Hard Things Over Hard Work

Dumbledore was a wise person; he said, "There are two choices, the easy and the right".

The last essay talked about 'Hard Work', something I deeply believe in because it was a lesson I learned the hard way (no pun intended). While I did touch upon the concept of hard things in my previous email, I didn't do it enough justice. I would like to rephrase my original hypothesis too —Doing 'Hard Things' takes precedence over 'Hard Work'. While Hard Work is required for Hard Things, it alone doesn't suffice.

Hard Work Paradox: Hard work alone generates a false sense of accomplishment that brings with it entitlement and expectations. People slog away at their work, burning the midnight oil. They expect in return a promotion or pay raise, which makes sense, but it doesn't always materialize. This causes resentment and increases aversion to hard work. In my experience, it seems that people confuse the repetition of a simple task hundreds of times with hard work. While writing a hundred reports feels like hard work, it is not a hard thing, the hard thing is to learn how to code and automate much of the process. This is where the paradox kicks in. Hard work is mistaken for hard things.

Perhaps the most famous example that illustrates this paradox is hidden in Abraham Lincoln's quote: "Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." Sharpening the axe is by no means an easier path; it is simply put the harder thing to do as it requires deeper thought, sourcing the axe-sharpening instruments, strategic planning, and potentially fighting the anxiety that comes with seeing others chipping away at the trunk while you sit and sharpen your axe.

Hard Things vs Hard Work: Given the hard work paradox, it is not often easy to distinguish hard things from hard work, especially as hard things often require hard work. So how would one differentiate? How would one know if they are just working hard vs if they are working on hard things?

Going Big / Feeling Uncomfortable: A good litmus test is simply to gauge if the task at hand requires you to step out of your comfort zone.

Hard things generally bring with them a higher chance of failure, which puts us at unease. Everything from trying to find cures for diseases to putting people on the moon are highly risky endeavours. The road to achieving these hard things is littered with failures, both metaphorical and literal (Blown up pieces of rockets).

Not simple/No Direct Path: Hard things are often complex. Not because the thing itself is complex, but because it constitutes sub-tasks within it, some of which are beyond our current areas of expertise, that all need to be weaved together. Which means that it requires venturing outside current understanding to discover new knowledge before one can even begin to attempt the hard thing—sharpening the axe.

One way to distinguish hard work from hard things is that the hard things are rarely simple to solve, even if they are simple to understand. The complexities can sometimes lie in adjacent aspects of the task, even when the primary task itself is straightforward, making the overall endeavor difficult.

For example, the entire team might know that a given code refactor is important, they know what to do, but crafting the story and gathering the data to build a case that would get approved by executives is hard. Leaving the team to work hard and build around the tech debt! They are still working hard, but not on the hard thing. Often this responsibility falls on the engineers who are not adept at storytelling, thus requiring them to venture outside the direct path to acquire new skills such as storytelling or reaching out and forming a stronger relationship with their product managers who could craft the story for them. In this case, their hard work was not directed at the hard thing.

Decades: Hard things take time. The rule of thumb is that they'll take about a decade to materialize. Which basically translates into hard things requiring consistency and long-term commitment. Often they don't deliver any results until the very end, which makes them really hard. One has to sustain hard work over a decade without any guarantee of success. Building a startup. Going to the moon. Developing a cure for a disease. Reforming a government. Learning to plan the piano like a pro. They all need decades of work.

I have been working on my sports startup for 12 years, and finally this year we made it to the professional level via an acquisition. Hard things take time!

Gram Weaver talks puts Hard Things as his first point in his Last Lecture series title How to Live an Asymmetric Life at Stanford Business School.

Hard work in itself is not enough and maybe won't help at all in some cases unless it is directed toward doing hard things.