 June 2021 2021 年 6 月 It might not seem there's much to learn about how to work hard. Anyone who's been to school knows what it entails, even if they chose not to do it. There are 12 year olds who work amazingly hard. And yet when I ask if I know more about working hard now than when I was in school, the answer is definitely yes. 关于如何努力学习，似乎没什么好学的。上过学的人都知道这意味着什么，即使他们选择不上学。有些 12 岁的孩子就非常努力。然而，当我问自己现在是否比上学时更懂得如何努力学习时，答案肯定是肯定的。 One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you'll have to work very hard. I wasn't sure of that as a kid. Schoolwork varied in difficulty; one didn't always have to work super hard to do well. And some of the things famous adults did, they seemed to do almost effortlessly. Was there, perhaps, some way to evade hard work through sheer brilliance? Now I know the answer to that question. There isn't. 我知道的一件事是，如果你想做大事，就必须非常努力。我小时候并不清楚这一点。学校功课的难度各不相同；一个人并不总是要付出超常的努力才能做得好。而一些有名的大人做的事情，他们似乎做起来几乎毫不费力。也许，有什么方法可以通过纯粹的聪明才智来逃避艰苦的工作吗？现在我知道答案了。没有。 The reason some subjects seemed easy was that my school had low standards. And the reason famous adults seemed to do things effortlessly was years of practice; they made it look easy. 有些科目之所以看起来容易，是因为我所在的学校标准不高。而有名的成年人做起事来似乎毫不费力的原因是多年的练习；他们让事情看起来很容易。 Of course, those famous adults usually had a lot of natural ability too. There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, but to do the best work you need all three: you need great natural ability and to have practiced a lot and to be trying very hard. [1] 当然，那些有名的成年人通常也有很多天赋能力。优秀的作品有三个要素：天赋、实践和努力。只有两个要素，你可以做得很好，但要做最好的作品，你需要所有三个要素：你需要很强的天赋能力、大量的练习和非常努力的尝试。[1] Bill Gates, for example, was among the smartest people in business in his era, but he was also among the hardest working. "I never took a day off in my twenties," he said. "Not one." It was similar with Lionel Messi. He had great natural ability, but when his youth coaches talk about him, what they remember is not his talent but his dedication and his desire to win. P. G. Wodehouse would probably get my vote for best English writer of the 20th century, if I had to choose. Certainly no one ever made it look easier. But no one ever worked harder. At 74, he wrote 例如，比尔-盖茨是那个时代商界最聪明的人之一，但他也是最勤奋的人之一。"他说："在我二十多岁的时候，我从来没有休息过一天。"一天也没有"。梅西也是如此。他天赋异禀，但当他的青年队教练谈起他时，他们记住的不是他的天赋，而是他的奉献精神和对胜利的渴望。如果让我选择，P. G. 沃德豪斯（P. G. Wodehouse）可能会当选 20 世纪最佳英国作家。当然，没有人比他更容易成功。但也没有人比他更努力。74 岁时，他写道 with each new book of mine I have, as I say, the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature. A good thing, really, I suppose. Keeps one up on one's toes and makes one rewrite every sentence ten times. Or in many cases twenty times.Sounds a bit extreme, you think. And yet Bill Gates sounds even more extreme. Not one day off in ten years? These two had about as much natural ability as anyone could have, and yet they also worked about as hard as anyone could work. You need both. 你会觉得这听起来有点极端。然而比尔-盖茨听起来更极端。十年中没有休息过一天？这两个人的天赋能力不亚于任何人，但他们的工作努力程度也不亚于任何人。两者缺一不可。 That seems so obvious, and yet in practice we find it slightly hard to grasp. There's a faint xor between talent and hard work. It comes partly from popular culture, where it seems to run very deep, and partly from the fact that the outliers are so rare. If great talent and great drive are both rare, then people with both are rare squared. Most people you meet who have a lot of one will have less of the other. But you'll need both if you want to be an outlier yourself. And since you can't really change how much natural talent you have, in practice doing great work, insofar as you can, reduces to working very hard. 