I like this, but also on some level I feel like it's nothing more than inspirational "rah-rah" garbage.
I wish he would have expanded on it.
A great example of the distinction from my younger days:
We had the game GranTurismo2 back when I was 12 or so.
We wanted the really fancy "best" car in the game.
The right way to get the good cars is to improve your skill and gain access to the higher level races that have bigger prizes.
That's the "hard work" part.
What we did instead was do one of the easy races over and over and over again for a couple days until we had enough saved up in the game to buy the car.
That's "long work"
It's stupid and boring and no fun.
If you want a fulfilling life, go for the "hard work".
Which I guess is also just a stupid "rah-rah" inspirational quip.
There was an MMO game called "Kingdom of Loathing" I played back in 2006.
The right way to get more money in the game is to improve your skills/equipment and gain access to the higher level areas that have bigger monsters/better loot. (hard work)
What we did instead was manually create hundreds of new accounts, complete the tutorial level and then send the tutorial prize to the main account for selling on the open market (long work).
Eventually I figured out how to create an "autoit" script that automated the process of creating a new account, completing the tutorial, and then sending the goods over to the main account. The main account was getting very wealthy, but I should have known I needed to launder the ill-gotten gains somehow because an admin (Multi Czar) eventually caught on and all the accounts (including the main one) got banned.
> What we did instead was manually create hundreds of new accounts, complete the tutorial level and then send the tutorial prize to the main account for selling on the open market (long work).
Haha, this reminds me of the Forum war days of Punchme.com [1], someone on our forum found out a bug to exploit in the gambling game that would 2x your money. After a while raiding on other forums got boring with all the best equipment maxed out, so we realized that selling the upgrades was a way more interesting use of our time, so like 5 of us decided to start marketing the in-game weapons to other forums/gangs for half of what the game charged.
The devs eventually found the bug and patched it, but for those of use that still had valid accounts (I opened 10, but most got shutdown due to the scheme) this turned out even better as the demand for weapons just kept going up and I was making over $100/day in passive income at its peak until the interest for the game dropped.
The thing that sticks out the most was some kid from Slovakia I sold weapons to him on credit; he 'promised' me he'd send the money once his mom set him up with a bank account and got his paypal account verified--it was all free to me so I did it not thinking much if he didn't follow up.
I completely forgot about it for weeks after I lost interest in the scheme due to school and work, so I logged into to my paypal account to buy something online and I saw he actually did send me the funds like a month later. It's one of those few times were no expectations placed but trust and faith are lived up to anyway.
Reminds me of a high-speed trading empire I built once in EVE Online. I got bored of the long work way of earning ISK, so I hacked the game client and built a network of accounts running in VMs, proxying their traffic through AWS to get unique IPs, all orchestrated carefully and cooperating to pull off the overall trading strategy by my central server. (hard work)
It got to the point where I had $200 billion ISK and my fortune was doubling every week. At black market conversion rates that was probably worth $20K a month if you could sell it all somehow.
However, at this point I was probably about 10% of the trading volume in all of Jita, so the game mods noticed me and banned me.
They didn't get all my accounts, just the main one, proving that my techniques for laundering game currency and using isolated VMs with their own IP was enough to prevent them from being connected.
However, at this point I didn't have the patience to do that all again, I went and got a job instead. (back to the long work)
Hard work takes over and replaces long work when innovation, new skills and modalities are center stage and repetitive tasks take a back seat. I'd consider any form of automation hard work.
Oblivion. Characters get better at a skill when they "use" that skill.
Coming from UnrealTournament I hated the sluggish movement and jumping. I created a keyboard macro to run in a circle, jump a few times. I edited the macro script to do this for hours.
After a night of sleep I came back to a character that had leveled up a few times! Cool!
And now all the creatures had leveled up.
And all I could do was run away and jump because my combat skills were useless...
Sneak. Start the Dark Brotherhood quest and sneak in a corner in the house. The NPC spends most of its time sleeping and will still give you points so just run that overnight and max it out
To be fair the boundaries blur a bit and that is where magic happens.
I don't mean magic like JRR Tolkien magic or whatever, I mean magic like David Copperfield magic, Penn & Teller magic.
You go to a restaurant, you ask for a thing, magically it appears in front of your very eyes and it is delicious. The secret was a lot of "long work" that went into the situation before you got there, so the cooks could be ready for anything you might order and could assemble it in a short time for you.
