10 ms·

Work Hard (2007)

416 points by somerandomness 5y ago

david_allison 5y ago
(2007)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
herodoturtle 5y ago
> there is an important distinction between “working hard” and “maximising the number of hours during which one works”. In particular, forcing oneself to work even when one is tired, unmotivated, unprepared, or distracted with other tasks can end up being counterproductive to one’s long-term work productivity, and there is a saturation point beyond which pushing oneself to work even longer will actually reduce the total amount of work you get done in the long run Worth highlighting, for those of you that are skipping through.
- pm90 5y ago
  I'm glad you posted this as it goes against the "hard work cult" that seems to have gripped popular imagination. Hard work isn't just time spent on completing a task; this interpretation is maybe the easiest to understand and benefits employers the most.
- gfodor 5y ago
  I think there's an important point here too that cuts against a lot of memes: it's important to keep working hard right up until this point. A lot of people presume that if they put in a solid day's work they're going to do just as well as someone who is a "work-a-holic." That's not a great mental model, if the work-a-holic is working more but not so much they are hitting these problems mentioned. There's a fairly wide margin between underwork and overwork. edit: Lo and behold my sibling is taking on one of the memes I mentioned. :) If you're working less because you feel it's doing too much in the favor of your employer, and not because you're otherwise going to start becoming less productive because of it, you're probably underworking in the sense outlined here.
  - gopalv 5y ago
    > A lot of people presume that if they put in a solid day's work they're going to do just as well as someone who is a "work-a-holic." There are two kinds of workaholics - the ones who enjoy work and those who suffer from their work. The article hits on the first kind in the passing >> Of course, to work hard, it really helps if you enjoy your work. Working hard when you enjoy your work is easier and might look like workaholism to someone who is definitely not. If work is play, you might play longer & that gets a lot done, because mistakes you throw away don't feel like wasted time. The workaholic that people knock are the ones who work because it gives them positive feedback they lack in the rest of their lives - from an inattentive parent, disrespectful spouse or demanding children. My work environment is extremely gamified and well designed to give me great feedback to improve, excellent rewards for performance and throw in some respect of my peers. The home life is Sisyphean in comparison - cook dinner today and it doesn't lie on a progression towards cooking less tomorrow. It's easy to get sucked into that and work on a death-march, because it feels like progress on a daily basis. That "How we built Internet Explorer" tweet felt very familiar to me, because I would definitely get sucked into a mission like that.
    - didibus 5y ago
      > >> Of course, to work hard, it really helps if you enjoy your work. > Working hard when you enjoy your work is easier and might look like workaholism to someone who is definitely not. If work is play, you might play longer & that gets a lot done, because mistakes you throw away don't feel like wasted time. Exactly, and it's a misnomer to call that hard work. When someone enjoys their work, the work is easy. They are not "hard workers". You falsely believe they are hard working because you personally would not enjoy doing that work and would therefore not be motivated to work as much. But that only means that the work is hard to you, it doesn't mean it's hard to them.
      - mym1990 5y ago
        I would disagree with this. Many professional athletes love their work, but that doesn't make training, recovery, and competition a walk in the park...professional athletes are the pinnacle of hard work because many of them have to utilize the 24 hours in near perfection to stay at the top. Also, often the reason that someone enjoys their work is directly because it IS difficult. And the payoff from solving hard problems can be amazing and worth it. Alternatively, people who are pigeon holed into mundane or uninteresting work in their career will find dissatisfaction, even if the tasks are incredibly easy.
- ttul 5y ago
  And of course most of us are skipping through reading about “working hard…”
  - reidjs 5y ago
    Because working hard can mean skimming articles or delegating it to someone else to get you the gist of it. I don't have time to read every single interesting sounding article I come across. Well maybe I do, but then I wouldn't have as much time for commenting :)
- deleted 5y ago
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- tristanperry 5y ago
  It's a great bit of advice. It does also apply to companies who demand that their workers have bums on seats in an office 8-9 hours a day... Companies often don't seem to understand that loading employees with meetings and bureaucracy, then wondering why productivity isn't higher, is fairly foolish.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Great point. I like to compare work capacity to exercise capacity. Too much exercise will actually harm your fitness rather than improve it. However, reasonable exertions, combined with appropriate rest, will improve your fitness over time. Like exercise capacity, one's ability to work hard can also be improved through practice. This doesn't mean pulling all-nighters and chugging caffeine to override the sleepiness, though. It means setting incremental goals to try a little bit harder and then following up with proper rest and recovery. For example, if you install time tracking software and measure that you spend 3 hours in your code editor every day (a reasonable amount for someone working an 8-hour day, due to time spent reading documentation, in meetings, and other activities), it would be a mistake to set a goal to spend 6 hours in your code editor. You'll get burned out and hate it. However, if you set a goal to spend 3.5 hours in your code editor every day, you can likely find low-impact ways to make that happen. Maybe you're more efficient with transitioning from meetings back to coding. Or maybe you cut down time spent reading articles on HN or Twitter by 30 minutes and apply it to coding instead. Over the course of a 5-day work week, that extra 30 minutes per day adds up to almost 3 hours extra work. If your starting point was 3 hours per day, you've basically added an extra work day to your week without giving up much.
  - selestify 5y ago
    Are there any such tracking software that you’d recommend?
    - sankumsek 5y ago
      Not OP, but I've found a reasonable amount of success with the free version of RescueTime.
    - ralmeida 5y ago
      I use Timing for macOS, pretty good: https://timingapp.com/ https://timingapp.com/ (available also from Setapp)
      - superlopuh 5y ago
- garrickvanburen 5y ago
  Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is take a nap in the middle of the day. On a daily basis, I do so more often than not.
  - nolaspring 5y ago
    I’ve found that a lot of my co workers have stated to do this. It’s turned into a disconnected, tech siesta.
- wvh 5y ago
  > Worth highlighting, for those of you that are skipping through. Like my employer...
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  Working smart then :-)
- noduerme 5y ago