这似乎是显而易见的，但在实践中，我们却发现这有点难以把握。天赋与勤奋之间存在着一种微弱的对立。这一方面源于流行文化，因为它似乎根深蒂固；另一方面也源于这样一个事实，即离群者是如此罕见。如果说天赋和努力都是稀缺的，那么两者兼备的人就是稀缺的平方。你所遇到的大多数人，如果其中一种能力很强，那么另一种能力就会很弱。但是，如果你想成为一个离群者，你就需要同时具备这两个条件。由于你无法真正改变自己的天赋，因此，在实践中，只要你能做到，就必须非常努力地工作。 It's straightforward to work hard if you have clearly defined, externally imposed goals, as you do in school. There is some technique to it: you have to learn not to lie to yourself, not to procrastinate (which is a form of lying to yourself), not to get distracted, and not to give up when things go wrong. But this level of discipline seems to be within the reach of quite young children, if they want it. 如果你有明确的、外部强加的目标，就像在学校一样，努力工作是很简单的。这需要一些技巧：你必须学会不欺骗自己，不拖延（这也是一种欺骗自己的方式），不分心，遇到困难不放弃。但这种程度的纪律似乎是相当小的孩子就能做到的，只要他们愿意。 What I've learned since I was a kid is how to work toward goals that are neither clearly defined nor externally imposed. You'll probably have to learn both if you want to do really great things. 从小到大，我学到的是如何努力实现既没有明确定义也没有外部强加的目标。如果你想做真正伟大的事情，你可能必须学会这两种方法。 The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working without anyone telling you to. Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off. I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm working hard, but I can be sure I'm getting nowhere when I'm not, and it feels awful. [2] 其中最基本的一点就是觉得自己应该工作，而不需要别人告诉你。现在，当我不努力工作时，警钟就会响。当我努力工作的时候，我无法确定自己是否有所收获，但当我不努力工作的时候，我可以确定自己一无所获，这感觉糟透了。[2] There wasn't a single point when I learned this. Like most little kids, I enjoyed the feeling of achievement when I learned or did something new. As I grew older, this morphed into a feeling of disgust when I wasn't achieving anything. The one precisely dateable landmark I have is when I stopped watching TV, at age 13. 我并不是一开始就知道这一点的。像大多数小孩子一样，我很享受学习或做新东西时的成就感。随着年龄的增长，当我没有取得任何成就时，这种感觉就变成了厌恶。13岁那年，我停止了看电视，这是我人生中一个可以精确到日期的里程碑。 Several people I've talked to remember getting serious about work around this age. When I asked Patrick Collison when he started to find idleness distasteful, he said 与我交谈过的一些人都记得，他们大约是在这个年龄开始认真工作的。当我问帕特里克-科里森什么时候开始觉得无所事事令人厌恶时，他说 I think around age 13 or 14. I have a clear memory from around then of sitting in the sitting room, staring outside, and wondering why I was wasting my summer holiday.Perhaps something changes at adolescence. That would make sense. 也许青春期会发生一些变化。这就说得通了。 Strangely enough, the biggest obstacle to getting serious about work was probably school, which made work (what they called work) seem boring and pointless. I had to learn what real work was before I could wholeheartedly desire to do it. That took a while, because even in college a lot of the work is pointless; there are entire departments that are pointless. But as I learned the shape of real work, I found that my desire to do it slotted into it as if they'd been made for each other. 奇怪的是，认真工作的最大障碍可能是学校，学校让工作（他们所谓的工作）显得枯燥无味、毫无意义。我必须先了解什么是真正的工作，然后才能全心全意地投入工作。这需要一段时间，因为即使是在大学里，很多工作也是毫无意义的；有整个系都是毫无意义的。但是，当我了解了真正工作的形态之后，我发现自己对工作的渴望与之相得益彰，就好像它们是天生一对。 I suspect most people have to learn what work is before they can love it. Hardy wrote eloquently about this in A Mathematician's Apology: 我猜想，大多数人在热爱工作之前，必须先了解什么是工作。