit you because the pipeline of work will never end; if you get all your work done early, there's always more work to be done. Does this mean you'll get paid more for doing more work? A lot of the time, no. Some people get lucky, but don't count on getting a reasonable bonus or any kind of recognition.
I don't think there's anything wrong with this, by the way. It can make sense not to rock the boat when the cash keeps flowing. But typical company rhetoric and outdated advice from older generations are still convincing some people that being a "better worker" will advance them.
Hard work isn't everything, as lots of successful people were in the right place at the right time. I'm not just talking about multi-billionaires like Mark Cuban(who got lucky IMO), but I've known many executives in relatively small companies who got to where they were because they were either around since the beginning or knew someone else who recommended them for a position. Being executive is a difficult job and requires making difficult choices, but they don't necessarily ever work harder than people in other careers. More than likely, it's the quality of choices they made throughout their life that got them where they are. I'm not trying to say that working hard doesn't have a role, or that people should be lazy, but it's a smaller piece of the pie than many people think.
I really feel sorry for the people in my life whom I know work extremely hard and work more hours. They're not getting paid more, usually. If they worked less and spent the excess time coming up with other ways to make money, they might be in better positions in the long run; perhaps better than depending completely on employers and hoping that their 401k is going to allow them to retire comfortably.
Of course, but results aren't entirely driven by creativity either -- sometimes you need to put in some work that isn't fulfilling in order to do things you are interested in.
Hard work is definitely overrated, but it does have its place. This just seems like an extreme position in a different direction.
I would be curious to know: what great things were accomplished without hard work? Note that this is different than the mere notion of "success"; there are certainly plenty of "rich" people who have not worked hard.
You can do numbingly simple and hard stuff that wouldn't challenge anyone, just is a big amount of work.
But. As a programmer and as a founder of a digital (non-physical) company, DHH is in a bubble. He's living closer to that future than billions of his fellow humans.
The idea that "hard work" is correlated with success comes from the context where papers don't sort themselves, bricks don't build themselves, and water doesn't pump itself. In that context, working hard for someone else's benefit signals that you care about them, and working hard alongside someone else strengthens your relationship. All those associations with hard work are deeply ingrained in us.
It's only when people have access to systems which do function on their own that they can "work less". Those systems are still being built (and debugged!), and not everyone has access to them, or the time/tools/knowledge needed to build one themselves.
This post seems like it's an expression of DHH's frustration, but it's a message that needs to be targeted to a particular audience: leaders of large corporations. It's too easy for them to weigh the costs and benefits of scaling up a low-paid, hard-working work force (and being rewarded for "creating jobs"), vs. taking the risk of jumping to a new and expensive technology or system (which might not even work out!), and opt for the former. These business leaders aren't necessarily risk takers, but they should be, and we should reward them for that.
As a random postscript, I'd like to point out also that "hard work" isn't always time-correlated, but also effort- and energy-correlated. For instance, moving a heavy sleeper sofa up a narrow staircase with a low ceiling and a right-angle turn could take only 10 minutes but requires a lot of strength and energy.
I generally love my career and consider it more a hobby than a job, so I "work" very hard and I don't mind doing that. However in my life the most money I've made and what most people would consider to be successful, is when I worked the least. Which is appalling and baffles me since it hurts the values I was raised with and struggle to keep believing in.
I could convince myself that at those times I was reaping the benefits of my previous hard work but honestly I know that I had the luck to work in a team where people worked steadily in moderation or little, and had the opportunity to make some good decisions in a favorable environment.
We should stop listening to all these egotistical stories of success and humblebragging tainted by survivor bias. Most of the time they provide useless or wrong advice and make more harm than good. I think we should focus more on presenting fair points of view, learning and teaching others about healthy work habits and financial decisions, and in the process have a bit of more empathy to everyone successful or not.
Picasso didn’t become a world-class painter without decades of practice. Stanley Kubrick didn’t become a world-class filmmaker without decades of practice. Ditto for basically every artist, filmmaker, philosopher, craftsman, architect in history.
Maybe quality isn’t important when you’re running a project management SAAS, but if your chosen skill requires time and effort to master it, you will have to put in a lot of hard work.
But is DHH trying to get us to believe that he made Rails without working hard? He just fell into auto racing and a lavish lifestyle without hard work in the earlier days of 37Signals/Basecamp and instead relied on his "creativity, insights, breakthroughs, rebellions" without ANY head-bashing and getting stuck trying to make Rails 1.0 a great system for web development in Ruby?
This may be the greatest example of Survivorship Bias I've seen in recent history.
On the flip side, why should anyone celebrate "Creativity, insights, breakthroughs, rebellions"? And why are those assumed to be something that have some inherent value? Why should I care if the cereal box has a new fancy design, or if somebody changedthe colour of a button from khaki to lemonchifon? The arduous task of assigning "value" to what we do is itself fraught with centuries old philosophical dilemmas that nobody has been able to settle. You gain nothing by belittling 'effort'.
It is far easier to perform a popular song on your guitar or whatever, that it is to write/perform a violin sonata. The person who plays the violin had to do repetitive boring practice for years and years before they got even half good to play in an orchestra. Boring repetitive work has 'value' too.
Also, atleast in science, you don't get to insight without the boring work. We have technicians in our lab who run gels/assays/tests day-in day-out. Their work is not "creative" by peoples standards, but its actually very critical work that allows scientists to experiment with various processes and ideas and _derive_ insights from the drudge work. It is important to celebrate the technicians effort, even if they weren't the ones who created the insight.
We say "work hard" but what we mean is "persist" in attempting difficult things that are valuable. These aren't the same.
This blog rant is low quality, and attacks a straw man; that what people who encourage hard work are praising is the toil and not the persistence. Shame on him.
I have a minimum wage job where I perform the same repetitive manual labor tasks every single day.
Effort isn't accomplishment but for some people it's all they have. I wouldn't be so quick to devalue the pride my coworkers put in their hard work.
It's easy to be smug about not working hard when you don't have to worry about starving or being homeless.
- Thomas Jefferson
TJ was pretty succesfull...
Those "hard workers" that are successful usually had serious connections, money, and luck to start with. Most actual hard workers end up poor and ignored.