> 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<p>Worth highlighting, for those of you that are skipping through.
If there's anyone I'll listen respectfully to about the value of hard, diligent work, it's Terence Tao.<p>Reminds me of Richard Hamming talking about his professional envy of John Tukey:<p><i>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!</i><p>From "You and Your Research": <a href="https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html</a>
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.<p>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.
It's probably good advice, and maybe my dissent is just due to my burn out, but...<p>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.
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.<p>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?
See also the classic book "The Hacker Ethic" by Pikka Himanen (foreword by Linus Torvalds).<p><a href="https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4690" rel="nofollow">https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4690</a>
Seems to have the hacker news hug of death. Cached version:
<a href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Tr5R5Jh7rTcJ:https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/work-hard/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" rel="nofollow">https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Tr5R5J...</a>
At the end of the article, he references "The Gap" by Ira Glass. Someone made an excellent video, based on that[0].<p>Worth the watch (IMNSHO). It's very short, and very encouraging.<p>[0] <a href="https://vimeo.com/85040589" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/85040589</a>
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.
I will always work smart, rather than working hard.<p>I don't define myself or my self worth solely via the work I do.<p>Always. But then again, in my culture it's not as extreme as in other parts of the world.
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.<p>Additionally, I think the obsession over "intelligence" and "natural ability" is vastly overstated, in general. It <i>absolutely</i> helps, and it compounds, to be smart, but a person who "works hard" is <i>infinitely</i> more valuable to their colleagues than a smart person who doesn't, and tries to rely on raw intellect.<p>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.
On a related note, this always trickles down to low level managers who then proceed to tell it to the floor workers.<p>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.<p>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).
>"It is also important to direct your effort in a fruitful direction rather than a fruitless one"<p>This is actually the most critical sentence in the entire article.<p>I read an article somewhere, maybe 25 or 30 years ago, that was about this exact topic.<p>Some successful scientist, I don't even remember his name now, was asked about his success.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Anyways, take what you will from what I just wrote.
Same thing in a lot fewer words, for "visual thinkers" among us: <a href="https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/" rel="nofollow">https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/</a><p>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.
It's interesting to see what qualified as worthy of a blog post not so long ago.<p>It takes time and effort to do difficult tasks? You shouldn't overwork?<p>What new insights, let me blog about it :)<p>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.<p>That was for physical labor by the way. In another 200 years, I expect people to finally realize that thinking is <i>harder</i> than repetitive physical labor and one can't do more than a few hours of it, per day.<p>Until then we'll have 'burn out' blog posts and people reading and posting on HackerNews/reddit/twitter during work hours.