哈代在《数学家的道歉》一书中对此有精辟的论述： I do not remember having felt, as a boy, any passion for mathematics, and such notions as I may have had of the career of a mathematician were far from noble. I thought of mathematics in terms of examinations and scholarships: I wanted to beat other boys, and this seemed to be the way in which I could do so most decisively.He didn't learn what math was really about till part way through college, when he read Jordan's Cours d'analyse. 直到大学期间，他读了乔丹的《分析教程》，才知道数学的真谛。 I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that remarkable work, the first inspiration for so many mathematicians of my generation, and learnt for the first time as I read it what mathematics really meant.There are two separate kinds of fakeness you need to learn to discount in order to understand what real work is. One is the kind Hardy encountered in school. Subjects get distorted when they're adapted to be taught to kids — often so distorted that they're nothing like the work done by actual practitioners. [3] The other kind of fakeness is intrinsic to certain types of work. Some types of work are inherently bogus, or at best mere busywork. 要想了解什么是真正的工作，你需要学会摒弃两种不同的虚假。一种是哈代在学校里遇到的那种。当学科被改编成课程教授给孩子们时，它们就会被扭曲--往往扭曲到与真正的实践者所做的工作完全不一样。[3] 另一种虚假是某些类型的工作所固有的。某些类型的工作本质上是虚假的，或者充其量只是忙碌的工作。 There's a kind of solidity to real work. It's not all writing the Principia, but it all feels necessary. That's a vague criterion, but it's deliberately vague, because it has to cover a lot of different types. [4] 真正的工作有一种踏实感。虽然不全是写《原理》，但感觉都是必要的。这是一个模糊的标准，但它是故意模糊的，因为它必须涵盖许多不同的类型。[4] Once you know the shape of real work, you have to learn how many hours a day to spend on it. You can't solve this problem by simply working every waking hour, because in many kinds of work there's a point beyond which the quality of the result will start to decline. 一旦你知道了真正工作的形态，你就必须学会每天花多少小时来完成它。你不能靠每天工作来解决这个问题，因为很多工作都有一个时间点，超过这个时间点，结果的质量就会开始下降。 That limit varies depending on the type of work and the person. I've done several different kinds of work, and the limits were different for each. My limit for the harder types of writing or programming is about five hours a day. Whereas when I was running a startup, I could work all the time. At least for the three years I did it; if I'd kept going much longer, I'd probably have needed to take occasional vacations. [5] 这个限制因工作类型和个人而异。我做过几种不同类型的工作，每种工作的限制都不一样。对于难度较大的写作或编程工作，我的极限是每天工作五小时左右。而当我经营一家初创公司时，我可以一直工作。至少在我工作的三年里是这样；如果我再坚持更长时间，我可能就需要偶尔休假了。[5] The only way to find the limit is by crossing it. Cultivate a sensitivity to the quality of the work you're doing, and then you'll notice if it decreases because you're working too hard. Honesty is critical here, in both directions: you have to notice when you're being lazy, but also when you're working too hard. And if you think there's something admirable about working too hard, get that idea out of your head. You're not merely getting worse results, but getting them because you're showing off — if not to other people, then to yourself. [6] 找到极限的唯一方法就是跨越它。培养对工作质量的敏感度，然后你就会注意到工作质量是否因为你太努力而下降。诚实在这里是至关重要的，而且是双向的：你必须注意到自己什么时候偷懒了，也要注意到自己什么时候工作太努力了。如果你觉得工作太努力有什么值得钦佩的地方，那就赶紧把这种想法抛到脑后吧。你不仅仅是在获得更糟糕的结果，而是因为你在炫耀--即使不是向别人炫耀，也是向你自己炫耀。[6] Finding the limit of working hard is a constant, ongoing process, not something you do just once. Both the difficulty of the work and your ability to do it can vary hour to hour, so you need to be constantly judging both how hard you're trying and how well you're doing. 