He Works Hard For the Money

You know, when Donna Summers came out with the song She Works Hard for the Money, it came out with a picture (did she have a video too?) of a waitress being exhausted. Years later, I heard this was really a song about prostitutes (I'm told a slang expression for this in Hindi is "randy" or "rundy" or somewhere in between). I think the waitress idea works better.

But that's beside the point.

A while back, a guy from India said, over dinner, that he believed hard work could overcome talent. He claimed Einstein was not so brilliant, that hard work could overcome all. Several of us argued against that point.

I've come to the conclusion, much later on, that even if we could quantify what being smart or brilliant or talented meant (something that's quite difficult, I'd say), the argument assumes that hard work trumps all. You work hard, and you will figure out things that the brilliant folks figure out. Slow and steady wins the race.

But here's the kicker. Not everyone is willing to put in hard work. Hard work, by its very name, is hard.

To be more specific, we had him do some stuff with databases. Now, he hadn't done anything with databases in a while--since college really. No need, I suppose. And he had either forgotten a great deal, or never properly learned it the first time around.

Now, it's hard to become really good at anything. It helps if you already know someone bright. Even if you try to teach yourself (some people are great at this), you don't know what you should be learning. I was watching a person practice serves. It looked all wrong (from my view), and all the practice in the world wasn't necessarily going to tell that person they had to fundamentally change the way they were doing things.

Even if he had gotten a book on SQL and read it cover to cover (money became an issue there, so he wouldn't even consider that idea), he'd not know how best to, say, make the queries run fast.

Here was a guy who claimed hard work would pay off, but it's not like he goes home and learns how to do this the best he can. He doesn't read source code of implementations. He probably doesn't know that some SQL implementations allow you to inspect how the queries are executed. Indeed, lacking the money for his own computer or an Internet connection, he would have a hard time, I imagine, trying to explore this on his own.

It's not to say you can't learn this stuff without a computer or without the Internet, but the Internet is now becoming the way to conveniently learn, provided you know where to look (which is tough too).

The point is that this didn't interest him. He wasn't willing to spend a great deal of time to become an SQL master, and probably didn't even know how to get to that point. It would be so much easier, don't you know, if someone simply told him. This is how many people (including myself) would like to learn. Why bother actually finding the information? Let someone else do the hard work.

But this is not what Einstein and other hard-working guys did. They spent a great deal of time thinking, really thinking, about the problem at hand. When they got stuck, they learned how to get around it. Perhaps they studied something else for a while, realizing that would help them get better.

Indeed, one might argue that talent and hard work are linked. To have talent is to be able to work hard. Each can be a limiting factor. Working hard can push talent further. But you can't be amazingly talented with no work at all. You have to devote some time to it.

So you might ask, why are talented people more likely to succeed? One reason is that it comes easier. Let's say, within a day's worth of work, you can figure out the basics of some complex math theory, that would take someone else a week. It's a lower threshold to cross. What would cause the person to want to spend a week?

Part of wanting to spend this effort is interest. If you're not interested, then why bother? Look at Google's main page. It is considered the model of economy. But it has to do with laziness. Sergey Brin didn't want to learn HTML like an expert. He thought it was a useless thing to learn.

To tie the example back to this guy, what causes a person to work late? He might argue that if he spent far more time, he'd catch up. OK, I could buy that. But would he spend that many more hours at work to keep up? Probably not. Again, money, transportation, fatigue, all work against him. But finally, it's interest. Suppose you had a brilliant person who could get all his work done in four hours a day. Suppose a less brilliant but harder working person would require 14 hours a day to accomplish the same.

Would they spend the 14 hours a day? Or would they stretch that time out. That extra time costs money. You'd have to stay longer at work. You wouldn't be able to enjoy life. And frankly, you might be miserable. Those who work exceedingly hard give up a lot to spend this kind of time.

But I have to give credit to this guy for making me think about it. After all, it's given me a lot to blog about :).