I don't know. There's working hard and then there's looking like you're working hard. I'm guilty of falling into the latter and learning how to work effectively. Conversely, this guy works hard but seems to be effective:
I think all successful people are guilty of this at some point. When people feel like they are up against the wall, they feel like they have to be constantly fighting, even though sometimes it just best to take a step back.
I have two good friends from the science fair circuit that worked for him at CSHL. They both (separately) said he has been a huge jerk for many years, a jerk of legendary proportions. Except they used different words for jerk. They said he frequently made off-color jokes and had some "interesting" theories, but that they didn't really think he was actually racist. Neither friend liked him, but they both really respected him - especially his stance on patents.
[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.]
I see this story over and over again. Someone successful worked really hard and succeeded. They go on to say "I've learned that you don't have to work hard to succeed"
Hmm. It's more like someone comes back from a long wilderness trip or a hike through Europe and they go on and say "I've learned that you don't need 30 kg of luggage". Or someone who's built a good relationship saying "I've learned you can choose not to be jealous or dependent".
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.
Not easy, but measured. In general I'd rather have someone who maybe thinks about a problem while having a life during the weekend then walks in on Monday with a place to start from, than someone who slept under the desk in between heroic coding sessions. There's a place for both, but having the time and mental energy to gain and maintain perspective is also necessary. You (or at least I, and many people I've worked with) do better work when they have a high thinking to typing ratio.
I look forwarding to hearing what they really did 2 years from now. My guess is a) They worked obsessively/freaked out/panicked and are possibly successful or b) Hunch was a total failure.
Agreed completely! People have wrong faith about working hard that it would help in bringing out something useful and cool. One should clearly know why he is working hard and is it really worth to work hard for.
Regarding the Watson and Crick reference: it helps when you have other people like Rosalind Franklin working through the nights doing X-ray crystallography and taking the "pictures" that shed the real light on the structure of DNA. It leaves enough time to write the papers, do the PR, and get the credit. And, I guess, there's more than enough time left over for "chasing popsies."
"... it helps when you have other people like Rosalind Franklin working through the nights doing X-ray crystallography and taking the "pictures" that shed the real light on the structure of DNA. ..."
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.
Good summary but you missed a critical point of serendipity. There are 230 possible symmetry groups a crystal can fall into. Franklin, as a crystallographer, knew them all. But Watson's PHD thesis involved a compound with the same symmetry as DNA, so he was much more prepared to recognize that one than Franklin was.
Err... As chemists Watson & Crick were light-years behind Franklin. They initially proposed a model of DNA where the phosphates were on the inside. When they showed it to Franklin she (along with other chemists) basically laughed at them, and the faculty ordered them to stop working the problem because they obviously didn't know what the hell they were doing.
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.
They were dead wrong the first time, yes, but they had the right symmetry. Watson was a much worse chemist, but he was prepared to recognize that symmetry.
First, Watson and Crick were hardly entrepreneurs so the comparison is totally unrealistic.
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.
I think you might be surprised by how many people got rich by not working very hard at all -- practically, in fact, by accident.
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.
I've been thinking about this exact thing for many years now. During that time, I've had a few web startups that did not succeed -- even though I worked like the dickens on them.
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]
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.
Or perhaps a third type who simply think that success is due to "being right," no matter how you get there.
"work hard" and "keep learning" should be separated out. There are several people that will do one but not the other. I'd argue too that they have different effects on success: over the long-term, "keep learning" is much more important, but you need a minimum level of both to succeed.
There are a million types of people, and your argument is reductio ab absurdum.
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.
Working hard is just being conscious of what you are doing (most of the time). If you can do the same work without being conscious of doing it, you won't feel it to be working hard.
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.
Working hard is hardly work when you are operating from the basis of your strengths. If you have a group of coworkers whose strengths are your weaknesses, than it is very easy to enter into a state of flow.
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?"
There was a Japanese proverb that was made much of during the 80s:
"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.
a well worded, more detailed version of 'running like a headless chicken'. Running too often make it easy to get lost on the path and pick the wrong one at an important crossroad.
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) .
I was hesitant to click on this link. I thought to myself "oh no, another article that's going to defend 37Signals' philosophy." But as an entrepreneur and designer, the author makes two good points:
(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.
I'm reminded of an episode of MASH where Burns tries to get Hawkeye in trouble. Hawkeye is playing cards. Burns feels he should be in surgery. But he is waiting for the patient to be stabilized. He had ordered the kid get IV fluids, whole blood, and antibiotics so he wouldn't die on the operating table. He is playing cards (without drinking, for a change) to keep himself up so he will be awake and alert when it is time to operate in the middle of the night.
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.
I don't really understand your point, but will note that Klinger's dresses are a good example of someone working extremely hard at something and getting nowhere. :-)
“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.
Without prejudice against her conclusions, a few things came to mind while reading this.
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.
That's so dumb. Of course you need to work on the right thing. I'm actually confused. She mentions Edison and how he has tried so many experiments and fails, suggests that he worked hard, yet seems to imply that his hard work was somewhat irrelevant. He was successful because he found the right thing. I am puzzled as I am wondering whether she thinks that her readership is ten years old or have no common sense at all.
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.
“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.
I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.” -- Nikola Tesla
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.
I think we can have an intelligent debate without having to call her post 'dumb'. I'm surprised this comment was voted so high.
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.
It waters down the expectations that a writer should have of their readership however and the expectations that a reader should have of an article.
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.
Serious question: I am wondering if you aren't American. American culture puts a lot of emphasis on "work ethic". Someone in the comments section of the article indicated they were British but living in America and generally appalled at how we "flog ourselves to death" constantly. Perhaps this observation is more "obvious" to people from other cultures? But for most Americans it probably merits repeating (very regularly even).
101 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 78.2 ms ] threadhttp://www.inc.com/magazine/20090901/the-way-i-work-marc-lor...
[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.]
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.
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
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.
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.
"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.
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) .
(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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.