找到努力工作的极限是一个持续不断的过程，而不是只做一次。工作的难度和你的能力每小时都可能不同，因此你需要不断判断自己的努力程度和表现。 Trying hard doesn't mean constantly pushing yourself to work, though. There may be some people who do, but I think my experience is fairly typical, and I only have to push myself occasionally when I'm starting a project or when I encounter some sort of check. That's when I'm in danger of procrastinating. But once I get rolling, I tend to keep going. 不过，努力并不意味着不断逼迫自己工作。也许有些人是这样，但我认为我的经历比较典型，我只有在开始一个项目或遇到某种检查时才会偶尔逼迫自己。这时我就有拖延的危险。但是一旦我开始行动，我就会坚持下去。 What keeps me going depends on the type of work. When I was working on Viaweb, I was driven by fear of failure. I barely procrastinated at all then, because there was always something that needed doing, and if I could put more distance between me and the pursuing beast by doing it, why wait? [7] Whereas what drives me now, writing essays, is the flaws in them. Between essays I fuss for a few days, like a dog circling while it decides exactly where to lie down. But once I get started on one, I don't have to push myself to work, because there's always some error or omission already pushing me. 让我坚持下去的动力取决于工作的类型。当我在 Viaweb 工作时，我的动力来自于对失败的恐惧。那时候我几乎不拖延，因为总有一些事情需要去做，如果我可以通过做这件事在我和追捕我的野兽之间拉开更多的距离，那为什么还要等呢？[7] 而我现在写作文的动力则是文章中的缺陷。每写一篇文章，我都要焦躁好几天，就像一只狗，一边转圈，一边决定到底该在哪里躺下。但一旦开始写，我就不必再逼自己去努力，因为总有一些错误或疏漏已经在逼我了。 I do make some amount of effort to focus on important topics. Many problems have a hard core at the center, surrounded by easier stuff at the edges. Working hard means aiming toward the center to the extent you can. Some days you may not be able to; some days you'll only be able to work on the easier, peripheral stuff. But you should always be aiming as close to the center as you can without stalling. 我确实做了一些努力来关注重要的主题。许多问题的中心都是难点，边缘都是容易的东西。努力工作就意味着在你力所能及的范围内瞄准中心。有些时候，你可能做不到；有些时候，你只能做比较容易的边缘部分。但是，在不停滞不前的情况下，你应该始终以尽可能接近中心为目标。 The bigger question of what to do with your life is one of these problems with a hard core. There are important problems at the center, which tend to be hard, and less important, easier ones at the edges. So as well as the small, daily adjustments involved in working on a specific problem, you'll occasionally have to make big, lifetime-scale adjustments about which type of work to do. And the rule is the same: working hard means aiming toward the center — toward the most ambitious problems. 如何处理你的生活这个更大的问题就是这样一个核心问题。中心有重要的问题，这些问题往往很难解决，而边缘的问题则不那么重要，比较容易解决。因此，除了在解决某个具体问题时所涉及的日常小调整之外，你偶尔还需要在做哪种类型的工作上做出终身的大调整。规则是一样的：努力工作意味着瞄准中心--瞄准最雄心勃勃的问题。 By center, though, I mean the actual center, not merely the current consensus about the center. The consensus about which problems are most important is often mistaken, both in general and within specific fields. If you disagree with it, and you're right, that could represent a valuable opportunity to do something new. 不过，我所说的中心是指实际的中心，而不仅仅是当前关于中心的共识。关于哪些问题最重要的共识往往是错误的，无论是在一般情况下还是在特定领域。如果你不同意这种共识，而你又是对的，那可能就是一个做新事情的宝贵机会。 The more ambitious types of work will usually be harder, but although you should not be in denial about this, neither should you treat difficulty as an infallible guide in deciding what to do. If you discover some ambitious type of work that's a bargain in the sense of being easier for you than other people, either because of the abilities you happen to have, or because of some new way you've found to approach it, or simply because you're more excited about it, by all means work on that. Some of the best work is done by people who find an easy way to do something hard. 