That last paragraph, especially, is awesome.

I heartily agree with a lot of the sentiment. But to be fair, Watson and Crick didn't have to work hard because they stole the whole thing from a woman down the hall.

Agreed. Work softly.

interestingly enough, hard work can also prove to be deadly. the untold 3rd party in the Watson and Crick DNA love-in is Rosalind Franklin, who worked tirelessly as she conducted x-ray tests and discovered evidence of the double helix structure. she died of ovarian cancer (claimed to be related to her work done with the x-ray machines) only a few short years before she could be awarded the nobel prize alongside Watson and Crick.

pro tip: don't die before you can reap the spoils of your accomplishments.

Nice! Bravo! I've thought a lot about the very simple tortoise and hare in this start-up. Once you burn out it's so hard to carry through to the finish line.

Excellent article. Work hard on the right thing.

A little-emphasized fact is that Edison also had a small army of anonymous assistants (although he took full credit for the final inventions). He used a "brute force" or "process of elimination" strategy for invention. Many successful entrepreneurs and inventors use very different strategies. Mozart composed everything in his head and just wrote it down all at once.

Still, it is strange that so many of the world's great changes are the result of young people with no idea what they are doing, working incredible hours in the excitement of the unknown. Reality is a real downer sometimes.

Also, one of my favorite quotes (feel free to replace man with person :)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Maxims for Revolutionists

Was nice to meet you this afternoon.

Best,
Leonard

"The Dip" by Seth Godin.

I was also going to mention the "appropriation" of the work of Ms Franklin, in the example.

Yet I could not agree more whole heartedly with the main point- wheel-spinning is hard; hard work on something you love is one of life's great pleasures.

I hope you're having fun, Caterina!

I wonder how the concept of flow(optimal experience) plays into all this ?

You might be right about this. Sometimes I attack a problem or goal, and really conquer it, and then not much comes of it because it didn't have too much relevance.

This reminds me of how Randy Pausch said something like "no one cares if you dust the under-side of a bookshelf shelf".

"Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be", like you said there, sure takes a self-controlling of one's ego.

This post sure came at the right time. Next up, please, more on how to find the right thing to work on?

Shannon, that is a great idea for a post. I'll give it some thought. How to find the right thing to work on.

You're utterly right. As a Brit living in the USA, I am constantly amazed at the prevailing attitude here that one is lazy if one is not constantly flogging oneself to death working. You guys get virtually no holiday! Thank goodness I'm an academic and get to set my own working hours. The relationship between effort and productivity has a peak, after which productivity can actually decline with harder work. Smart employers will value their employees' quality of life over their productivity.

Beautifully written. An example of the very thing you're saying. Go to the heart of it, but not by efforting/freaking out.

I know that I can always force out left brain / analytic stuff if I'm tired, hungry, freaked out etc. But only when I'm relaxed, fun and engaged does anything fun or good come out. And what works online and anywhere (to cite Tim Shey) is what's real or fun.

The value of efforting comes from a belief that suffering is a worthwhile goal. Very sad.

Great post; sometimes the harder you work, the more difficult it can be to maintain the strategic detachment -- it is almost like Keats's negative capability -- necessary to find the right problem. As for how to choose the right problem, Roelof Botha recently told me his investing thesis was to invest always in at least one of the seven deadly sins. A product that appealed to people's greed, sloth, gluttony, lust, envy, pride or wrath was, for him, a sure winner. I'm not sure I agree with all of that -- at Redfin we tend to believe that if you do something good, people will always pay you for it -- but focusing exclusively on customer demand, and connecting with the reptilian center of pleasure and pain in a customers' brain are good places to start from when looking for the right problem. Then once you find the right problem, you have to work pretty hard from there...

how do you find the right thing to work on? great question. interested to hear caterina's response.

You are on the money. Too much time is wasted on worry. Invention is born from connectedness and insight. Creativity is born from play. Focus is more important than hard work. And panic is the enemy of it all.
The one thing I would go back and emphasize is that persistance is key. If I look at you and Stuart or Ev or Ben and Mena. You all kept going when many others would have stopped. Insight + Creativity + Persistance = Winning / Creating somthing great.

You are on the money. Too much time is wasted on worry. Invention is born from connectedness and insight. Creativity is born from play. Focus is more important than hard work. And panic is the enemy of it all.
The one thing I would go back and emphasize is that persistance is key. If I look at you and Stuart or Ev or Ben and Mena. You all kept going when many others would have stopped. Insight + Creativity + Persistance = Winning / Creating somthing great.