  This really is important. Exhortations to work hard seem a bit tone-deaf right now. I'm a person who's been self-employed and therefore self-motivated, driven, and devoted all hours of day and night to realizing ideas and products for the past 20+ years, organizing my own time in ways I've always noticed 9-5 friends find difficult to understand. Once I get into an idea or a big piece of code, I can get lost for days, forgetting to eat or shower. But that's always been balanced by an active social life, travel, exercise - things that help me maintain a psychological equilibrium while helping me structure my own time. Covid has upended the outlets I depend on for sanity to the point where it's very hard to get into the flow of work and research I need to commit myself to in order to accomplish long tasks. So I'm really trying to be gentle and easy on myself when I don't want to work up to the breaking point... or even of days where I don't want to do any serious work at all. Maybe this is a bad thing, but before lockdowns I never felt like I had to make myself work at all... I just wanted to, and nothing could take me away from it. Usually one big night out would be enough to motivate me to spend the next week happily locked indoors of my own volition. But without that balance... you just have too much time.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  This is a very important distinction. I realized over time that what I wanted out of work was not a job where I lived at the stupid office, but not one where I was twiddling my thumbs all day either. I really want to put in serious work, but then go home.
- pototo666 5y ago
  This. Even though I know that working all night till 6 am is wrong, I still do this now and then, because work is sometimes addicting. I need such message from real genius to help me control myself.
- amai 5y ago
  My physics professor used to say: "power is work per unit of time."
- arvinsim 5y ago
  I think this point is obvious. What's not obvious is to find the line between doing too little and doo too much. There are just too many variables and a lot of nuance to consider.
snakeboy 5y ago
Off-topic, but why is it that Terry Tao's blog attracts such low-quality comments? When I look at SSC/ACX, Shtetl-Optimized, Marginal Revolution, etc. the comments are mostly constructive, engaged, and well-informed. With Tao, it's a huge proportion of random people asking for generic life advice, or fanboy-ism. This seems counter-intuitive, because Tao's blog is by far the least accessible of those above 3 blogs on a technical level. There's almost no reason to visit Tao's blog if you don't have a graduate maths degree.
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  Because Terry Tao is a celebrity. People find his blog after watching him on Youtube.
  - strikelaserclaw 5y ago
    This is true, his video on gaps between prime numbers had over 2 million views. People find his genius fascinating even if they don't understand his work.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  large foreign readership , so English is not a primary language. probably also a lot of spam comments that get through. Those other sides also tend to have a fair share of low quality comments as well. A lot of troll bait or off topic stuff. I just don't read the comments, often I find that I am not missing out on much by not doing so.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > When I look at SSC/ACX, Shtetl-Optimized, Marginal Revolution, etc. the comments are mostly constructive, engaged, and well-informed. There are constructive, well-informed comments on Marginal Revolution, but I wouldn't call them the majority...
- fossuser 5y ago
  Tao has gotten a lot more public media attention for the most part (Netflix, shows, TV, news, etc.) than any of the others which remain more niche. I'd guess as a result the audiences of the others are better selected to lean more high quality.
Fk_ttao 5y ago
Does he still hate gays?
- kenjackson 5y ago
  This is off-topic, although I am curious -- what source do you have for this?
  - categorynerd 5y ago
    As a highly paid employee of UCLA, his salary information is publicly known: https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2018/university-of-california/terence-tao/ https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2018/university-o... White supremacists in California banned affirmative action in 1996 by ballot measure, and that has resulted in near extermination of Black and Latinx students: https://www.npr.org/2013/06/23/194656555/what-happens-without-affirmative-action-the-story-of-ucla https://www.npr.org/2013/06/23/194656555/what-happens-withou... We don’t need Whites who ask what our sources are; we need reparations.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- adem 5y ago
  Look at the username, probably a troll.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cushychicken 5y ago
If there's anyone I'll listen respectfully to about the value of hard, diligent work, it's Terence Tao. Reminds me of Richard Hamming talking about his professional envy of John Tukey: One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office! From "You and Your Research": https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
- paulpauper 5y ago
  Remidns me of the 'cheat code' of reading a chapter ahead
- TrackerFF 5y ago
  TIL Bode, Hamming, Shannon, Tukey, et. al all worked at Bell Labs around the same time. Wonder what the culture must've been like, those are all household names in signal processing, control, information theory.
  - spenczar5 5y ago
    Richard Hamming wrote a book, "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering", which - despite its name - is more or less a memoir of his own scientific career. It's a fun read if you're interested in that culture.
    - breck 5y ago
      Best book I've read in a long while. I hope to reread every few years.
    - yesenadam 5y ago
      From the preface, "After many years of pressure and encouragement from friends, I decided to write up the graduate course in engineering I teach at the U.S.Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. ...In this series of lectures I try to communicate to students what cannot be said in words—the essence of style in science and engineering. ...I have found that the personal story is far, far more effective than the impersonal one; hence there is necessarily an aura of “bragging” in the book that is unavoidable." You can watch him giving that 31-lecture course in 1995 here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30 Enjoy! It's wonderful. (The last lecture is the famous "You and Your Research" that he gave many times.) I've really enjoyed his books too, from Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers to Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics. They're all drenched with experience.
beny23 5y ago
Of course the same applies not just in the field of maths. The same could be said about software engineering just swap “projects” for tickets…
TameAntelope 5y ago
I've held for a long time that you must know the rules quite well before you're "allowed" to break them, and I think this reinforces my opinion on that. Additionally, I think the obsession over "intelligence" and "natural ability" is vastly overstated, in general. It absolutely helps, and it compounds, to be smart, but a person who "works hard" is infinitely more valuable to their colleagues than a smart person who doesn't, and tries to rely on raw intellect. My problem, and I wonder if others have this issue as well, is how hard it is to know these things intellectually, and also apply them to my life. I just cannot, for the life of me, maintain a "work hard" mindset. I'm still trying, but I very often fail at this, and its frustrating because I know how valuable it is to being good at what I do.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  It really depends on what you define as natural abilities. The ability to work hard for 12 hours without break every day IMHO is as "natural" as having a good IQ.
  - zqna 5y ago
    One attribute of having "high IQ" is being able to understand the vanity of working "hard".