越是雄心勃勃的工作通常越难做，尽管你不应该否认这一点，但也不应该把困难当作决定做什么的无懈可击的指南。如果你发现某类雄心勃勃的工作对你来说比别人容易，或者因为你的能力，或者因为你找到了新的方法，或者仅仅因为你对它更感兴趣，那么你就可以去做。一些最出色的工作都是由那些找到了一种简单的方法来完成一件困难的事情的人完成的。 As well as learning the shape of real work, you need to figure out which kind you're suited for. And that doesn't just mean figuring out which kind your natural abilities match the best; it doesn't mean that if you're 7 feet tall, you have to play basketball. What you're suited for depends not just on your talents but perhaps even more on your interests. A deep interest in a topic makes people work harder than any amount of discipline can. 除了学习实际工作的形式，你还需要弄清楚自己适合哪种工作。这并不仅仅意味着要弄清楚你的天赋能力与哪种工作最匹配；这并不意味着如果你身高 7 英尺，你就必须打篮球。你适合做什么，不仅取决于你的天赋，也许更取决于你的兴趣。对某个主题的浓厚兴趣会让人比任何学科都更加努力。 It can be harder to discover your interests than your talents. There are fewer types of talent than interest, and they start to be judged early in childhood, whereas interest in a topic is a subtle thing that may not mature till your twenties, or even later. The topic may not even exist earlier. Plus there are some powerful sources of error you need to learn to discount. Are you really interested in x, or do you want to work on it because you'll make a lot of money, or because other people will be impressed with you, or because your parents want you to? [8] 发现自己的兴趣可能比发现自己的才能更难。天赋的种类比兴趣少，而且在童年时期就已经开始判断，而对某个话题的兴趣则是一种微妙的东西，可能要到 20 多岁甚至更晚才会成熟。甚至在更早的时候，这个话题可能根本就不存在。此外，还有一些强大的错误来源，你需要学会去伪存真。你是真的对 x 感兴趣，还是因为能赚大钱、别人对你刮目相看、父母希望你这么做？[8] The difficulty of figuring out what to work on varies enormously from one person to another. That's one of the most important things I've learned about work since I was a kid. As a kid, you get the impression that everyone has a calling, and all they have to do is figure out what it is. That's how it works in movies, and in the streamlined biographies fed to kids. Sometimes it works that way in real life. Some people figure out what to do as children and just do it, like Mozart. But others, like Newton, turn restlessly from one kind of work to another. Maybe in retrospect we can identify one as their calling — we can wish Newton spent more time on math and physics and less on alchemy and theology — but this is an illusion induced by hindsight bias. There was no voice calling to him that he could have heard. 不同的人在确定工作内容时遇到的困难大不相同。这是我从小到大学到的关于工作最重要的事情之一。小时候，你会觉得每个人都有自己的使命，他们要做的就是找到自己的使命。电影和给孩子们看的精简传记都是这么写的。现实生活中有时也是如此。有些人在孩提时代就想好了要做什么，然后就去做了，比如莫扎特。但另一些人，比如牛顿，则不安分地从一种工作转向另一种工作。也许回过头来，我们可以确定其中一种是他们的使命--我们可以希望牛顿花更多时间在数学和物理上，而少花时间在炼金术和神学上--但这是后见之明的偏见造成的错觉。他没有听到任何声音在召唤他。 So while some people's lives converge fast, there will be others whose lives never converge. And for these people, figuring out what to work on is not so much a prelude to working hard as an ongoing part of it, like one of a set of simultaneous equations. For these people, the process I described earlier has a third component: along with measuring both how hard you're working and how well you're doing, you have to think about whether you should keep working in this field or switch to another. If you're working hard but not getting good enough results, you should switch. It sounds simple expressed that way, but in practice it's very difficult. You shouldn't give up on the first day just because you work hard and don't get anywhere. You need to give yourself time to get going. But how much time? And what should you do if work that was going well stops going well? How much time do you give yourself then? [9] 因此，有些人的生活会迅速趋同，而有些人的生活则永远不会趋同。