There are plenty of things I work hard on because I like them, but there are also lots of things I have to work hard on because they need to get done.
I have similar feelings about Ikigai, the overlap of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Those things don't really overlap for me.
Not many have the luxury to do what they think makes sense. I've been running my own small business for years. It's lonely to not have coworkers but work is extremely enjoyable.
The author, too, had autonomy but doesn't seem to make a point of that.
The system that we've built is why people aren't enjoying their work. The bigger the organization, the less autonomy an individual has.
Markets are beautiful things when they work. They allow individuals to offer their services to the world in exactly the way they find best. Which feels good. And is great for a positive sum society.
The amount of people employed in small businesses or self employed is shrinking and has been for a while. The rules are too complex to start a business. In tech, there is no common protocol to speak. You are a surf of the platform you find yourself on. They extract the value.
To help people find meaning in their work, we must first force open protocols, interoperability, and regulations that are gradual by business size.
"The system that we've built is why people aren't enjoying their work. The bigger the organization, the less autonomy an individual has."
I think it depends on your position. I've worked for big companies, where my department (and I) had it's own autonomy. Sure, you had to answer to the hire executives at some point, but it wasn't that rigid.
Autonomy is usually earned after years of work, through trust. I know lots of people that basically stop working and try to do nothing, when they are given full autonomy (Many examples of this in the OE subreddit).
I had my own small business for 7 years and am now a consultant. I automatically just get work done without being asked or watched. Most people don't have this mindset and need to be told what to do and monitored.
I really don't think this is the reason. It's easier than ever to start a business now that there are so many free, accessible resources to help you through the process.
There are even services like Stripe Atlas that will walk you through incorporating, getting an EIN, and setting up your billing: https://stripe.com/atlas
The reason few people start businesses is that it's really hard to make a good living. Running your own business is highly risky and takes a lot of work. For every success story there are countless failure stories that people don't speak of.
Being an employee, especially in tech, can be an extraordinarily good deal. It can be frustrating like any job, but predictable pay that comes in well above median compensation for work that poses very little risk to yourself is a luxury. A lot of us have gone back and forth between self-employed and being an employee, and you don't really appreciate how nice it is to get a regular old job doing a narrow piece of work until you've dealt with the stresses of running your own business from top to bottom.
> we must first force open protocols, interoperability, and regulations that are gradual by business size.
What does this even mean? Very few business types would even benefit from "forcing" platforms to have open protocols. If regulators came in and forced Facebook or Instagram or even Hacker News to open their protocol and allow other businesses to interoperate (whatever that means) what makes you think individual small businesses would thrive, as opposed to other large companies coming in to take advantage of those forced-open platforms?
"It’s to help people find work that feels easy for them — not necessarily work they already know how to do, but work that feels obvious for them to get done by whatever means possible"
Having worked across the spectrum of big co. and startups this is much easier to do from a startup/small co. perspective. The larger the company gets the less likely this is going to be the case even for the ones that are more amenable to shifting folks around regularly. The Venn diagram of fulfilling work and the team that you're on gets further spread the larger the company you're on and will change rapidly on you.
I am currently doing a masters degree at Carnegie Mellon and I gotta be honest, this place is so dehumanizing for the exact reasons discussed in the link. It's just a grind pit here. And its harder to swallow this pill when you realize that university campuses are one of the few remaining venues well suited for exploring new ideas and having intellectual serendipity. When you're in a job, you can't easily just find a biology expert or economics expert and chat with them. When students are assaulted with work, they lose the ability to take advantage of that unique quality of the university environment.
Why do you think it’s such a grind? Do you think there’s somewhere else that wouldn’t be?
I’ve been interested in doing more school as well, but I took a class in-person at a top school and it seems like CS students at least are so career-focused that there’s very little room for curiosity or joy. I guess it’s a big luxury to be a mid-career person doing it mostly out of interest.
> I felt like I should catch up to stay relevant in the changing tech landscape, but that feeling just didn’t translate to action.