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      There is a line between IQ and wisdom, and wisdom is learned through experience and time.
      - beckingz 5y ago
        I prefer reading.
- albatross13 5y ago
  It's kind of a double edged sword- I've worked with a few people that "work hard" and "get things done", only to find out once they leave (or go on vacation) that now we have to untangle a 600 line bash script that's integral to production. I'm being a bit hyperbolic here, but the gist of my point is: not everyone who works hard is worth keeping around, especially if their hard work leads to an un-managable mess in the future.
giantg2 5y ago
It's probably good advice, and maybe my dissent is just due to my burn out, but... I'm tired of hearing "work hard". Very often, working hard does not lead to success. It sure as shit didn't work out that way for me. There are many people who do not work hard and make tons of money in things like NFT, crypto, securities, office politics, scams, etc. It seems like luck is the shared variable... of which I have none.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  His advice isn’t for how to get rich in crypto, it’s for how to succeed in academic mathematics. I can’t imagine that anyone has ever “lucked” their way into that.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    It's not luck alone. You can still work hard in math and fail. Didn't get the grant you needed - tough luck. Want tenure? Better be ready to play politics. Etc
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - paulpauper 5y ago
    same principle applies. a lot of people vying for something in which few can succeed
  - sdenton4 5y ago
    Hard work is necessary but not sufficient. Picking the right problems to work on is also necessary, and difficult to get right. Worming in on a hard unsolved problem that is eventually incredibly important is the scientific equivalent of winning the lottery, and we know lots of examples of this. Recently, mRNA vaccines, neural networks, and the twin primes conjecture come to mind. But there are doubtless many, many other examples of people working on a possibly-fundamental problem which never actually break through, and we never hear about it. But I would argue it's still worth making a concerted effort to identify good problems to solve, and specifically thinking about what makes a good 'hard problem.' It's much easier to make progress in an under-studied area, simply because the low hanging fruit haven't been eaten yet. The danger, of course, is that understudied things may be understudied for a reason: they're not actually relevant to anything else, or there's some secret impediment and many others have already failed. By contrast, cracking away at ridiculous subproblems from the last generation of academics is almost always a dead end, imo; you're competing with people who already know the field extremely well, the low hanging fruit has been picked, and the obvious roads to relevance have probably already been well-explored. Unsolved problems in a long-standing discipline are often unsolved because the right tools are missing or it's impossible within the existing paradigm... Or the problem is just irrelevant, relative to the amount of effort needed to solve it. ramble ramble ramble
unholiness 5y ago
Seems to have the hacker news hug of death. Cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Tr5R5Jh7rTcJ:https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/work-hard/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Tr5R5J...
jarenmf 5y ago
Reading alone would take some serious hard work. To make any meaningful contribution in any field you have to do some serious reading (and understanding) to bring yourself up to date with the field.
bserge 5y ago
On a related note, this always trickles down to low level managers who then proceed to tell it to the floor workers. Trying to motivate a cleaner, assembly operative, driver, cashier, warehouse operative, packer and other low level workers with it is like telling them to go fuck themselves. It sounds like bullshit. It is bullshit. No one fucking loves these jobs. There's nothing to aspire to. Working hard means just killing yourself faster (but not fast enough).
- paulpauper 5y ago
  what if you work hard and derive meaning from your work
  - themacguffinman 5y ago
    I can certainly understand how one can derive meaning from a trade or profession, but I would find it difficult to believe that anyone could really do that for menial jobs like a cashier or warehouse packer. These jobs are dead ends, they don't have a meaningful spectrum of quality and you're little more than a warm body. A comedian (David Mitchell) once joked that he's proud of the UK's terrible service reputation. It doesn't seem honest or appropriate for service staff to be so happy and enthusiastic, why would they be? There's very little to be happy about.
    - rednerrus 5y ago
      The only way to make those jobs manageable is to create some sense of meaning and mastery out of them. You're always striving to do a little bit better job. You remind yourself of the importance of what you're doing. If you have a good manager, they're trying to find ways to give you autonomy in what you're doing.
    - airstrike 5y ago
      > A comedian (David Mitchell) once joked that he's proud of the UK's terrible service reputation. It doesn't seem honest or appropriate for service staff to be so happy and enthusiastic, why would they be? There's very little to be happy about. I remember watching this episode on TV but I haven't the faintest idea what the show was called... though it was incredibly funny
categorynerd 5y ago
In which yet another Asian male from a Californian university lectures the rest of us on the importance of ‘working hard’, even as he draws a six figure salary from an institution that stands on land stolen from the Natives, while systematically marginalizing Blacks and Latinx. Math is indeed racist.
OtomotO 5y ago
I will always work smart, rather than working hard. I don't define myself or my self worth solely via the work I do. Always. But then again, in my culture it's not as extreme as in other parts of the world.
didibus 5y ago
I don't really know if I believe in hard work. I feel more inclined to see things from the motivation school of thought. When you're motivated, all work is easy. The "hard" feeling comes from pushing through doing something you are not motivated to do. And the thing is, I don't know if anyone is successful at that. I feel most success comes from people who had the motivation for it. Can you force yourself or others through work that they're not motivated to do and actually expect it to deliver on breakthroughs?
- themacguffinman 5y ago
  I'm fairly confident that when the article says "hard work", it just means "a lot of work". The article later mentions that more motivation will help you work harder. The point is that motivated or not, high quality output requires a lot of work. Working a lot on a particular thing is still going to be easier for some and harder for others.
  - didibus 5y ago
    Ya, I agree with you 100%. But I think this is the problem with calling it "hard work". If working a lot on thing X is something I don't struggle with, and in fact I enjoy and find fun, and am really motivated to do, than it's actually pretty easy for me to put in a lot of time and effort into it. Isn't it weird then that I'd go and tell others I'm a "hard worker"? I just find it a bit deceiving. Like people can hear that and think, damn, this person is able to work through something they hate doing, have no motivation to work on, and where there are other things they'd rather do, yet somehow they can power through using raw will and focus on putting tons of time and effort into it? Well damn, I must be a weak minded person then. Personally, I think that second interpretation is common, and it does more harm than good in my opinion. Every time I have put a lot of time and effort into something, I either really enjoyed the thing, or I was really motivated by the outcome. In both cases, that made it pretty easy for me to put in a lot of work.
