You make a great point, one that I have been thinking about, and unfortunately, I'm not sure if I can entirely agree with it.
There are something to be said about habit and discipline. Certainly, one should never pursue something they have no interest in whatsoever. But for any thing we want to accomplish in life, there are tangent, chores, and generally "schlep" that you can't avoid. An extreme reading of your comment would mean that we should give up at the first road block. How do you differentiate between lacks of internal motivation, and great motivation being thwarted by fear of unpleasant tasks? In an ideal world, that shouldn't be an issue, in the real world, it's a lot harder to know.
When you're playing an instrument, if you've practiced a piece few hundreds times, you don't think your playing is good anymore. You know when you're making mistake, but even when you're playing perfectly, your perception of the piece you're playing would be a lot more "meh" comparing to the perception of some outside listener -- after all, you've heard that piece a lot of times. Motivated or not, without discipline it's unlikely you can keep doing things over and over.
When I was younger, I've always thought that great people doing great things by just focusing on their genuine interest, ie a physicist just want to understand the nature of the universe, and not particularly care whether his work is gonna have any impact or effect. It turns out that interest might not be the full picture: people who do great work might actually be conscious in wanting to be great, too. One of the example would be Richard Hamming, mentioned in his "You and Your Research" essay (which just popped up on HN lately, actually), even Feynman's biography mentioned that he need introspection during the period when he wasn't being productive as a physicist.
> In order to get at you individually, I must talk in the first person. I have to get you to drop modesty and say to yourself, ``Yes, I would like to do first-class work.'' Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You're not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance. Well, that's a kind of dumb thing to say. I say, why shouldn't you set out to do something significant. You don't have to tell other people, but shouldn't you say to yourself, ``Yes, I would like to do something significant.'' -- Richard Hamming, You and Your Research.
Right, there's no need to get all New Age enlightenment-ish about it. I am not even in disagreement with the Richard Hamming quote. All I'm stressing on is that it's title is "YOU and YOUR Research". It's not "YOU and WHAT-YOU-THINK-YOU-SHOULD-RESEARCH-ON Research".
I struggled with the exact same confusion about "it's supposed to be natural" vs. "real life == effort" for many years till I understood : you do what it takes when it's your vision. You put in the outer effort, but there is no inner friction. And this can happen across years of "effort".
For example, if you envision clearly that you want to provide your child with a home, and at the same time decide that you're not going to work 12 hours a day for it, and forego a Google job in preference for a more "boring" employer who pays lower but allows flexibility while still paying enough for the mortgage to be paid, why not? It will still look like dreary effort to the hotshot Stanford grad, but to you, each day, which is part of a designed self-directed life, will be lovely. So what if it involves some amount of will-power to deal with an abusive colleague, etc;? You'll live, because it's within YOUR parameters of tolerance. The same thing could work the other way round : you cannot IMAGINE working for Google, but for someone for whom it's been a lifelong dream puts in the "effort".
i fully agree with your point, and hope it's not getting lost on folks: figuring out what drives you requires a level of introspection (and revisiting-- it will likely not be static your entire life) that most people never do. introspection is hard, and not something you get taught at school. i'd argue most people dont realize how to self-reflect until they are much older.. or perhaps it requires a certain level of experiences before it is even approachable?
> Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You're not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance.
This is so true. It's odd that we celebrate butterflies and crush caterpillars. I think it was Les Brown who said something along the lines of– if you want to achieve uncommon, unreasonable results, you have to be an uncommon, unreasonable person putting in uncommon, unreasonable amounts of effort.
25% of all new businesses fail within the first year.
36% fail before their second anniversary.
44% fail before the end of the third year.
----
46% fail due to incompetence.
30% fail due to inexperience.
11% fail due to lack of domain knowledge.
As the years pass, the conditional probability that the new business will fail in the next year, given that it did not fail in the previous year, tapers off. The competence has been tested. The inexperience vanishes. The domain knowledge becomes less something you acquire from elsewhere and more something you make from within.
From the statistics, it looks like an awful lot of people are making uninformed guesses, out of their early incompetence or inexperience, and incorrect guesses destroy their business. That does not look like fortitude to me. It looks like walking your very first tightrope, never having had the benefit of even seeing another person cross one, over a pit of starving grizzly bears, as the people who have already crossed laugh at you and throw rocks at your head.
Those who already fell into the pit and managed to climb back out for another try have fortitude. But they also didn't get eaten. That's lucky.