The fact that you neglect the fundamental contribution of Rosalind Franklin to the "Watson&Crick story" makes this article completely ridonculous. While these two were dandying around, the so called "overrated" hard work generated all the relevant data. Whether the two were actually the first to see the "bigger picture" in the case of DNA is at least questionable.

Extremely well written post and just what I needed to read today after reconsidering my "to do" list and thinking about what was really important on it. Being "busy" doesn't mean "being productive." Working is like "working out"; at some point there is no benefit and you need to change up your routine - if you want to progress.

Continued success . .and reasonable work hours that lead to dinner at home - at your excellent startup, Hunch.

Boy, do I disagree with this.

I agree that working on the right problem is important. But determining the right problem is often harder, and usually many people are working simultaneously on the right problem. Who will succeed in that case? Generally the people who are working hardest.

There are certainly exceptions, as is always the case, but in my experience, there are many more examples of success through hard work instead of identifying the right problem and working an average amount.

Catarina, you should know this more than most since Flickr was born accidentally out of Game Neverending. You were working on the wrong problem but through your hard work and skills, you made Flickr a success.

Sorry to see your archives have gone; spam is a PITA.

Have you thought about automatically disabling comments three or so days after a post is published?

Works for me.

excelent. a well worded, more detailed version of 'running like a headless chicken'. in french school, it is typical to learn "le lievre et la tortue" a fable from la fontaine. sorry i failed to find a english link on it.

Stephan Zweig in the chess player novel, shows very well the dilemna between brute force vs. smart and creative way.

At the time he wrote this novel , he was quite pessimistic about the possibility to resist brute force...

I guess being able to use both is maybe a way.

Regarding how to choose what to work on, Hamming's You and Your Research: http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

Sadly - Watson and Crick were able to 'discover' the double helix because of the frequently unrecognised (she died) work of the diligent and talented Rosalind Franklin.

Love this. Great post!

Running fast in the wrong direction does lead you anywhere; hardly where you want to be.
However the faster you run, the faster you may figure out you are in the wrong direction and change it.
Great entrepreneurs (Gates, Jobs, McNealy), specially in IT, have worked pretty hard. That seems to be a requirement as I haven't heard of anyone as successful as they are, who worked from 9-6.

I really want to believe this! However, "freaking out" at Flickr brought you guys a huge success. Need more examples of people not working that hard, but achieving comparable results...

Watson and Crick were certainly in the right place at the right time.

Another unmentioned name is Maurice Wilkins who brought x-ray crystallography to the problem. A sine qua non of the discovery.

There was a 3rd person to share that particular Nobel prize and it was Wilkins. Rosalind Franklin, for that matter, probably would have shared in the prize had she not already passed away (died of cancer at 37).

http://www.chemheritage.org/classroom/chemach/pharmaceuticals/watson-crick.html

So how does one find the right place at the right time? Well it would seem, first off, to be a matter of luck.

But Bill Joy apparently picked Berkeley for grad school because at the time it _wasn't_ one of the more widely recognized schools for computer science and Joy has said himself that he felt he'd be able to make more of an impact there.

And for that matter, my brother-in-law got a PHD in lower temperature physics from Standford. So clearly superconducting would be one option, although progress there has not been particularly good. Real-time PET image was one post-doc but again it lacked in career potential. When he finally hit upon astrophysics, he'd found a winner. Many breaking discoveries; lots of funding; etc.

Although we're not all working hard all the time, I think it is necessary that I'm always thinking; taking in new information; and integrating it.

Sometimes the best way to free up a line of thought is to get up from one's desk, go outside, and take something like a half-mile walk. And take a pen and paper with you.

monty python references aside, since i'm a completely lazy bastard, i find this post to be highly intelligent and exactly on the mark.

(of course, the fact that i'm traipsing around europe right now meeting with random entrepreneurs & startups also makes this post easy to agree with & rationalize my own behavior ;)

Completely correct! However prob with entrepreneurs is the desire to go for kill - which generally ends up making them work harder and harder without realizing if they are going in right direction or not!

We are building India's largest design platform and i would be wrong to say i have never been a prey of this!

Such a great post. As to the 'what to work on' question, I'll offer my own advice: set your metrics in advance so that you know what you're trying to accomplish. Then, work on things that will improve those metrics. This seemingly simple step is often overlooked in the rush to "do something."

I personally use Dave McClure's AARRR metrics. If I'm doing something that improves those metrics, I'm working on *a* right thing. If I'm doing something that directly improves the most critical metric on that list, then I'm doing *the* right thing. This approach has really worked for me.