- mym1990 5y ago
  I actually believe the complete opposite. People who rely on motivation to get them through to the finish line in long term situations probably never make it there. Motivation is a very fleeting feeling unless you find something that utterly sets your soul on fire, and I would almost say it is a crutch for many. Sometimes you're going to get up in the morning and you're just going to have to push through. And there will almost always be small/medium/large pieces of work that are simply not fun(and you can't always delegate). The people who succeed will be the ones that have developed a mindset of resilience and just doing what needs to get done.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
chrisweekly 5y ago
See also the classic book "The Hacker Ethic" by Pikka Himanen (foreword by Linus Torvalds). https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4690 https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4690
brailsafe 5y ago
So if you are already a child prodigy, born into a family of prodigies, specifically within Mathematics, and you want that PHD, gotta keep grinding.
- courtf 5y ago
  It's also a lot easier to work hard when you are handed access to every academic resource on the planet before you hit puberty. His life story is the most blatant counterexample to this article imaginable. Sounds like a case of deep denial.
  - wheelinsupial 5y ago
    Maybe an article he wrote called A Close Call: How a Near Failure Propelled Me to Succeed [1] might be of interest to you. "After many nerve-wracking minutes of closed-door de- liberation, the examiners did decide to (barely) pass me; however, my advisor gently explained his disappointment at my performance, and how I needed to do better in the future. I was still largely in a state of shock—this was the first time I had performed poorly on an exam that I was genuinely interested in performing well in." "In retrospect, nearly failing the generals was probably the best thing that could have happened to me at the time." [1] https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202007/rnoti-p1007.pdf https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202007/rnoti-p1007.pdf
    - courtf 5y ago
      Is this supposed to be a tale of overcoming adversity, almost failing some exam? The stakes are so low I can barely identify the conflict in the story. Actually failing something of actual importance and then overcoming the odds to succeed anyway would be a little less boring. He sounds like he's lived his entire life in a university basement and mistook the petty challenges of academia for real life.
      - wheelinsupial 5y ago
        The original poster made a comment about grinding to get a math PhD. You said Terrence Tao is a blatant counter example to that. I posted (I'll concede that I probably didn't display great quotes from the article or provide enough context) an article about Terrence Tao almost failing his PhD generals exam, which I thought would lend some evidence to the idea of grinding for the PhD, which is the original point under discussion. Since he passed the generals and he didn't prepare very well for it, may be you're right and that is weak evidence. I think the article does provide some evidence that others who were studying for their PhD in math at Princeton while Terrence Tao was studying for his were not relying solely on intelligence alone. Perhaps I'm wrong on that point too. However, I don't think you're trying to criticize the article as bad evidence in relation to achieving a math PhD. You're going on about academia having low stakes and academia not representing real life. If I'm mis-characterizing this, then I apologize. I do believe you're moving the goal posts in this discussion. The original article posted is about math graduate school. That's all. It's not about real life. The first two sentences in the article establish this point. > Relying on intelligence alone to pull things off at the last minute may work for a while, but, generally speaking, at the graduate level or higher it doesn’t. > One needs to do a serious amount of reading and writing, and not just thinking, in order to get anywhere serious in mathematics;
alexashka 5y ago
It's interesting to see what qualified as worthy of a blog post not so long ago. It takes time and effort to do difficult tasks? You shouldn't overwork? What new insights, let me blog about it :) For those who don't know, the 8 hour work days and holidays were talked about by Adam Smith more than 200 years ago. The reason that system was put in place was because letting people work as much as they wanted led to over-exertion and injuries, lowering productivity. That was for physical labor by the way. In another 200 years, I expect people to finally realize that thinking is harder than repetitive physical labor and one can't do more than a few hours of it, per day. Until then we'll have 'burn out' blog posts and people reading and posting on HackerNews/reddit/twitter during work hours.
m0zg 5y ago
Same thing in a lot fewer words, for "visual thinkers" among us: https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ This holds up really well, in any STEM field, not just mathematics. Celebrate those dimples on the surface of human knowledge, if you can, in fact, even make them. Very few people can, and our future depends on them.
tacojimjennings 5y ago
I just come here for the self help blog posts honestly
keithalewis 5y ago
I work hard to be lazy. Put in the effort once and keep leveraging off of it.
- ramraj07 5y ago
  That’s exactly what Terry advices against. Not because you owe the company or anyone else that, but it’s possible you might regret not doing so yourself. My advisor described it as “being too smart for your own good.”
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
At the end of the article, he references "The Gap" by Ira Glass. Someone made an excellent video, based on that[0]. Worth the watch (IMNSHO). It's very short, and very encouraging. [0] https://vimeo.com/85040589 https://vimeo.com/85040589
France_is_bacon 5y ago
>"It is also important to direct your effort in a fruitful direction rather than a fruitless one" This is actually the most critical sentence in the entire article. I read an article somewhere, maybe 25 or 30 years ago, that was about this exact topic. Some successful scientist, I don't even remember his name now, was asked about his success. He said that others worked just as hard and diligently. But his skill was in selecting the projects that had a high degree of probability of success. He would watch others in his profession and see how they made horrible choices in the selection of their work. The unsuccessful people made a series of unwise choices. Tilting at windmills that had exceptionally poor chance of success, areas where there was no funding available or very difficult to get funding, and all sorts of other problems. The same thing is true with everything. For example, lots of people start businesses that are shitty selection right off the bat - they have almost zero chance of success before they even begin. All teh perfect execution and hard work will be for naught. The founder has blinders on. You always hear about the successes. People always say false things like, the idea is 1%, execution is 99% of it. Not true. It's more like, the idea is worth 99%, and the execution is the other 99% of success. Trust me, I've seen a LOT of great execution on shit ideas and the company goes down the drain. You just never hear of them. And by the way, this is in regards to ideas that are actually have a corporation started around them, as opposed to just aimlessly talking about ideas. Anyways, take what you will from what I just wrote.