对这些人来说，确定工作内容与其说是努力工作的前奏，不如说是工作的持续部分，就像一组同步方程中的一个。对这些人来说，我前面描述的过程还有第三个组成部分：在衡量你工作的努力程度和表现的好坏的同时，你还必须考虑是否应该继续在这个领域工作，还是转到另一个领域。如果你努力工作却没有取得足够好的结果，你就应该转行。这样说听起来很简单，但实际操作起来却非常困难。你不应该因为努力工作却毫无进展，就在第一天就放弃。你需要给自己一些时间，让自己能够继续前进。但需要多少时间呢？如果原本进展顺利的工作停止了，你该怎么办？你又能给自己多少时间呢？[9] What even counts as good results? That can be really hard to decide. If you're exploring an area few others have worked in, you may not even know what good results look like. History is full of examples of people who misjudged the importance of what they were working on. 怎样才算是好的结果？这可能真的很难决定。如果你正在探索一个鲜有人涉足的领域，你甚至可能不知道好结果是什么样的。历史上有很多错误判断所从事工作重要性的例子。 The best test of whether it's worthwhile to work on something is whether you find it interesting. That may sound like a dangerously subjective measure, but it's probably the most accurate one you're going to get. You're the one working on the stuff. Who's in a better position than you to judge whether it's important, and what's a better predictor of its importance than whether it's interesting? 检验一件事情是否值得去做的最好标准就是你是否觉得它有趣。这听起来可能是一个危险的主观衡量标准，但它可能是最准确的衡量标准。你就是那个在研究的人。有谁比你更有资格判断它是否重要，又有什么比它是否有趣更能预测它的重要性呢？ For this test to work, though, you have to be honest with yourself. Indeed, that's the most striking thing about the whole question of working hard: how at each point it depends on being honest with yourself. 不过，要让这个测试发挥作用，你必须对自己诚实。事实上，这正是整个 "努力工作 "问题最引人注目的地方：它的每一点都取决于对自己是否诚实。 Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It's a complicated, dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point. You have to understand the shape of real work, see clearly what kind you're best suited for, aim as close to the true core of it as you can, accurately judge at each moment both what you're capable of and how you're doing, and put in as many hours each day as you can without harming the quality of the result. This network is too complicated to trick. But if you're consistently honest and clear-sighted, it will automatically assume an optimal shape, and you'll be productive in a way few people are. 努力工作不仅仅是把表盘调到 11。它是一个复杂的动态系统，每一点都必须调整得恰到好处。你必须了解实际工作的形态，看清自己最适合哪种工作，尽可能接近工作的真正核心，准确判断自己每时每刻的能力和表现，在不影响工作质量的前提下，每天投入尽可能多的时间。这个网络太复杂，骗不了人。但是，如果你始终保持诚实和清醒的头脑，它就会自动呈现出最佳状态，而你也会以一种很少有人能做到的方式提高工作效率。 Notes 说明 [1] In "The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius" I said the three ingredients in great work were natural ability, determination, and interest. That's the formula in the preceding stage; determination and interest yield practice and effort. [1] 我在《天才的公共汽车票理论》中说过，伟大工作的三个要素是天赋能力、决心和兴趣。这就是前一阶段的公式；决心和兴趣产生实践和努力。 [2] I mean this at a resolution of days, not hours. You'll often get somewhere while not working in the sense that the solution to a problem comes to you while taking a shower, or even in your sleep, but only because you were working hard on it the day before. [2] 我指的是以天为单位，而不是以小时为单位。你经常会在不工作的情况下有所收获，比如你在洗澡时，甚至在睡梦中突然想到了问题的解决方案，但这只是因为你前一天还在努力工作。 It's good to go on vacation occasionally, but when I go on vacation, I like to learn new things. I wouldn't like just sitting on a beach. 