> Then, a few months ago, I had this silly idea for a Trader Joe’s snack box builder. It made me smile to think about it existing in the world. So I downloaded Cursor, and built and shipped a basic version in two hours.
And what if AI was what made it feel easy?
> That tiny spark of joy reminded me how much I love to build. A few weeks ago, I got pulled into building a Community Library app — something I’d been noodling on for months as a shared Google Sheet. Once I had the idea for a real site, it just made sense to build it.
What if all your problems could be solved with AI? Visualize it. Find that tiny spark of joy. Magnify it.
I mean the missing link here is can you make money with it. There are plenty of people out there for whom the "easy" work is something like building hyper-detailed models of obscure railway bridges, or painting 5,000 pictures of their cat, or tending their vegetable garden. But their ability to indulge in that is limited because they have to support themselves with some other kind of work.
I don't think the hard part is finding something to do that fulfills you and feels easy. The hard part is meeting your material needs while still having enough time and energy to do that stuff that fulfills you and feels easy.
When I was child, I observed how peasants worked on their own small farms. Get up at around 4:30 am (with rooster call), be at farm by 6 am. short break at 10 am, lunch at farm around 2pm, back home 6pm, have dinner and back at farm until 9 or 10pm. Any travel to other villages would be mostly during all night by walk, preferably under moonlight. We usually reach destination by 6am.
Basically, work stops only for food breaks and sleep of about 6 hrs. Ofcourse, this is seasonal, with summers having more free time, due to lack of crop work. But summers would have different types of work such as spinning fiber for cot threads or ropes, mending home roofings, repairing farm tools, carts, fixing irrigation systems, having marriages and festivals etc.
Same thing I observed (Eastern Europe). As a city dweller I was astonished how little free time people had in village, almost every second they were doing something.
PS: The difference was though winters were "less" work, because everything is under snow. But they're still preparing for future all the time (the huge part of it is logging and wood chopping, which is easier in winter than summer).
I'm not trying to throw shade, but the approach as described is very short sighted.
> That tiny spark of joy reminded me how much I love to build
Well, yes. That's the fun part. The hard part is the "bug fixes on that community library site you built 8 years ago, has 2k loyal users, and will never make you a dime."
This approach, as liberating as it feels, only makes the "who fixes the toilets for the utopia" problem harder.
There's a certain kind of work that's productive and doesn't take much "effort," at least not in the sense of that super annoying voice in your head that says "I really should focus... I didn't get much done yesterday, gotta make up for it now! Other people are working, look at how smart and productive they are! I need coffee, just one coffee then I'll have enough energy to do this."
Used to happen all the time playing piano in a concert or just an intense practice session. I'd notice that I had been incredibly focused, shockingly focused, like my brain had decided this random sound making activity was its One True Purpose and if it didn't work hard enough it would probably shrivel up and die. And thinking back it hadn't felt strenuous, it felt weirdly calm in the moment, but I think "ease" is totally the wrong word here. It was obvious that I had been working extremely hard, it was as intense as it was calming (? somehow?), and after I'd be totally exhausted.
I think the article really means "what if hard work didn't feel incredibly annoying at the same time?"
On the other hand there's "what if work that feels relaxing isn't also nearly useless"? Because there's a great way to make hard work feel easy, which is to just stop worrying, man. Take it one step at a time, it's probably the right step. There's no rush, slow down, you'll probably get there at the same time as you would by stressing yourself out and stopping for more coffee all the time. Here, use this easy framework...
I've experienced both hard physical and mental work, both sucks but physical sucks worse. But for mental work, it depends on what you're working on.
Some mental work you can just put away, and sleep on, like trying to solve difficult problems. But when you add in time constraint and urgency, that's when things really begin to suck. When I worked in the military I sometimes had double shifts (15-16 hours) where I'd track objects non-stop, doing trying to piece together a puzzle, and update reports on the go. You're so mentally drained afterwards, that you can't do anything but go home and sleep / turn off your brain.
I think this is a dangerously half-true way of thinking.
