Daily Productive Sharing 947 - On Work Hard

One helpful tip per day:)

Paul Graham analyzed how to work hard:

1. 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.
2. If great talent and great drive are both rare, then people with both are rare squared.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. There's a kind of solidity to real work. It's not all writing the Principia, but it all feels necessary.
7. Once you know the shape of real work, you have to learn how many hours a day to spend on it.
8. The only way to find the limit is by crossing it.
9. Honesty is critical here, in both directions: you have to notice when you're being lazy, but also when you're working too hard.
10. Finding the limit of working hard is a constant, ongoing process, not something you do just once.
11. Both the difficulty of the work and your ability to do it can vary hour to hour, so you need to be constantly judging both how hard you're trying and how well you're doing.
12. I only have to push myself occasionally when I'm starting a project or when I encounter some sort of check. That's when I'm in danger of procrastinating.
13. But once I get started on one, I don't have to push myself to work, because there's always some error or omission already pushing me.
14. Working hard means aiming toward the center to the extent you can.
15. The bigger question of what to do with your life is one of these problems with a hard core.
16. The rule is the same: working hard means aiming toward the center — toward the most ambitious problems.
17. 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.
18. Some of the best work is done by people who find an easy way to do something hard.
19. As well as learning the shape of real work, you need to figure out which kind you're suited for.
20. What you're suited for depends not just on your talents but perhaps even more on your interests.
21. 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.
22. The difficulty of figuring out what to work on varies enormously from one person to another. That's one of the most important things I've learned about work since I was a kid.
23. If you're working hard but not getting good enough results, you should switch.
24. History is full of examples of people who misjudged the importance of what they were working on.
25. The best test of whether it's worthwhile to work on something is whether you find it interesting.
26. 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.
27. 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.
28. 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.
29. 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.

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Paul Graham 分享了他关于努力的看法：

1. 要做到最好，你需要这三者：出色的天赋，大量的练习，以及非常努力的尝试。
2. 如果说伟大的天赋和强烈的驱动力都很罕见，那么同时具备这两者的人就更为罕见。
3. 既然你无法真正改变你拥有的天赋多少，那么努力工作就成为了你唯一可以改变的选项。
4. 你必须学会不对自己撒谎，不拖延（这是对自己撒谎的一种形式），不分心，以及在事情出错时不放弃。
5. 找到极限的唯一方法是挑战它。
6. 这里诚实至关重要，双向都是：你必须注意到自己何时在偷懒，但也要注意到自己何时工作过度。
7. 找到努力工作的极限是一个持续不断的过程，而不是只做一次的事情。
8. 工作的难度和你完成工作的能力可能会时刻变化，所以你需要不断地判断自己尝试的有多努力以及做得有多好。
9. 但一旦我开始了某件事，我就不需要强迫自己去工作，因为总有一些错误或遗漏已经在推动我了。
10. 有一部分最好的结果是通过事半功倍达成的。
11. 你需要弄清楚哪种类型的工作最适合你。
12. 你适合什么不仅取决于你的才能，或许更多地取决于你的兴趣。
13. 弄清楚要做什么工作因人而异。这是我从小到大关于工作学到的最重要的事情之一。
14. 如果你努力工作但成果不够好，你应该调整方向。
15. 历史上充满了人们误判工作重要性的例子。
16. 判断是否值得在某事上工作的最佳测试是你是否觉得它有趣。
17. 事实上，关于努力工作的整个问题最引人注目的是：在每一点上它都依赖于对自己诚实。
18. 你必须理解真正工作的形态，清楚地看到你最适合哪种类型，尽可能地瞄准它的真正核心，准确地判断每一刻你能做什么以及你的表现如何，并且每天投入尽可能多的时间，而不会 burn out。

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