Author: Gaurav Sharma

Excerpts from the essay ‘How to Work Hard‘ by Paul Graham

There’s a faint xor between talent and hard work.

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.

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.

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.

I do make some amount of effort to focus on important topics. Many problems have a hard core at the center, surrounded by easier stuff at the edges. Working hard means aiming toward the center to the extent you can. Some days you may not be able to; some days you’ll only be able to work on the easier, peripheral stuff. But you should always be aiming as close to the center as you can without stalling.

The bigger question of what to do with your life is one of these problems with a hard core. There are important problems at the center, which tend to be hard, and less important, easier ones at the edges. So as well as the small, daily adjustments involved in working on a specific problem, you’ll occasionally have to make big, lifetime-scale adjustments about which type of work to do. And the rule is the same: working hard means aiming toward the center — toward the most ambitious problems.

The more ambitious types of work will usually be harder, but although you should not be in denial about this, neither should you treat difficulty as an infallible guide in deciding what to do.

As well as learning the shape of real work, you need to figure out which kind you’re suited for.

What you’re suited for depends not just on your talents but perhaps even more on your interests. A deep interest in a topic makes people work harder than any amount of discipline can.

It can be harder to discover your interests than your talents. There are fewer types of talent than interest, and they start to be judged early in childhood, whereas interest in a topic is a subtle thing that may not mature till your twenties, or even later.

The best test of whether it’s worthwhile to work on something is whether you find it interesting. That may sound like a dangerously subjective measure, but it’s probably the most accurate one you’re going to get. You’re the one working on the stuff. Who’s in a better position than you to judge whether it’s important, and what’s a better predictor of its importance than whether it’s interesting?

For this test to work, though, you have to be honest with yourself. Indeed, that’s the most striking thing about the whole question of working hard: how at each point it depends on being honest with yourself.

Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It’s a complicated, dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point.

You have to understand the shape of real work,

see clearly what kind you’re best suited for,

aim as close to the true core of it as you can,

accurately judge at each moment both what you’re capable of and how you’re doing,

and put in as many hours each day as you can without harming the quality of the result.

This network is too complicated to trick.

But if you’re consistently honest and clear-sighted, it will automatically assume an optimal shape, and you’ll be productive in a way few people are.