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June 2021  
  
It 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 they chose not to do it. There
are 12 year olds who work amazingly hard. And yet when I ask if I know more
about working hard now than when I was in school, the answer is definitely
yes.  
  
One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you'll have to work
very hard. I wasn't sure of that as a kid. Schoolwork varied in difficulty;
one didn't always have to work super hard to do well. And some of the things
famous adults did, they seemed to do almost effortlessly. Was there, perhaps,
some way to evade hard work through sheer brilliance? Now I know the answer to
that question. There isn't.  
  
The reason some subjects seemed easy was that my school had low standards. And
the reason famous adults seemed to do things effortlessly was years of
practice; they made it look easy.  
  
Of course, those famous adults usually had a lot of natural ability too. There
are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort.
You can do pretty well with just two, but to do the best work you need all
three: you need great natural ability _and_ to have practiced a lot _and_ to
be trying very hard.   
  
Bill Gates, for example, was among the smartest people in business in his era,
but he was also among the hardest working. "I never took a day off in my
twenties," he said. "Not one." It was similar with Lionel Messi. He had great
natural ability, but when his youth coaches talk about him, what they remember
is not his talent but his dedication and his desire to win. P. G. Wodehouse
would probably get my vote for best English writer of the 20th century, if I
had to choose. Certainly no one ever made it look easier. But no one ever
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 even more extreme.
Not one day off in ten years? These two had about as much natural ability as
anyone could have, and yet they also worked about as hard as anyone could
work. You need both.  
  
That seems so obvious, and yet in practice we find it slightly hard to grasp.
There's a faint xor between talent and hard work. It comes partly from popular
culture, where it seems to run very deep, and partly from the fact that the
outliers are so rare. If great talent and great drive are both rare, then
people with both are rare squared. Most people you meet who have a lot of one
will have less of the other. But you'll need both if you want to be an outlier
yourself. And since you can't really change how much natural talent you have,
in practice doing great work, insofar as you can, reduces to 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 technique to 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, and not to give up when things go wrong.
But this level of discipline seems to be within the reach of quite young
children, if they want it.  
  
What I've learned since I was a kid is how to work toward goals that are
neither clearly defined nor externally imposed. You'll probably 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 working without
anyone telling you to. Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off. I
can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm working hard, but I can be sure
I'm getting nowhere when I'm not, and it feels awful.   
  
There wasn't a single point when I learned this. Like most little kids, I
enjoyed the feeling of achievement when I learned or did something new. As I
grew older, this morphed into a feeling of disgust when I wasn't achieving
anything. The one precisely dateable landmark I have is when I stopped
watching TV, at age 13.  
  
Several people I've talked to remember getting serious about work around this
age. When I asked Patrick Collison when he started to find 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 about work was
probably school, which made work (what they called work) seem boring and
pointless. I had to learn what real work was before I could wholeheartedly
desire to do it. That took a while, because even in college a lot of the work
is pointless; there are entire departments that are pointless. But as I
learned the shape of real work, I found that my desire to do it slotted into
it as if they'd been made for each other.  
  
I suspect most people have to learn what work is before they can love it.
Hardy wrote eloquently about this in _A Mathematician's Apology_ :

> 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 through college, 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 to discount in
order to understand what real work is. One is the kind Hardy encountered in
school. Subjects get distorted when they're adapted to be taught to kids —
often so distorted that they're nothing like the work done by actual
practitioners.  The other kind of fakeness is intrinsic to certain types of
work. Some types of work are inherently bogus, or at best mere busywork.  
  
There's a kind of solidity to real work. It's not all writing the _Principia_
, but it all feels necessary. That's a vague criterion, but it's deliberately
vague, because it has to cover a lot of different types.   
  
Once you know the shape of real work, you have to learn how many hours a day
to spend on it. You can't solve this problem by simply working every waking
hour, because in many kinds of work there's a point 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 were different for each. My
limit for the harder types of writing or programming is about five hours a
day. Whereas when I was running a startup, I could work all the time. At least
for the three years I did it; if I'd kept going much longer, I'd probably have
needed to take occasional vacations.   
  
The only way to find the limit is by crossing it. Cultivate a sensitivity to
the quality of the work you're doing, and then you'll notice if it decreases
because you're working too hard. Honesty is critical here, in both directions:
you have to notice when you're being lazy, but also when you're working too
hard. And if you think there's something admirable about working too hard, get
that idea out of your head. You're not merely getting worse results, but
getting them because you're showing off — if not to other people, then to
yourself.   
  
Finding the limit of working hard is a constant, ongoing process, not
something you do just once. Both the difficulty of the work and your ability
to do it can vary hour to hour, so you need to be constantly judging both how
hard you're trying and how well you're doing.  
  