偶尔去度假是件好事，但我去度假时喜欢学习新东西。我不喜欢只是坐在沙滩上。 [3] The thing kids do in school that's most like the real version is sports. Admittedly because many sports originated as games played in schools. But in this one area, at least, kids are doing exactly what adults do. [3] 孩子们在学校里做的最像真实版的事情就是体育运动。诚然，许多体育运动起源于学校里的游戏。但至少在这一领域，孩子们所做的与成年人所做的如出一辙。 In the average American high school, you have a choice of pretending to do something serious, or seriously doing something pretend. Arguably the latter is no worse. 在美国的普通高中，你可以选择假装做一些严肃的事情，或者认真地做一些假装的事情。可以说，后者并不比前者差。 [4] Knowing what you want to work on doesn't mean you'll be able to. Most people have to spend a lot of their time working on things they don't want to, especially early on. But if you know what you want to do, you at least know what direction to nudge your life in. [4] 知道自己想做什么并不意味着你能做什么。大多数人不得不把大量时间花在他们不想做的事情上，尤其是在早期。但是，如果你知道自己想做什么，你至少知道该把生活引向哪个方向。 [5] The lower time limits for intense work suggest a solution to the problem of having less time to work after you have kids: switch to harder problems. In effect I did that, though not deliberately. [5] 降低高强度工作的时间限制为解决有了孩子后工作时间减少的问题提供了一个办法：改做更难的题。实际上，我就是这么做的，虽然不是故意的。 [6] Some cultures have a tradition of performative hard work. I don't love this idea, because (a) it makes a parody of something important and (b) it causes people to wear themselves out doing things that don't matter. I don't know enough to say for sure whether it's net good or bad, but my guess is bad. [6] 有些文化有表演性辛勤工作的传统。我不喜欢这种想法，因为（a）它是对重要事物的模仿，（b）它会让人们疲于做一些无关紧要的事情。我还不太了解，不能断言它是好是坏，但我猜是坏的。 [7] One of the reasons people work so hard on startups is that startups can fail, and when they do, that failure tends to be both decisive and conspicuous. [7] 人们在初创企业上如此努力的原因之一是，初创企业可能会失败，而一旦失败，这种失败往往是决定性的，也是显而易见的。 [8] It's ok to work on something to make a lot of money. You need to solve the money problem somehow, and there's nothing wrong with doing that efficiently by trying to make a lot at once. I suppose it would even be ok to be interested in money for its own sake; whatever floats your boat. Just so long as you're conscious of your motivations. The thing to avoid is unconsciously letting the need for money warp your ideas about what kind of work you find most interesting. [8] 为了赚大钱而努力是可以的。你需要想方设法解决钱的问题，而通过努力一次性赚很多钱来有效地解决钱的问题并没有错。我想，甚至为了钱而对钱感兴趣也是可以的，只要你喜欢。只要你能意识到自己的动机。要避免的是无意识地让对金钱的需求扭曲你对哪种工作最感兴趣的想法。 [9] Many people face this question on a smaller scale with individual projects. But it's easier both to recognize and to accept a dead end in a single project than to abandon some type of work entirely. The more determined you are, the harder it gets. Like a Spanish Flu victim, you're fighting your own immune system: Instead of giving up, you tell yourself, I should just try harder. And who can say you're not right? [9] 许多人在较小范围内的单个项目中都会遇到这个问题。但是，认识到并接受单个项目的死胡同，比完全放弃某类工作要容易得多。你越坚定，就越困难。就像西班牙流感患者一样，你在与自己的免疫系统作斗争：与其放弃，不如告诉自己，我应该更加努力。谁又能说你不对呢？ Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, John Carmack, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this. 感谢 Trevor Blackwell、John Carmack、John Collison、Patrick Collison、Robert Morris、Geoff Ralston 和 Harj Taggar 阅读本文草稿。 |
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 Arabic Translation阿拉伯语翻译 {{0} |
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