The Hardest Working People on the Planet

One of the biggest surprises for me when I went to work for a big corp was that people didn't actually work harder in startups than in large corporations. Perhaps there's a bit of sample bias; people at Google tend to work harder than at other big companies, at least according to my Noogler classmates who used to work at Adobe and Intuit. But I know people at Yahoo and IBM that work even harder than I do at Google, and I work about as hard at Google as when I was working with a YC startup. And yet they at IBM accomplish far less than we do at Google, and we at Google (on a person-for-person basis) accomplish far less than the average successful YC startup.<p>I've been trying to put my finger on why that is, and I think it all comes down to misallocation of resources. Over time, work becomes focused inwards at a large corporation, dedicated to supporting the inner world of the corporation instead of the outer world of the market. Without market discipline, decisions get made that seem logical to the decision-maker but are actually very pessimal from an efficiency standpoint. Some team might create an API that's a continual tax on its users, but without the ability to bypass it and use or write an alternative, there's no way around it. Or some VP may make a decision that seems sensible at a time, but mortgages future development, and without the ability for that initial project to fail and get completely reverted, you'll never arrive at the optimal solution.<p>Working hard is generally a necessary but not sufficient condition for success, and it's nowhere near a straight-line correlation. Far more important is to pay attention to <i>what</i> you're working on, and make sure that it's actually important. You can't succeed with zero hard work, but you can get much farther with a little smarts and little hard work than with a lot of hard work.

Maybe it's where and when I grew up, but no job that largely involves sitting in front of a computer and occasionally talking with (or at) people really strikes me as "hard work" (even if you add copious quanitities of long-haul travel).<p>The farmers and fishermen I knew growing up worked <i>incredibly</i> hard but I honestly don't remember a <i>single</i> one of them telling anyone about how hard they work. However, having worked on farms and (briefly) on a North Sea trawler when I was a student I can honestly say nothing you can do inside in the nice and warm can possibly come close - remember that the guys running farms and fishing trawlers are running businesses as well, usually on pretty damned low margins or unpredictable cashflow.<p>Edit: Not sure which "personalities" I'd have on a "working hard" list - but it would probably include this chap:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranulph_Fiennes" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranulph_Fiennes</a>

Bad title... What about people working in African mines where they work long hours performing heavy physical labor under dangerous conditions. Even risking their health. Just to survive and give food to their families.<p>There are dozens of these answers where this kind of 'slave' labor is still going on.<p>So stop tooting the horn of those hard working entrepreneurs (I'm one of them). And please try not to offend other people with these kinds of titles and articles.

This isn't inspiring, this is neurotic.<p>Mental illness is no way to live.<p>And for every captain of industry who worked 24/7, there are plenty who relax, enjoy life, and still manage to move mountains.

&#62; Let’s do the math. If you worked from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week, you’d still be two hours short of 100 hours.<p>... and you'd never see your children.

<p><pre><code> Y'all don't know my struggle Y'all can't match my hustle You can't catch my hustle You can't fathom my love dude Lock yourself in a room doin' five beats a day for three summers That's a different world like Kree Summers I deserve to do these numbers - Kanye West, Spaceship</code></pre>

I loved this article, truly inspirational, specially the last one, and there is only one possible explanation for all these(and all the other hard working people in the world):<p>Passion.<p>If there is something that you love, whatever it is, from your work to your family, you would do almost anything. Thanks for sharing.

I don't think the author misses any of the points that have been brought up as critiques of the article. He says in the second paragraph that "hard work is completely irrelevant is you’re not working smart and being productive." Also, "hard work is also counter-productive if you’re sacrificing your health to an extreme degree and if the increase in quantity of hours worked is leading to a decrease in your creativity."<p>I think the best summary of the article is a quote from the quote of Seth Godin: "[Hard work] begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with."<p>This article is not about physical labor or spinning your wheels without making progress. It's not about burning yourself out. It's about doing the shit that other people don't want to do. It's what Paul Graham was getting at when he wrote, "If you have two choices, choose the harder." It's what Thomas Edison was getting at when he said, "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration."<p>There are people who sit around on HN or Reddit all day not doing anything productive. Actually focusing on work for long periods of time is hard. There are anecdotal statistics that the average 40-hour-a-week worker works 1.5 hours a day. Hard work means working all 8.

Get shit done, don't work hard. Hard work mean nothing, especially if it described as not having free time.

"From my perspective, humans are learning machines, as evidenced by the totality of human output."<p>While I think I agree with you, this argument is not very strong imo - it takes only a very small amount of people ('outliers' or 'abnormals' if you want) to think of new things that are then implemented by all the others. And this even includes much 'research' that is being done today - you only need 1 guy to drive a lab of 50 who do the things this one guy has imagined. And yet those 50 are also called 'researchers', and are already considered at the 'extreme' end of the curve of people able to self-mobilize.

Work smarter not harder.

As I read this, I am reminded of a thought that occurred to me this weekend: work is what you have to do, passion is what you want to do. Also, I don't think I would claim that anyone who is working 100 hours a week is living. Work to live, not live to work.

This was posted as a comment by Ryan Willis, but is probably worth watching: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k74r1aoMc0" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k74r1aoMc0</a>

I would add Madonna, Oprah, Obama, and doctors to that list.

Thanks a lot for posting this wonderful article. Very very inspiring.

<i>The edge is getting so jazzed about what you do, you just spent 24 hours straight working on a project and you thought it was a couple hours.</i><p>I always lose interest when I read something like that. The last time I experienced this flow state was in college (or just after), when I was still coding entirely within a domain that I knew. Once I got into the real world, things got hard, domains changed with every assignment, and flow state became impossible.