Work Hard (2007)

david_allison 5y ago

(2007)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

herodoturtle 5y ago

> there is an important distinction between “working hard” and “maximising the number of hours during which one works”. In particular, forcing oneself to work even when one is tired, unmotivated, unprepared, or distracted with other tasks can end up being counterproductive to one’s long-term work productivity, and there is a saturation point beyond which pushing oneself to work even longer will actually reduce the total amount of work you get done in the long run Worth highlighting, for those of you that are skipping through.

pm90 5y ago
I'm glad you posted this as it goes against the "hard work cult" that seems to have gripped popular imagination. Hard work isn't just time spent on completing a task; this interpretation is maybe the easiest to understand and benefits employers the most.
gfodor 5y ago
I think there's an important point here too that cuts against a lot of memes: it's important to keep working hard right up until this point. A lot of people presume that if they put in a solid day's work they're going to do just as well as someone who is a "work-a-holic." That's not a great mental model, if the work-a-holic is working more but not so much they are hitting these problems mentioned. There's a fairly wide margin between underwork and overwork. edit: Lo and behold my sibling is taking on one of the memes I mentioned. :) If you're working less because you feel it's doing too much in the favor of your employer, and not because you're otherwise going to start becoming less productive because of it, you're probably underworking in the sense outlined here.
- gopalv 5y ago
  > A lot of people presume that if they put in a solid day's work they're going to do just as well as someone who is a "work-a-holic." There are two kinds of workaholics - the ones who enjoy work and those who suffer from their work. The article hits on the first kind in the passing >> Of course, to work hard, it really helps if you enjoy your work. Working hard when you enjoy your work is easier and might look like workaholism to someone who is definitely not. If work is play, you might play longer & that gets a lot done, because mistakes you throw away don't feel like wasted time. The workaholic that people knock are the ones who work because it gives them positive feedback they lack in the rest of their lives - from an inattentive parent, disrespectful spouse or demanding children. My work environment is extremely gamified and well designed to give me great feedback to improve, excellent rewards for performance and throw in some respect of my peers. The home life is Sisyphean in comparison - cook dinner today and it doesn't lie on a progression towards cooking less tomorrow. It's easy to get sucked into that and work on a death-march, because it feels like progress on a daily basis. That "How we built Internet Explorer" tweet felt very familiar to me, because I would definitely get sucked into a mission like that.
  - didibus 5y ago
    > >> Of course, to work hard, it really helps if you enjoy your work. > Working hard when you enjoy your work is easier and might look like workaholism to someone who is definitely not. If work is play, you might play longer & that gets a lot done, because mistakes you throw away don't feel like wasted time. Exactly, and it's a misnomer to call that hard work. When someone enjoys their work, the work is easy. They are not "hard workers". You falsely believe they are hard working because you personally would not enjoy doing that work and would therefore not be motivated to work as much. But that only means that the work is hard to you, it doesn't mean it's hard to them.
    - mym1990 5y ago
      I would disagree with this. Many professional athletes love their work, but that doesn't make training, recovery, and competition a walk in the park...professional athletes are the pinnacle of hard work because many of them have to utilize the 24 hours in near perfection to stay at the top. Also, often the reason that someone enjoys their work is directly because it IS difficult. And the payoff from solving hard problems can be amazing and worth it. Alternatively, people who are pigeon holed into mundane or uninteresting work in their career will find dissatisfaction, even if the tasks are incredibly easy.
ttul 5y ago
And of course most of us are skipping through reading about “working hard…”
- reidjs 5y ago
  Because working hard can mean skimming articles or delegating it to someone else to get you the gist of it. I don't have time to read every single interesting sounding article I come across. Well maybe I do, but then I wouldn't have as much time for commenting :)
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tristanperry 5y ago
It's a great bit of advice. It does also apply to companies who demand that their workers have bums on seats in an office 8-9 hours a day... Companies often don't seem to understand that loading employees with meetings and bureaucracy, then wondering why productivity isn't higher, is fairly foolish.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Great point. I like to compare work capacity to exercise capacity. Too much exercise will actually harm your fitness rather than improve it. However, reasonable exertions, combined with appropriate rest, will improve your fitness over time. Like exercise capacity, one's ability to work hard can also be improved through practice. This doesn't mean pulling all-nighters and chugging caffeine to override the sleepiness, though. It means setting incremental goals to try a little bit harder and then following up with proper rest and recovery. For example, if you install time tracking software and measure that you spend 3 hours in your code editor every day (a reasonable amount for someone working an 8-hour day, due to time spent reading documentation, in meetings, and other activities), it would be a mistake to set a goal to spend 6 hours in your code editor. You'll get burned out and hate it. However, if you set a goal to spend 3.5 hours in your code editor every day, you can likely find low-impact ways to make that happen. Maybe you're more efficient with transitioning from meetings back to coding. Or maybe you cut down time spent reading articles on HN or Twitter by 30 minutes and apply it to coding instead. Over the course of a 5-day work week, that extra 30 minutes per day adds up to almost 3 hours extra work. If your starting point was 3 hours per day, you've basically added an extra work day to your week without giving up much.
- selestify 5y ago
  Are there any such tracking software that you’d recommend?
  - sankumsek 5y ago
    Not OP, but I've found a reasonable amount of success with the free version of RescueTime.
  - ralmeida 5y ago
    I use Timing for macOS, pretty good: https://timingapp.com/ https://timingapp.com/ (available also from Setapp)
    - superlopuh 5y ago
garrickvanburen 5y ago
Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is take a nap in the middle of the day. On a daily basis, I do so more often than not.
- nolaspring 5y ago
  I’ve found that a lot of my co workers have stated to do this. It’s turned into a disconnected, tech siesta.
wvh 5y ago
> Worth highlighting, for those of you that are skipping through. Like my employer...
quickthrower2 5y ago
Working smart then :-)
noduerme 5y ago
This really is important. Exhortations to work hard seem a bit tone-deaf right now. I'm a person who's been self-employed and therefore self-motivated, driven, and devoted all hours of day and night to realizing ideas and products for the past 20+ years, organizing my own time in ways I've always noticed 9-5 friends find difficult to understand. Once I get into an idea or a big piece of code, I can get lost for days, forgetting to eat or shower. But that's always been balanced by an active social life, travel, exercise - things that help me maintain a psychological equilibrium while helping me structure my own time. Covid has upended the outlets I depend on for sanity to the point where it's very hard to get into the flow of work and research I need to commit myself to in order to accomplish long tasks. So I'm really trying to be gentle and easy on myself when I don't want to work up to the breaking point... or even of days where I don't want to do any serious work at all. Maybe this is a bad thing, but before lockdowns I never felt like I had to make myself work at all... I just wanted to, and nothing could take me away from it. Usually one big night out would be enough to motivate me to spend the next week happily locked indoors of my own volition. But without that balance... you just have too much time.
emodendroket 5y ago
This is a very important distinction. I realized over time that what I wanted out of work was not a job where I lived at the stupid office, but not one where I was twiddling my thumbs all day either. I really want to put in serious work, but then go home.
pototo666 5y ago
This. Even though I know that working all night till 6 am is wrong, I still do this now and then, because work is sometimes addicting. I need such message from real genius to help me control myself.
amai 5y ago
My physics professor used to say: "power is work per unit of time."
arvinsim 5y ago
I think this point is obvious. What's not obvious is to find the line between doing too little and doo too much. There are just too many variables and a lot of nuance to consider.