Yes, there are times when hard work feels great, and it's absolutely worth seeking out this kind of work.
But any serious endeavor is going to have times that are a slog, and your ability to stick with it through the bad times will very directly dictate your ability to get back to the good times.
The article seems to boil down to, "I found a way to do the part I like." Obviously, the really unpleasant work on a product is usually down the line. Bugs, technical debt, keeping documentation relevant, and integrating new features.
This site used to talk all the time about Minimum Viable Products. The focus of startups was to get the MVP out the door so that you could see if there's even a market for it before you invest in further development, scaling, etc. I'm surprised that I haven't seen more posts here specifically about using AI to get an MVP out the door, with the awareness that there will be a lot of human labor down the line.
hard work is 1000x easier when I know that I'm contributing to something worthwhile, and more importantly, I have strong assurance that my work will make a positive impact. Working at something you suspect you're redundant or bad at is demoralizing and a recipe for burnout.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 49.6 ms ] threadThere are plenty of things I work hard on because I like them, but there are also lots of things I have to work hard on because they need to get done.
I have similar feelings about Ikigai, the overlap of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Those things don't really overlap for me.
Not many have the luxury to do what they think makes sense. I've been running my own small business for years. It's lonely to not have coworkers but work is extremely enjoyable.
The author, too, had autonomy but doesn't seem to make a point of that.
The system that we've built is why people aren't enjoying their work. The bigger the organization, the less autonomy an individual has.
Markets are beautiful things when they work. They allow individuals to offer their services to the world in exactly the way they find best. Which feels good. And is great for a positive sum society.
The amount of people employed in small businesses or self employed is shrinking and has been for a while. The rules are too complex to start a business. In tech, there is no common protocol to speak. You are a surf of the platform you find yourself on. They extract the value.
To help people find meaning in their work, we must first force open protocols, interoperability, and regulations that are gradual by business size.
I think it depends on your position. I've worked for big companies, where my department (and I) had it's own autonomy. Sure, you had to answer to the hire executives at some point, but it wasn't that rigid.
Autonomy is usually earned after years of work, through trust. I know lots of people that basically stop working and try to do nothing, when they are given full autonomy (Many examples of this in the OE subreddit).
I had my own small business for 7 years and am now a consultant. I automatically just get work done without being asked or watched. Most people don't have this mindset and need to be told what to do and monitored.
I really don't think this is the reason. It's easier than ever to start a business now that there are so many free, accessible resources to help you through the process.
There are even services like Stripe Atlas that will walk you through incorporating, getting an EIN, and setting up your billing: https://stripe.com/atlas
The reason few people start businesses is that it's really hard to make a good living. Running your own business is highly risky and takes a lot of work. For every success story there are countless failure stories that people don't speak of.
Being an employee, especially in tech, can be an extraordinarily good deal. It can be frustrating like any job, but predictable pay that comes in well above median compensation for work that poses very little risk to yourself is a luxury. A lot of us have gone back and forth between self-employed and being an employee, and you don't really appreciate how nice it is to get a regular old job doing a narrow piece of work until you've dealt with the stresses of running your own business from top to bottom.
> we must first force open protocols, interoperability, and regulations that are gradual by business size.
What does this even mean? Very few business types would even benefit from "forcing" platforms to have open protocols. If regulators came in and forced Facebook or Instagram or even Hacker News to open their protocol and allow other businesses to interoperate (whatever that means) what makes you think individual small businesses would thrive, as opposed to other large companies coming in to take advantage of those forced-open platforms?
Having worked across the spectrum of big co. and startups this is much easier to do from a startup/small co. perspective. The larger the company gets the less likely this is going to be the case even for the ones that are more amenable to shifting folks around regularly. The Venn diagram of fulfilling work and the team that you're on gets further spread the larger the company you're on and will change rapidly on you.