I'm still trying to unlearn what my depression-era father taught me about work, so this was a valuable read for me. Some great comments here as well.

caterina: very insightful article, especially your thesis in the last paragraph.

finding what problem to work on, is almost as (perhaps more) important that toiling away.

boils down to how well one can interpret the context they live in.

They did not steal "the whole thing from a woman down the hall". Whilst I'm here, Einstein's wife did not invent general relativity, no matter what PBS might have told you.

This is exactly why getting out there and socializing is necessary in the web world. Going to conferences, talks, etc, and just sparking up conversations -- or leaning into some.

Working on the right thing is like having great margins. Covers a lot of mistakes and lets you not sweat the small stuff.

Caterina,

Well said, and finally a post that merits me taking a few minutes away from work ;) ...

My sister is working on a book featuring Rosalind Franklin; she might disagree on how lovely it was that Francis and Crick could while away drinking tea and playing tennis while she arguably did all the leg work, but that's another conversation.

I found this post fascinating, and more because you have the experience and hence the proper insight to make this accurate. I do wonder though, as someone in the first-business camp, whether it's possible the first time around to put faith in the fact that all work and no play makes Jane a bad entrepreneur? I get what some of these commenters mean when they say that you had to be crazy to get that first business off the ground. I would argue that the differentiation among startups is the degree of intensity of it's management. But success has a multiplier effect: Once you achieve it, you can leverage it. You have proven to be an effective entrepreneur; you have less proving to do, no? Believe me, I know you still have to slug it out every day, but perhaps you have the benefit of knowing only what can be known the second time around.

Thanks for your powerful and simple thoughts. It brings to mind the old, cliched question "Working hard or hardly working?"

"Motivation and intelligence in the absence of experience yields dazzling inertia."
-Wayne McVicker

great insight. i think the best way to work in the right direction is to choose the right game to play and choose the result you want to produce. So both games and results are defined by you based on the importance of what you want from the game and the result. For example, i choose to plan for my next venture rather than working on a current project. In this case the first option is more important than the second one. In this way, we can intelligently decide whats more important and whats not, every moment.

So true... It's too easy to be consumed with busy-work and minute details -- and feeling like you're busy -- and not nearly enough on big picture and actually moving from point A to B.

Thanks

Thanks for posting this. So true and easily forgotten. Such a good reminder.

Best part: "Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing. Working hard, even, if that's what you like to do."

My cello teacher in grad school used to say that you "don't learn anything unless you are confused."

He's right I think, and I've noticed that when people work "hard" they usually know exactly what they are doing--or--they haven't the foggiest idea what to do but, as you indicate, they are freaking out. They haven't learned to reap the benefits of being "confused."

I imagine that Watson and Crick were always working on their problem in their heads, but it didn't seem like "hard" work because either (1) they DID know what they were doing and/or (2) they didn't freak out over not knowing what they were doing (confused, but not panicked).

In my teacher's case, what he described as "confused" seems to me to be a state where you constantly are open to what's in front of you, without interference from your own past. You have knowledge, education, experience from your past, yes...but you still seek the "right problem" by observation--you don't try to impose what you know onto what is really there, or what you want to really make, etc. So not "hard" work (in the Puritan tradition), but actually a state of "work" that is in some senses difficult to achieve by traditional means.

This is an interesting post and, I think, although it is somewhat confusing, I have learned something from it... :-)

Thanks!

The Monty Python reference is interesting, in that they were surprisingly disciplined in their working habits.

As I recall they developed their skits in pairs during the morning and afternoon--and then all met up to discuss their ideas.

I'm blown away that they were morning people.

I thought hunch.com way way cool and addictive. I mentioned it in my blog this week.

What passes for productivity is often an appalling waste of time in disguise. Long hours spent freaking out is time much better spent on tasks that will inform and nourish the working hours. A give and take approach to work and play creates flow, just as surely as passing a magnet through a coil creates electricity.

We're entrepreneurs too, with a vested interested in this topic from several angles. Our product, Life Balance, is designed to help recovering multi-taskers to "get a life" again. (Yes, there's an app for that!) As entrepreneurs, we also live and breathe it. There's always a some reason to freak out, and that energy is nearly always better spent either doing something that really addresses the problem, or taking a meaningful break and letting our minds work on the issue in the background.

I can't tell you how many times, we've decided that it was time to take a break, go walk the dog, and solved the problem before we returned home!

Your post really resonated with us!

And then knowing when to shift towards implementing. Knowing you've found the right thing to work on and disengaging from the information firehose. Difficult.

