How to Work Hard

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| June 2021It 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.
[1]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.
[2]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.
[3]
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.
[4]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.
[5]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.
[6]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

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