snakeboy 5y ago

Off-topic, but why is it that Terry Tao's blog attracts such low-quality comments? When I look at SSC/ACX, Shtetl-Optimized, Marginal Revolution, etc. the comments are mostly constructive, engaged, and well-informed. With Tao, it's a huge proportion of random people asking for generic life advice, or fanboy-ism. This seems counter-intuitive, because Tao's blog is by far the least accessible of those above 3 blogs on a technical level. There's almost no reason to visit Tao's blog if you don't have a graduate maths degree.

fighterpilot 5y ago
Because Terry Tao is a celebrity. People find his blog after watching him on Youtube.
- strikelaserclaw 5y ago
  This is true, his video on gaps between prime numbers had over 2 million views. People find his genius fascinating even if they don't understand his work.
paulpauper 5y ago
large foreign readership , so English is not a primary language. probably also a lot of spam comments that get through. Those other sides also tend to have a fair share of low quality comments as well. A lot of troll bait or off topic stuff. I just don't read the comments, often I find that I am not missing out on much by not doing so.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> When I look at SSC/ACX, Shtetl-Optimized, Marginal Revolution, etc. the comments are mostly constructive, engaged, and well-informed. There are constructive, well-informed comments on Marginal Revolution, but I wouldn't call them the majority...
fossuser 5y ago
Tao has gotten a lot more public media attention for the most part (Netflix, shows, TV, news, etc.) than any of the others which remain more niche. I'd guess as a result the audiences of the others are better selected to lean more high quality.

Fk_ttao 5y ago

Does he still hate gays?

kenjackson 5y ago
This is off-topic, although I am curious -- what source do you have for this?
- categorynerd 5y ago
  As a highly paid employee of UCLA, his salary information is publicly known: https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2018/university-of-california/terence-tao/ https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2018/university-o... White supremacists in California banned affirmative action in 1996 by ballot measure, and that has resulted in near extermination of Black and Latinx students: https://www.npr.org/2013/06/23/194656555/what-happens-without-affirmative-action-the-story-of-ucla https://www.npr.org/2013/06/23/194656555/what-happens-withou... We don’t need Whites who ask what our sources are; we need reparations.
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adem 5y ago
Look at the username, probably a troll.

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cushychicken 5y ago

If there's anyone I'll listen respectfully to about the value of hard, diligent work, it's Terence Tao. Reminds me of Richard Hamming talking about his professional envy of John Tukey: One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office! From "You and Your Research": https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

paulpauper 5y ago
Remidns me of the 'cheat code' of reading a chapter ahead
TrackerFF 5y ago
TIL Bode, Hamming, Shannon, Tukey, et. al all worked at Bell Labs around the same time. Wonder what the culture must've been like, those are all household names in signal processing, control, information theory.
- spenczar5 5y ago
  Richard Hamming wrote a book, "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering", which - despite its name - is more or less a memoir of his own scientific career. It's a fun read if you're interested in that culture.
  - breck 5y ago
    Best book I've read in a long while. I hope to reread every few years.
  - yesenadam 5y ago
    From the preface, "After many years of pressure and encouragement from friends, I decided to write up the graduate course in engineering I teach at the U.S.Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. ...In this series of lectures I try to communicate to students what cannot be said in words—the essence of style in science and engineering. ...I have found that the personal story is far, far more effective than the impersonal one; hence there is necessarily an aura of “bragging” in the book that is unavoidable." You can watch him giving that 31-lecture course in 1995 here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30 Enjoy! It's wonderful. (The last lecture is the famous "You and Your Research" that he gave many times.) I've really enjoyed his books too, from Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers to Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics. They're all drenched with experience.

beny23 5y ago

Of course the same applies not just in the field of maths. The same could be said about software engineering just swap “projects” for tickets…

TameAntelope 5y ago

I've held for a long time that you must know the rules quite well before you're "allowed" to break them, and I think this reinforces my opinion on that. Additionally, I think the obsession over "intelligence" and "natural ability" is vastly overstated, in general. It absolutely helps, and it compounds, to be smart, but a person who "works hard" is infinitely more valuable to their colleagues than a smart person who doesn't, and tries to rely on raw intellect. My problem, and I wonder if others have this issue as well, is how hard it is to know these things intellectually, and also apply them to my life. I just cannot, for the life of me, maintain a "work hard" mindset. I'm still trying, but I very often fail at this, and its frustrating because I know how valuable it is to being good at what I do.