Magic is very often just a cleverly concealed patience. “How could she have known in advance that I was going to pick the jack of spades? That envelope has been in my hand the whole time and she has not touched it.” Well, if it really mattered, maybe she bought 52 decks of playing cards, filtered out the jack of spades from each one, and assembled a deck which only had the jack of spades in it. You thought you had a free choice, and you did, in the sense that you can get a model T in any color you want so long as it’s black. Of course the concealment takes some skill too, like maybe she unwrapped a different 52-card deck and threw out the jokers and instruction cards pointedly and then shuffled it before your eyes, then used some sleight of hand to switch the decks. But the point remains that the thing which makes it “magic” is the absurd backflips done out-of-sight. David Copperfield surely wouldn't make a Learjet in the middle of a ring of blindfolded people holding hands disappear by going out and hiring a quarter of those people to be stooges, having them disassemble their part of the circle and tow the plane out with a cable, and then reassemble the circle and interview the non-stooges for the camera, would he? OK, but he surely wouldn't go to the expense of building a rotating theater in order to vanish the statue of Liberty though right?
If you want to appear magical to others, a lot of it is going to be long work. Funny story, a lot of my physics education was spent in this way. We would get a problem, and my peers would sit there and scratch their heads and say “I wonder, what is the best way to solve this problem” and I would sit there and say “this is _a_ way to solve that problem, it’s not gonna be pretty and it’s gonna be painful but I will grind and grind and get an answer.” Then I would look at the answer and be like “that’s actually profoundly beautiful,” like maybe it’s the sort of answer which suggests that there is a duality between position and momentum space such that you could rotate one into the other, because it involves u x² + v p² for some u, v. Or maybe the answer is something divided by the total energy and I am like “oh maybe multiplying through by the total energy makes this derivation really really simple.”
And then since I know the answer I can reconstruct this beautiful argument and then I can write _that_ down as my final answer. Someone else sees this and thinks I am smart. Not as smart as I look! Hah. Then I learned that this is actually the basis for several cryptographic attacks called “meet in the middle;” often if you're trying to figure out the right path through a complex forest to an unknown solution you have to try N paths, but once you know where you are going then you can simultaneously work forwards from the starting point and backwards from the ending point and see which ones end up passing through the same point midway through the forest and you’ll succeed after only 2√N half-paths total because you get the product of (start attempts)×(finishing attempts) for the total number of paths you are trying through the forest.
> We had the game GranTurismo2 back when I was 12 or so.
Gameshark was the way to do that the real 'smart way,' also worth noting was that even back then you could share memorycard saved data if you had access to it with some clever devices.
This was my introduction to 'hacking' culture (soldering mod chips, ripping and burning games into ISOs followed that) and was really interesting to see so many homebrew solutions to challenges like these and kind of made the game(s) the side feature of what was taking place at the time.
The new PS5 version of GT, whatever number they're on now, looks more like GT1/2 than all of its later versions but much shinier.
I personally disliked the license(s) hurdle just using a controller, I breezed through them easily once we got a steering wheel and pedals and were actually kind of fun.
On one of the circular courses you could literally duct-tape the controller into the appropriate positions to grind out wins with one of the faster cars. Not a lot of points for these races but if you could set it and forget it. Is that hard-work or long-work? :)
You bet me to it. Suzuki Esceudo Pikes peak edition tuned to >1000bhp. Point it into the wall on the speedway and selotape the controller in place. You had a one in n chance of winning a formula one car. I think this is "lazy work" :P
I did the endurance race track with a car that I knew could win, set it on auto with the computer to do the 100-200 laps. These days I think you can speed up the auto play by 5-10x.
But doesn't years of long work lead up to hard work. Early in my career a lot of time was spend learning concepts, theory and practice. After 10 years of this, I started seeing the big picture, recognize patterns and make decisions.
This is a useful distinction, but it this misses what's actually hard about "hard work." The risk of failure is only 20% of the issue.
What's central is the fact that do hard work well, you need to temporarily tear apart the solution-forming systems that have served you adequately so far -- and put them back together in a different way. In the midst of this, there's genuine discomfort and nausea. Even if you know you'll eventually get it right, having everything in pieces on the floor is very jarring.
Finding your way through a lot of missteps, near misses and roadblocks takes a special sort of perseverance. I've done this long enough in my work that I get mordant joy from tracking the misses. Versions 2, 2A, 2B and 2C were dead-ends. It's on to Versions 3, 3A, etc.
Usually version 4E or so gets the job done. And it's elegant and I'm happy again. I had one epic struggle that went into the 7s. I ended up cracking it in a borrowed lab in Arizona, because the usual settings in NYC and CT were not getting me there.
Being patient and persistent at times like that is hard.
It is hard. After a few times around, you start to recognize the dreaded feeling. But then you realize you are closer to the other side than the way back and press on.