It is unkind to say that those who never make the attempt lack fortitude. Perhaps they simply have an aversion to being chased down and eaten by ravenous bears. Or maybe they were born in the pit, and never got far enough ahead of the bears to try to climb up to the ropes.
But that does not address the question that should be on everyone's mind with respect to this analogy. Why do those people on the other side of the pit throw their rocks at the people on the ropes, instead of at the bears in the pit? Why is it necessary that starting a business be both radically unfamiliar and incredibly risky?
>>The narrative of luck makes people feel less bad about their lack of fortitude.
Contrary to whatever you think 'chance' plays a huge role in every one's success. When luck meets hard work, the returns compound. When hard work meets back luck, a person feels they were treated unfairly.But chance matters in a way far more than you realize. Heck, a Human is born out of sheer luck.
People don't realize how important luck is, until despite all their hard work they fail. A few people fail over and over again despite giving their best all in the while watching people doing way little win.
It's not a nice thing to go through. It will take nothing short of a disaster to make you believe in a miracle.
But the thing is that without hard work, you can have all the luck in the world and nothing is going to happen. And it also seems that the people who work harder have more luck for various reasons raging from having more opportunities come their way to seizing opportunities better.
Ultimately, I think, the kind of luck that matters most is the lack of bad luck. You can be the hardest working person in the world, but if you get hit by a car and spend two years recovering, that's gonna be a problem.
My point is, success compounds. At one point it starts looking like pure luck.
"But the thing is that without hard work, you can have all the luck in the world and nothing is going to happen."
Unfortunately that's not true. People will the lottery every week. In business that happens too. Look at all the well funded startups which never amount to anything, and factor in the prestige, earnings and opportunity those companies afford their participants. Plenty of people are early employees of hot startups simply via friendships and connections. Many of them leave or are fired. Many of those people become vastly wealthy.
Moreover look at all the one-hit wonders and luck is an even greater factor. If people who are smart, talented and able can reproduce their success why are they so rare? When someone never manages to get close to their initial success lack is often in play. It's not that they weren't clever, or didn't work hard, but it can be that luck picked them from a field of very similar people.
That shouldn't of course change your behavior. Luck is beyond our locus of control and planning for it, or around it, is like planning around a potential meteorite strike, or rain.
Anything you can force via effort isn't luck which is why people get confused. You can achieve against the odds via hard work alone which is why working hard is worthwhile.
You can also scale your success. The difference between making a living, making a million and being Mark Zuckerberg can all be attracted to work and wit without the need to factor luck into the equation at all.
Finally we're all focused on good-luck. Bad luck is the real enemy. To be diagnosed with a serious illness, or to be unable to take an opportunity due to factors you cannot effect will cut the legs out from underneath you however hard you work. Sometimes your good luck is invisible unless you're aware of the bad luck of those who'd otherwise take your place.
There are something to be said about habit and discipline. Certainly, one should never pursue something they have no interest in whatsoever. But for any thing we want to accomplish in life, there are tangent, chores, and generally "schlep" that you can't avoid. An extreme reading of your comment would mean that we should give up at the first road block. How do you differentiate between lacks of internal motivation, and great motivation being thwarted by fear of unpleasant tasks? In an ideal world, that shouldn't be an issue, in the real world, it's a lot harder to know.
When you're playing an instrument, if you've practiced a piece few hundreds times, you don't think your playing is good anymore. You know when you're making mistake, but even when you're playing perfectly, your perception of the piece you're playing would be a lot more "meh" comparing to the perception of some outside listener -- after all, you've heard that piece a lot of times. Motivated or not, without discipline it's unlikely you can keep doing things over and over.
When I was younger, I've always thought that great people doing great things by just focusing on their genuine interest, ie a physicist just want to understand the nature of the universe, and not particularly care whether his work is gonna have any impact or effect. It turns out that interest might not be the full picture: people who do great work might actually be conscious in wanting to be great, too. One of the example would be Richard Hamming, mentioned in his "You and Your Research" essay (which just popped up on HN lately, actually), even Feynman's biography mentioned that he need introspection during the period when he wasn't being productive as a physicist.
> In order to get at you individually, I must talk in the first person. I have to get you to drop modesty and say to yourself, ``Yes, I would like to do first-class work.'' Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You're not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance. Well, that's a kind of dumb thing to say. I say, why shouldn't you set out to do something significant. You don't have to tell other people, but shouldn't you say to yourself, ``Yes, I would like to do something significant.'' -- Richard Hamming, You and Your Research.