I like this post. I want to believe it is true. However, I think it's lacking the detail about confidence. When you are confident of your success and your connections and your funding, you can afford to let off the gas. Until that time, working very hard is often what is needed. When you have achieved a certain amount of success and you've figured out where time and energy can equal reward then you can more easily discern what is productive work and what is wheel spinning.

I think knowing when and how to let off the gas is important. Peer pressure in a "work hard, work all the time" environment is enormous. Bosses like to see their underlings working like busy little bees even if that busy-ness is futile or not accomplishing much. Everyone needs a break. Recognizing that and honoring that could be integral to success.

I tend to agree with your thesis that a lot of burgeoning companies spend a lot of hours doing unnecessary work, but I wonder if it's truly unnecessary or if instead it is necessary waste. Perhaps the long hours - some wasted, some productive - are symptoms of success. They do not make success, but they show a single-minded devotion to a company and a product that is necessary for success.

Also, it seems like a lot of people succeed working crazy hours and crazy-hard on a project. There are notable examples of people succeeding on less, but they are notable because they are in contrast with many successes and with our understanding of success. Again, I wonder if this is because they feel this is necessary - it's correlation, not causation - or if there is something to it.

This post has been rattling around in my mind, and something hasn't felt perfectly grounded to me. I appreciate you bringing up the subject, even though I am not an entrepreneur...this is vitally important to nearly anyone who aspires to achieve a dream, large or small.

I have reread and reread this, and have come to a few more thoughts about it.

You said," Edison...tried thousands of materials looking for the right filament for the electric bulb. That might have been hard work...but he was also working on the right problem. So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard."

Question (not being facetious, I really am curious): Was Edison really working on the right problem the WHOLE time...or were the first several thousand "failures" necessary for him to perceive what exactly the right problem was? Because it seems to me that a lot of the hard work that people put in is actually, in a sense, very productive in that it helps them to whittle down their options gradually to only those with the greatest chances for success (at least in an optimal situation). In other words, it's really not always clear from the start what the "right problem" is.

As a corollary to that, this whittling down of "wrong" problems has the potential, I think, to not only eliminate those options that don't work... but each discovery of a "failure" CAN potentially show you WHY it is a failure, which can lead to WHAT can be a SUCCESS and WHY it can work. I wonder whether one can really find a solution, without going through (at the very least, mentally) the stages of defining through experience - "hard work" - why certain things are the wrong problems and why certain things are the right ones.

Lastly, I think Amanda brings up a very good point about the relationship between confidence and "hard" work. Masters in any field can make their displays of work look easy; while we know that a lot of hours of study and work go into mastery of anything, I do agree with Amanda that having confidence borne of experience (and putting in the hours of *seemingly* fruitless labor) can entirely change the game. When you have a certain type of confidence (as apparently Watson and Crick did) it might be that you've arrived at a stage in your development where typical long hours of "hard work" are no longer necessary to gain the amount of knowledge and confidence you need to proceed on tackling your problem, whatever that may be.

"Freaking out", not "working hard". How true!

As my grandfather use to tell me back in the 60's..."life is short, pick things that make a difference, share with others, be excited what your doing what ever it is, and enjoy the journey along the way"

Working hard is great but it is also exhausting. We need rest to regenerate. Hard work without rest is unsustainable. This is how we burn out people.

I've worked in startups for over 20 years now, and I've seen a different pattern repeatedly: people "working" in the office for 10-15 hours a day, sometimes working hard, sometimes working on the wrong thing and sometimes shopping, chatting with colleagues or doing busy work. Having wasted so much time, they need to stay in the office longer just to finally get something done.

Many managers, lacking real tools for measuring success or even simple progress, judge their employees by how often they see them at their desks or online ater 7pm.

The net result is often that the inefficient employees who are willing to spend their lives in the office get better reputations and advancement over those who get their work done and go home.

I wish I could say that age and experience bring better judgement and tools, and sometimes they do, but often it just brings more legitimacy to the idea that staying late and working long hours is the most important thing. (Which, BTW, is also the easiest thing to game.)

Good judgement, the ability to focus and efficiency are the most important things in my book. But I've seen people who were exactly that who were undervalued because they were not physically present in the office - even after having accomplished more in less time than their peers.

We need better management tools generally, so that we can judge people by accomplishments instead of hours. Personally, I look at time on the job after the other metrics I have in place start falling short - missed deadlines, lack of traction, etc.

So true. It's a form of laziness to work on the easiest, closest thing, and not do the work to find out what you should be working on.

Working hard doesn't mean we will achieve success at the end. It is all about working hard + persistence + great ideas.