Work like heaven
Yesterday Dustin Curtis [1] in the post titled ‘Work like hell’ reminded everyone about the following quote from Elon Musk: ”If other people are putting in 40-hour workweeks, and you’re putting in 100-hour workweeks, then, even if you’re doing the same thing, you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve”. The real life Tony Stark and the founder of PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors is known for his crazy work hours splitting his time between running two companies. The Hacker News community immediately jumped into the discussion throwing all the true things we’ve already heard a million times:
- It’s not about the number of hours you put, it’s about the quality of those hours.
- Work smart, not hard.
- It’s the choice between achieving greatness or living in a comfortable mediocrity.
- The Brook’s Law, or ‘Nine women can’t make a baby in one month’.
- “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it”.
- Working 100 hours a week is not sustainable, burnout & depression are waiting around the corner.
I completely agree that these 100-hour workweek schedules shouldn’t be glorified. Nor should the 4-hour workweeks. The whole debate wanders around the polar views and completely ignores the entire spectrum between the extremes. Elon Musk is absolutely sincere in his statement. It’s reasonable for him to say that ashe truly found his life’s work. Because when you do, you’re restless, you can’t just sit and drink piña colada on the beach all day long. You have the calling which pulls you forward. To express yourself honestly through your art, through your science. To leave the legacy and make something incredible. When you found your life’s work, you would have to exert an enormous discipline to stay still. It’s much easier to just follow the calling.
People who pull 100-hour workweeks for years are not necessarily the hardest-working people in the world. It’s not about the will power either. It would have been depleted [2] a long time ago. Here’s what Drew Houston said in his commencement speech at MIT this year:
‘It took me a while to get it, but the hardest-working people don’t work hard because they’re disciplined. They work hard because working on an exciting problem is fun. So after today, it’s not about pushing yourself; it’s about finding your tennis ball, the thing that pulls you. It might take a while, but until you find it, keep listening for that little voice’.
I can’t agree more.
On the other hand, we have Cal Newport [3] who has the point when he argues that ‘follow your passion’ is bad advice. ‘From my experience studying this issue’, he says, ‘passion is not something that you discover and then match a job to; it is, instead, something that grows over time along with your skills’. I don’t agree with Cal 100%, as something has to be said of natural talents and natural inclinations. You can become a grandmaster by sheer perseverance and hard work, but you can’t be the world champion without raw talent. I guess, it’s another choice you have to make: do you want to be in the top 1% in your field [4] or are you satisfied with being in the top 5% and enjoying well-balanced life [5]?
I agree that in the search of this mystical life’s work you can’t just jump from one occupation to another giving up every 6 months or so. But you also can’t ignore your natural strengths and weaknesses. There are more than a hundred cool ideas in the list of ‘startup ideas’ [6] I keep since 2008 or so. But I know that I’m not going to work on most of them as they are either not ‘interesting’ [7], or don’t involve my natural strengths. Another sign I shouldn’t be doing them is that I’m not particularly excited even writing about those ideas (not even executing) and I’m sure I would give up on them after the 4th hurdle [8].
So, if nothing worth putting 100 hours a week has come up yet, work harder to find it. There is no shortcut in finding your life’s work.
Follow me on Twitter: @suleimenov
Notes
[1] Creator of Svbtle.
[2] Dan Ariely. Understanding Ego Depletion.
[3] He writes a wonderful blog called ‘Study Hacks’ — one of my secret weapons behind the work-play balance I had during my enjoyable and intensive grad school years.
[4] Then pull Malcolm Gladwell.
[5] Then pull Tim Ferriss.
[6] Where ‘startup’ is not confined to the realms of founding companies. I define it more broadly as anything you create (a web/mobile app, a book, a movie, a series of paintings, a TV show, etc.) is essentially a startup.
[7] In the sense that even if everything goes right and I succeed, the success won’t be significant. The final destination doesn’t excite me, and it’s important that you don’t successfully climb the wrong wall.
[8] ”You have to have a lot of passion for what you do because if you don’t, any rational person would give up”. -Steve Jobs