markus_zhang 5y ago
It really depends on what you define as natural abilities. The ability to work hard for 12 hours without break every day IMHO is as "natural" as having a good IQ.
- zqna 5y ago
  One attribute of having "high IQ" is being able to understand the vanity of working "hard".
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    There is a line between IQ and wisdom, and wisdom is learned through experience and time.
    - beckingz 5y ago
      I prefer reading.
albatross13 5y ago
It's kind of a double edged sword- I've worked with a few people that "work hard" and "get things done", only to find out once they leave (or go on vacation) that now we have to untangle a 600 line bash script that's integral to production. I'm being a bit hyperbolic here, but the gist of my point is: not everyone who works hard is worth keeping around, especially if their hard work leads to an un-managable mess in the future.

giantg2 5y ago

It's probably good advice, and maybe my dissent is just due to my burn out, but... I'm tired of hearing "work hard". Very often, working hard does not lead to success. It sure as shit didn't work out that way for me. There are many people who do not work hard and make tons of money in things like NFT, crypto, securities, office politics, scams, etc. It seems like luck is the shared variable... of which I have none.

spoonjim 5y ago
His advice isn’t for how to get rich in crypto, it’s for how to succeed in academic mathematics. I can’t imagine that anyone has ever “lucked” their way into that.
- giantg2 5y ago
  It's not luck alone. You can still work hard in math and fail. Didn't get the grant you needed - tough luck. Want tenure? Better be ready to play politics. Etc
  - deleted 5y ago
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- paulpauper 5y ago
  same principle applies. a lot of people vying for something in which few can succeed
- sdenton4 5y ago
  Hard work is necessary but not sufficient. Picking the right problems to work on is also necessary, and difficult to get right. Worming in on a hard unsolved problem that is eventually incredibly important is the scientific equivalent of winning the lottery, and we know lots of examples of this. Recently, mRNA vaccines, neural networks, and the twin primes conjecture come to mind. But there are doubtless many, many other examples of people working on a possibly-fundamental problem which never actually break through, and we never hear about it. But I would argue it's still worth making a concerted effort to identify good problems to solve, and specifically thinking about what makes a good 'hard problem.' It's much easier to make progress in an under-studied area, simply because the low hanging fruit haven't been eaten yet. The danger, of course, is that understudied things may be understudied for a reason: they're not actually relevant to anything else, or there's some secret impediment and many others have already failed. By contrast, cracking away at ridiculous subproblems from the last generation of academics is almost always a dead end, imo; you're competing with people who already know the field extremely well, the low hanging fruit has been picked, and the obvious roads to relevance have probably already been well-explored. Unsolved problems in a long-standing discipline are often unsolved because the right tools are missing or it's impossible within the existing paradigm... Or the problem is just irrelevant, relative to the amount of effort needed to solve it. ramble ramble ramble

unholiness 5y ago

Seems to have the hacker news hug of death. Cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Tr5R5Jh7rTcJ:https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/work-hard/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Tr5R5J...

jarenmf 5y ago

Reading alone would take some serious hard work. To make any meaningful contribution in any field you have to do some serious reading (and understanding) to bring yourself up to date with the field.

bserge 5y ago

On a related note, this always trickles down to low level managers who then proceed to tell it to the floor workers. Trying to motivate a cleaner, assembly operative, driver, cashier, warehouse operative, packer and other low level workers with it is like telling them to go fuck themselves. It sounds like bullshit. It is bullshit. No one fucking loves these jobs. There's nothing to aspire to. Working hard means just killing yourself faster (but not fast enough).

paulpauper 5y ago
what if you work hard and derive meaning from your work
- themacguffinman 5y ago
  I can certainly understand how one can derive meaning from a trade or profession, but I would find it difficult to believe that anyone could really do that for menial jobs like a cashier or warehouse packer. These jobs are dead ends, they don't have a meaningful spectrum of quality and you're little more than a warm body. A comedian (David Mitchell) once joked that he's proud of the UK's terrible service reputation. It doesn't seem honest or appropriate for service staff to be so happy and enthusiastic, why would they be? There's very little to be happy about.
  - rednerrus 5y ago
    The only way to make those jobs manageable is to create some sense of meaning and mastery out of them. You're always striving to do a little bit better job. You remind yourself of the importance of what you're doing. If you have a good manager, they're trying to find ways to give you autonomy in what you're doing.
  - airstrike 5y ago
    > A comedian (David Mitchell) once joked that he's proud of the UK's terrible service reputation. It doesn't seem honest or appropriate for service staff to be so happy and enthusiastic, why would they be? There's very little to be happy about. I remember watching this episode on TV but I haven't the faintest idea what the show was called... though it was incredibly funny

categorynerd 5y ago

In which yet another Asian male from a Californian university lectures the rest of us on the importance of ‘working hard’, even as he draws a six figure salary from an institution that stands on land stolen from the Natives, while systematically marginalizing Blacks and Latinx. Math is indeed racist.

OtomotO 5y ago

I will always work smart, rather than working hard. I don't define myself or my self worth solely via the work I do. Always. But then again, in my culture it's not as extreme as in other parts of the world.

didibus 5y ago

I don't really know if I believe in hard work. I feel more inclined to see things from the motivation school of thought. When you're motivated, all work is easy. The "hard" feeling comes from pushing through doing something you are not motivated to do. And the thing is, I don't know if anyone is successful at that. I feel most success comes from people who had the motivation for it. Can you force yourself or others through work that they're not motivated to do and actually expect it to deliver on breakthroughs?

themacguffinman 5y ago
I'm fairly confident that when the article says "hard work", it just means "a lot of work". The article later mentions that more motivation will help you work harder. The point is that motivated or not, high quality output requires a lot of work. Working a lot on a particular thing is still going to be easier for some and harder for others.
- didibus 5y ago
  Ya, I agree with you 100%. But I think this is the problem with calling it "hard work". If working a lot on thing X is something I don't struggle with, and in fact I enjoy and find fun, and am really motivated to do, than it's actually pretty easy for me to put in a lot of time and effort into it. Isn't it weird then that I'd go and tell others I'm a "hard worker"? I just find it a bit deceiving. Like people can hear that and think, damn, this person is able to work through something they hate doing, have no motivation to work on, and where there are other things they'd rather do, yet somehow they can power through using raw will and focus on putting tons of time and effort into it? Well damn, I must be a weak minded person then. Personally, I think that second interpretation is common, and it does more harm than good in my opinion. Every time I have put a lot of time and effort into something, I either really enjoyed the thing, or I was really motivated by the outcome. In both cases, that made it pretty easy for me to put in a lot of work.
mym1990 5y ago
I actually believe the complete opposite. People who rely on motivation to get them through to the finish line in long term situations probably never make it there. Motivation is a very fleeting feeling unless you find something that utterly sets your soul on fire, and I would almost say it is a crutch for many. Sometimes you're going to get up in the morning and you're just going to have to push through. And there will almost always be small/medium/large pieces of work that are simply not fun(and you can't always delegate). The people who succeed will be the ones that have developed a mindset of resilience and just doing what needs to get done.