And here's another great one about how ease, and not grind, arguably led to some of the biggest discoveries ever, like General Relativity: https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/on-thinkers-and-doers
I am currently doing a masters degree at Carnegie Mellon and I gotta be honest, this place is so dehumanizing for the exact reasons discussed in the link. It's just a grind pit here. And its harder to swallow this pill when you realize that university campuses are one of the few remaining venues well suited for exploring new ideas and having intellectual serendipity. When you're in a job, you can't easily just find a biology expert or economics expert and chat with them. When students are assaulted with work, they lose the ability to take advantage of that unique quality of the university environment.
I’ve been interested in doing more school as well, but I took a class in-person at a top school and it seems like CS students at least are so career-focused that there’s very little room for curiosity or joy. I guess it’s a big luxury to be a mid-career person doing it mostly out of interest.
> I felt like I should catch up to stay relevant in the changing tech landscape, but that feeling just didn’t translate to action.
> Then, a few months ago, I had this silly idea for a Trader Joe’s snack box builder. It made me smile to think about it existing in the world. So I downloaded Cursor, and built and shipped a basic version in two hours.
And what if AI was what made it feel easy?
> That tiny spark of joy reminded me how much I love to build. A few weeks ago, I got pulled into building a Community Library app — something I’d been noodling on for months as a shared Google Sheet. Once I had the idea for a real site, it just made sense to build it.
What if all your problems could be solved with AI? Visualize it. Find that tiny spark of joy. Magnify it.
I don't think the hard part is finding something to do that fulfills you and feels easy. The hard part is meeting your material needs while still having enough time and energy to do that stuff that fulfills you and feels easy.
Basically, work stops only for food breaks and sleep of about 6 hrs. Ofcourse, this is seasonal, with summers having more free time, due to lack of crop work. But summers would have different types of work such as spinning fiber for cot threads or ropes, mending home roofings, repairing farm tools, carts, fixing irrigation systems, having marriages and festivals etc.
PS: The difference was though winters were "less" work, because everything is under snow. But they're still preparing for future all the time (the huge part of it is logging and wood chopping, which is easier in winter than summer).
> That tiny spark of joy reminded me how much I love to build
Well, yes. That's the fun part. The hard part is the "bug fixes on that community library site you built 8 years ago, has 2k loyal users, and will never make you a dime."
This approach, as liberating as it feels, only makes the "who fixes the toilets for the utopia" problem harder.
Used to happen all the time playing piano in a concert or just an intense practice session. I'd notice that I had been incredibly focused, shockingly focused, like my brain had decided this random sound making activity was its One True Purpose and if it didn't work hard enough it would probably shrivel up and die. And thinking back it hadn't felt strenuous, it felt weirdly calm in the moment, but I think "ease" is totally the wrong word here. It was obvious that I had been working extremely hard, it was as intense as it was calming (? somehow?), and after I'd be totally exhausted.
I think the article really means "what if hard work didn't feel incredibly annoying at the same time?"
On the other hand there's "what if work that feels relaxing isn't also nearly useless"? Because there's a great way to make hard work feel easy, which is to just stop worrying, man. Take it one step at a time, it's probably the right step. There's no rush, slow down, you'll probably get there at the same time as you would by stressing yourself out and stopping for more coffee all the time. Here, use this easy framework...
Some mental work you can just put away, and sleep on, like trying to solve difficult problems. But when you add in time constraint and urgency, that's when things really begin to suck. When I worked in the military I sometimes had double shifts (15-16 hours) where I'd track objects non-stop, doing trying to piece together a puzzle, and update reports on the go. You're so mentally drained afterwards, that you can't do anything but go home and sleep / turn off your brain.
Yes, there are times when hard work feels great, and it's absolutely worth seeking out this kind of work.
But any serious endeavor is going to have times that are a slog, and your ability to stick with it through the bad times will very directly dictate your ability to get back to the good times.
This site used to talk all the time about Minimum Viable Products. The focus of startups was to get the MVP out the door so that you could see if there's even a market for it before you invest in further development, scaling, etc. I'm surprised that I haven't seen more posts here specifically about using AI to get an MVP out the door, with the awareness that there will be a lot of human labor down the line.