Does putting in more hours and raw effort reliably produce more success, or does smarter/strategic work matter more?
5 recorded positions from 4 people, first published May 2004. They do not agree — the readings below are what each one actually argued.
Brute force hours drive success in most things
Ilir Sela · published Aug 4, 2023
Anything is possible, but only if you work extremely hard
His family sacrificed leaving their home and family to immigrate to the US for opportunity, and he feels compelled not to squander it
Scope: framed as his personal driving belief
5:27 20VC: Why "Hire Great People and Get Out of the Way" is Total BS, Why Your Upbringing Can Make You a Worse Leader & A Bentley, Two Nissan Cubes and Becoming One of Macedonia's Largest Employers; The Story of Slice with Ilir Sela
Harry Stebbings · published Aug 21, 2024
More hours leads to more success; brute force works for most things
Offered as an example of a value he holds that others would actively dispute in favour of strategic work and balance
Scope: acknowledges many people say this is wrong
49:13 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast
Also on the record
Chandra Narayanan · published Mar 13, 2024
Working hard remains the most important thing, but hard work on unprioritized things does not lead to impact.
Long hours are a rite of passage that feel good, but the value of the activity is what counts.
9:04 Hard work matters but only when prioritized unprioritized hard work does not produce impact
Paul Graham · published May 2004
There are economies of scale in how much of your life you devote to work: in the right business one dedicated person can generate ten or a hundred times an average employee's wealth.
A programmer, instead of maintaining existing software, could write a whole new program and create a new source of revenue.
source Economies of scale in the right business let more hours produce outsized wealth
Paul Graham · published Jun 2021
You can't just work every waking hour, because in many kinds of work quality declines past a limit that varies by type of work and by person.
His own limit for hard writing or programming was about five hours a day, whereas running a startup he could work all the time.
source Quality declines past a variable individual hour limit so working every waking hour backfires
Your assistant can query this graph directly — 5 positions here, 19,646 across the corpus. Add 996.fm over MCP.