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chrisweekly 5y ago

See also the classic book "The Hacker Ethic" by Pikka Himanen (foreword by Linus Torvalds). https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4690 https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4690

brailsafe 5y ago

So if you are already a child prodigy, born into a family of prodigies, specifically within Mathematics, and you want that PHD, gotta keep grinding.

courtf 5y ago
It's also a lot easier to work hard when you are handed access to every academic resource on the planet before you hit puberty. His life story is the most blatant counterexample to this article imaginable. Sounds like a case of deep denial.
- wheelinsupial 5y ago
  Maybe an article he wrote called A Close Call: How a Near Failure Propelled Me to Succeed [1] might be of interest to you. "After many nerve-wracking minutes of closed-door de- liberation, the examiners did decide to (barely) pass me; however, my advisor gently explained his disappointment at my performance, and how I needed to do better in the future. I was still largely in a state of shock—this was the first time I had performed poorly on an exam that I was genuinely interested in performing well in." "In retrospect, nearly failing the generals was probably the best thing that could have happened to me at the time." [1] https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202007/rnoti-p1007.pdf https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202007/rnoti-p1007.pdf
  - courtf 5y ago
    Is this supposed to be a tale of overcoming adversity, almost failing some exam? The stakes are so low I can barely identify the conflict in the story. Actually failing something of actual importance and then overcoming the odds to succeed anyway would be a little less boring. He sounds like he's lived his entire life in a university basement and mistook the petty challenges of academia for real life.
    - wheelinsupial 5y ago
      The original poster made a comment about grinding to get a math PhD. You said Terrence Tao is a blatant counter example to that. I posted (I'll concede that I probably didn't display great quotes from the article or provide enough context) an article about Terrence Tao almost failing his PhD generals exam, which I thought would lend some evidence to the idea of grinding for the PhD, which is the original point under discussion. Since he passed the generals and he didn't prepare very well for it, may be you're right and that is weak evidence. I think the article does provide some evidence that others who were studying for their PhD in math at Princeton while Terrence Tao was studying for his were not relying solely on intelligence alone. Perhaps I'm wrong on that point too. However, I don't think you're trying to criticize the article as bad evidence in relation to achieving a math PhD. You're going on about academia having low stakes and academia not representing real life. If I'm mis-characterizing this, then I apologize. I do believe you're moving the goal posts in this discussion. The original article posted is about math graduate school. That's all. It's not about real life. The first two sentences in the article establish this point. > Relying on intelligence alone to pull things off at the last minute may work for a while, but, generally speaking, at the graduate level or higher it doesn’t. > One needs to do a serious amount of reading and writing, and not just thinking, in order to get anywhere serious in mathematics;

alexashka 5y ago

It's interesting to see what qualified as worthy of a blog post not so long ago. It takes time and effort to do difficult tasks? You shouldn't overwork? What new insights, let me blog about it :) For those who don't know, the 8 hour work days and holidays were talked about by Adam Smith more than 200 years ago. The reason that system was put in place was because letting people work as much as they wanted led to over-exertion and injuries, lowering productivity. That was for physical labor by the way. In another 200 years, I expect people to finally realize that thinking is harder than repetitive physical labor and one can't do more than a few hours of it, per day. Until then we'll have 'burn out' blog posts and people reading and posting on HackerNews/reddit/twitter during work hours.

m0zg 5y ago

Same thing in a lot fewer words, for "visual thinkers" among us: https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ This holds up really well, in any STEM field, not just mathematics. Celebrate those dimples on the surface of human knowledge, if you can, in fact, even make them. Very few people can, and our future depends on them.

tacojimjennings 5y ago

I just come here for the self help blog posts honestly

keithalewis 5y ago

I work hard to be lazy. Put in the effort once and keep leveraging off of it.

ramraj07 5y ago
That’s exactly what Terry advices against. Not because you owe the company or anyone else that, but it’s possible you might regret not doing so yourself. My advisor described it as “being too smart for your own good.”

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

At the end of the article, he references "The Gap" by Ira Glass. Someone made an excellent video, based on that[0]. Worth the watch (IMNSHO). It's very short, and very encouraging. [0] https://vimeo.com/85040589 https://vimeo.com/85040589

France_is_bacon 5y ago

>"It is also important to direct your effort in a fruitful direction rather than a fruitless one" This is actually the most critical sentence in the entire article. I read an article somewhere, maybe 25 or 30 years ago, that was about this exact topic. Some successful scientist, I don't even remember his name now, was asked about his success. He said that others worked just as hard and diligently. But his skill was in selecting the projects that had a high degree of probability of success. He would watch others in his profession and see how they made horrible choices in the selection of their work. The unsuccessful people made a series of unwise choices. Tilting at windmills that had exceptionally poor chance of success, areas where there was no funding available or very difficult to get funding, and all sorts of other problems. The same thing is true with everything. For example, lots of people start businesses that are shitty selection right off the bat - they have almost zero chance of success before they even begin. All teh perfect execution and hard work will be for naught. The founder has blinders on. You always hear about the successes. People always say false things like, the idea is 1%, execution is 99% of it. Not true. It's more like, the idea is worth 99%, and the execution is the other 99% of success. Trust me, I've seen a LOT of great execution on shit ideas and the company goes down the drain. You just never hear of them. And by the way, this is in regards to ideas that are actually have a corporation started around them, as opposed to just aimlessly talking about ideas. Anyways, take what you will from what I just wrote.