Trying hard doesn't mean constantly pushing yourself to work, though. There
may be some people who do, but I think my experience is fairly typical, and I
only have to push myself occasionally when I'm starting a project or when I
encounter some sort of check. That's when I'm in danger of procrastinating.
But once I get rolling, I tend to keep going.  
  
What keeps me going depends on the type of work. When I was working on Viaweb,
I was driven by fear of failure. I barely procrastinated at all then, because
there was always something that needed doing, and if I could put more distance
between me and the pursuing beast by doing it, why wait?  Whereas what
drives me now, writing essays, 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.
But once 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. Many problems
have a hard core at the center, surrounded by easier stuff at the edges.
Working hard means aiming toward the center to the extent you can. Some days
you may not be able to; some days you'll only be able to work on the easier,
peripheral stuff. But you should always 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 these problems with
a hard core. There are important problems at the center, which tend to be
hard, and less important, easier ones at the edges. So as well as the small,
daily adjustments involved in working on a specific problem, you'll
occasionally have to make big, lifetime-scale adjustments about which type of
work to do. And the rule is the same: working hard means aiming toward the
center — toward the most ambitious problems.  
  
By center, though, I mean the actual center, not merely the current consensus
about the center. The consensus about which problems are most important is
often mistaken, both in general and within specific fields. If you disagree
with it, and you're right, that could represent a valuable opportunity to do
something new.  
  
The more ambitious types of work will usually be harder, but although you
should not be in denial about this, neither should you treat difficulty as an
infallible guide in deciding what to do. If you discover some ambitious type
of work that's a bargain in the sense of being easier for you than other
people, either because of the abilities you happen to have, or because of some
new way you've found to approach it, or simply because you're more excited
about it, by all means work on that. Some of the best work is done by people
who find an easy way to do something hard.  
  
As well as learning the shape of real work, you need to figure out which kind
you're suited for. And that doesn't just mean figuring out which kind your
natural abilities match the best; it doesn't mean that if you're 7 feet tall,
you have to play basketball. What you're suited for depends not just on your
talents but perhaps even more on your interests. A _deep interest_ in a topic
makes people work harder than any amount of discipline can.  
  
It can be harder to discover your interests than your talents. There are fewer
types of talent than interest, and they start to be judged early in childhood,
whereas interest in a topic is a subtle thing that may not mature till your
twenties, or even later. The topic may not even exist earlier. Plus there are
some powerful sources of error you need to learn to discount. Are you really
interested in x, or do you want to work on it because you'll make a lot of
money, or because other people will be impressed with you, or because your
parents want you to?   
  
The difficulty of figuring out what to work on varies enormously from one
person to another. That's one of the most important things I've learned about
work since I was a kid. As a kid, you get the impression that everyone has a
calling, and all they have to do is figure out what it is. That's how it works
in movies, and in the streamlined biographies fed to kids. Sometimes it works
that way in real life. Some people figure out what to do as children and just
do it, like Mozart. But others, like Newton, turn restlessly from one kind of
work to another. Maybe in retrospect we can identify one as their calling — we
can wish Newton spent more time on math and physics and less on alchemy and
theology — but this is an _illusion_ 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 others whose lives
never converge. And for these people, figuring out what to work on is not so
much a prelude to working hard as an ongoing part of it, like one of a set of
simultaneous equations. For these people, the process I described earlier has
a third component: along with measuring both how hard you're working and how
well you're doing, you have to think about whether you should keep working in
this field or switch to another. If you're working hard but not getting good
enough results, you should switch. It sounds simple expressed that way, but in
practice it's very difficult. You shouldn't give up on the first day just
because you work hard and don't get anywhere. You need to give yourself time
to get going. But how much time? And what should you do if work that was going
well stops going well? How much time do you give yourself then?   
  
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 not even know what good
results look like. History is full of examples of people who misjudged the
importance of what they were working on.  
  
The best test of whether it's worthwhile to work on something is whether you
find it interesting. That may sound like a dangerously subjective measure, but
it's probably the most accurate one you're going to get. You're the one
working on the stuff. Who's in a better position than you to judge whether
it's important, and what's a better 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 of working hard: how
at each point it depends on being honest with yourself.  
  
Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It's a complicated, dynamic
system that has to be tuned just right at each point. You have to understand
the shape of real work, see clearly what kind you're best suited for, aim as
close to the true core of it as you can, accurately judge at each moment both
what you're capable of and how you're doing, and put in as many hours each day
as you can without harming the quality of the result. This network is too
complicated to trick. But if you're consistently honest and clear-sighted, it
will automatically assume an optimal shape, and you'll be productive in a way
few people are.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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