This makes me think of war time vs peace time. During a war, the govt will put engineers and architects into an R&D incubator with all the resources they need. To the engineers, the fact that there is a war is irrelevant, they aren't paying attention to that, they're just focussing on innovation because it's their job.
Couldn't this scenario be simulated, even without war? I think of bell labs.
It strange that innovative environments, filled with hard work, aren't a priority until its a matter of life or death (of a company, nations, etc.)
If a department is doing well, or even just fair, it will do everything it possibly can to prevent any sort of innovation. When innovation happens, new rules and safeguards are put into place to make sure it doesn't happen again. Of course they'll keep talking about how innovation is very important and rewarded all the while they're stamping it out.
Innovation is a rebellious act which is why it typically only happens in small startup environments. Occasionally a larger company will set up a "skunkworks" where it can be temporarily tolerated by hiding it from the view of the rest of the organization.
This is a remarkably myopic view of innovation that completely ignores the roles of government, research institutions and yes, large companies, in a huge chunk of all the innovations of the last 120 years.
Point of correction on Bell Labs. There was a war going on not a shooting shooty war, but a cold war that was motivating a lot of the research.
In war time the reason there is so much focus and emphasis is because a country is fighting for its survival, it forces efficiency and results in a brutal manner, because if you don't succeeded and out think and out maneuver the enemy people die.
In the Cold War the same tension and feeling of fighting for survival was present.
In my area, we had a massive overhaul of the hospital system thanks to COVID-19. Nurses used to do minimal work with patients, now they changed diapers of patients and helped them with everything. People with 11 AM appointments needed to come at 10.30 AM, not 6 AM... and parking and reception became more efficient too. Doctors were faster.
You'd think that the workload dropped, but it increased greatly. But this kind of change needed hospital leaders and politicians on board putting it as a high priority. Change is difficult, and most of the time people don't care enough to.
The book Peak Performance summarized that growth = rest + stress. Without the stress of a war, the system doesn't put innovation at a high enough priority, and you get an effect like the US faces, where universities and R&D departments are just a bottomless sink.
In war time patents are suspended or the government forces everyone to cross license. Along with the hard focused work, I think this is a big reason why tech advanced so much during WWI and WWII.
Not in my experience (JIEDDO/Paladin in OIF/OEF). The R&D lab seems like a peacetime concept. All the ideas, all the experimentation, all the hacks that turned into programs, came from the field, often lab guys that got sent forward. The labs had their part for sending new toys, but the pace was so much faster for hacking things together at the front lines.
Money is how we measure the worth of time spent. In that mindset doing hard, innovative work and failing is worse than doing nothing at all, because you lose both your time and money.
To the engineers, the fact that there is a war is irrelevant
I'm not sure this is true. In my point of view, engineers would typically outdo themselves on wartime because they know there are big immediate stakes to their work.
>Hard work is frightening. We shy away from hard work because inherent in hard work is risk. Hard work is hard because you might fail. You can’t fail at long work, you merely show up. You fail at hard work when you don’t make an emotional connection, or when you don’t solve the problem or when you hesitate.
I disagree with this, at least what the author classifies as risk. I'm more than happy to take on challenging work, work I am emotionally connected to and want to see succeed--then fail. I can deal with failure and progress on just fine because I have pretty iron clad motivation. I've worked in R&D environments most my life and I can assure you, research has a lot of failure if you're doing it correctly.
The risk that makes certain work "hard" vs others is that failure results in livelihood setbacks: not having food, not having a place to live, financial failure, health risks, not having any bit of job security, etc. Those to me are the real risks people shy away from when we talk about "hard" work.
Give me a difficult/creative problem or task and I can try for hours, days, weeks, months, years... to find a solution, but only if I know at the end of the day I'll have a reasonably comfortable life.
The way a lot of work is structured, I find "hard" work is that which has inherent livelihood risk to the person doing the work in some way, shape, or form. It could be health risk work (say a police officer), failed research resulting in lack of a job, or a poor new art collection that ruins the future career of an artist.
Our society needs to learn to be more accepting to to a few more degrees of failure than the hypercompetiveness currently allows. Less and less failure is being acceptable and it's completely unrealistic to hold all humans to these standards. Yes, we should reward high risk success but should we punish every form of failure as we often do? Sure, laziness can be masked under failure and abuse this leniency, but so can success.
I prefer the labels "predictable" vs "unpredictable" work. For example, I've been experience the difference between research and back-end web dev work lately, and the main difference is that for research you don't know if it will pan out, while for back-end work you're almost always making incremental progress towards the end-goal. But I wouldn't necessarily call research "harder", it's just different. It's usually more difficult conceptually, but there's also way less stuff you need to keep in your head at the same time.
