How to Work Hard - Paul Graham  ## Metadata - Author: **Paul Graham** - Full Title: How to Work Hard - Category: #articles - Tags: #business - URL: http://www.paulgraham.com/hwh.html ## Highlights - 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." ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hh82azhyn95qnf0pmbrajmqp)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hh87atzvx5v12agmawkbsge6)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hh82mrtm38qg841ygv0zfkm3)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hh82phjypkh6q1q2gdrzn5y4)) - The only way to find the limit is by crossing it ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hh87f0rq2dk92pkp0y0bcdvq)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hh82ssjcjzgwasw0t7z15pan)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hh82t8re6kvr1ebapsx0cfej)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hh82xtvpdjz9qtajwprfpe05)) - 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? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hh88229cmwszxgfxkczbay3j)) - 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](http://www.paulgraham.com/disc.html) induced by hindsight bias. There was no voice calling to him that he could have heard. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hh884jrb2xg1m3m73gf9w52y))