I think the hard part is that unpredictable work has to be done more with discipline. Predictable work often originates from external requirements, and the external interest to the work gives you motivation. However, unpredictable work requires more intrinsic motivation (or discipline), as there is no external interest until you get some results.
It seems what is being called “hard work” here really is “expert work” which often can be no work at all, in that it rests on the shoulders of likely thousands of previous hours of long work, and can sometimes feel effortless. One seminal example of this Paula Scher’s 5 minute design of the Citigroup logo. https://link.medium.com/KuxBw6rJi9
For those who are musically inclined -- When learning to play a musical instrument (including voice), the distinction between long work and hard work is the difference between spending time and making progress. Long work is mindless practice; hard work is identifying weaknesses and using targeted practice to improve.
For those in marketing -- Long work is spending more on an advertising campaign; hard work is determining what increases the conversion rate.
For those in computer science or mathematics -- Long work is implementing a brute force approach to calculating a specific result; hard work is generalizing the problem and generating a class of results.
For students -- Long work is studying to pass a specific exam; hard work is internalizing the fundamental principles of a subject so you can derive answers regardless of the particular exam questions.
One thing I've found interesting is that the first time I do something related to tech as long as it isn't mind boggling frustrating cough Oracle cough I enjoy learning it. The second and third times it's tolerable, but if I have to keep doing something repeatedly the only way I can enjoy it any longer is by listening to an audiobook while doing it or by automating it.
As soon as I set myself to automating I realize that I like it again because now I am interacting with it in a new way.
Not sure setting up a k8s cluster qualifies as "hard work" the way the author describes it. It seems by "hard work" he means work requiring novelty, creativity or insight, not simply intellectual work.
Or emotional labor. But yeah, setting up k8s would not qualify. I thought there was an older version of the same general riff in Fast Company, which I can't find right now, but here is a blog post about a version that appeared in Free Prize Inside:
yes I think that's key, I imagine a typical 2 axis analysis for this, where one axis is hard/long and the other is passionate or not passionate about it.
But I think there are more dimensions to it, as the article points out sometimes we shy away from hard work, because it's uncertain and your identity is on stake, you can fail, and I agree it takes that leap.
I'd say it is a leap of faith, because sometimes you don't know if it is hard work that is relevant, and worth, or not, I've never been an academic, but I guess many PhD feel that way ?
What about "deep" work? The kind of work that requires you to understand the fundamentals of a complex system to be able to simplify/modify it for the better.
I think understanding a system enough to modify/extend/repair it would be "wide" work. If one is dipping in thoroughly enough to truly understand all components and be able to build such a system that is also open to later modification - that is "deep" work.
Seth is always pithy and thus leaves a lot of room for interpretation, but I do find this an interesting prompt.
"Hard" is, of course, very subjective and depends a lot on the person and the project. What's hard for me may not be hard for someone else due to skillset, personal risk, time pressure, mindset, etc. and vice versa.
What's created hard work for me in the course of founding a startup is constantly balancing delivery timelines against a lack of resources and deep skills on the team. Having to invent my way out of situations I'm not technically qualified to handle where there is real risk to the business in being wrong or late has been harrowing, but also a very effective way to grow my skillset.
I think it’s what the “failure” would mean for a person that makes it hard, part of the fixed mindset Carol Dweck is talking about, i.e. only seeking validation of what one thinks of oneself.
there are two other salient differences between hard work and long work - hard work when the person is skillful enough to do it is energizing, long work is always draining.
Only if you're using someone else's definition of hard instead of your own.
If by 'energizing' you mean morale-boosting, yes. But hard work is generally taxing. You are paying for long-term happiness with short term pain. Having slain a dragon on Thursday, you are likely to be in high spirits on Tuesday. But for the rest of the day and possibly tomorrow, you're may be sitting here doing menial tasks or reading documentation.
Our jobs revolve around convincing machines to do the long work for us.
I don't think I'll ever understand why so many of us are perfectly content doing the same long work over and over again. Do you know what computers are for?
Never really thought of computers as needing convincing but come to think of it it takes about as many tries to convince my computer to do want I want as it takes to convince my son. Hmm..
I wish he would have expanded on it.
A great example of the distinction from my younger days:
We had the game GranTurismo2 back when I was 12 or so.
We wanted the really fancy "best" car in the game.
The right way to get the good cars is to improve your skill and gain access to the higher level races that have bigger prizes.
That's the "hard work" part.
What we did instead was do one of the easy races over and over and over again for a couple days until we had enough saved up in the game to buy the car.
That's "long work"
It's stupid and boring and no fun.
If you want a fulfilling life, go for the "hard work".
Which I guess is also just a stupid "rah-rah" inspirational quip.