
The lazy way to being outstanding: go after hard things - artpi
https://deliber.at/2020/hard-things-are-easier/
======
tempsy
Definitely disagree with this one.

The way to be outstanding is to go after a niche and learn your way into the
20% of that field. For knowledge-based work this is _not_ that difficult.

For example, a few years ago I stumbled upon payment fraud as an interesting
area to learn about and quickly became somewhat of an "expert" in the
industry. The whole Trust & Safety industry has only gotten larger ever since,
and there's no shortage of product management/engineering/data science/program
management/analyst jobs in this area.

~~~
phaedrus
Isn't there an element of being in the right place / right time though? I
sometimes feel like my side-interest niches fall into two categories: things I
came late to the party to, or things I thought would be a good thing to get
into but not enough other people cared.

~~~
jimbokun
So that's where the point of the article comes in. If you are working at a
corporation, the problem that seems hard (but probably really isn't) and would
unlock a lot of value if solved, is a good thing to work on. Chances are,
other companies have similar blockages and becoming an expert in that area is
likely to offer a lot of career growth opportunities.

------
yowlingcat
This is a horrible article and borderline (maybe full blown) blog spam. While
there's nothing intrinsically wrong with going after unsolved problems, and
making headway on one of them is a really important part of intellectual and
professional maturity, it's not a panacea, and it doesn't come without severe
existential risks. Nowhere is the downside of going after moonshots addressed,
which is failing completely and having little to show for it. I have seen many
a talented friend (and friend of friend) waste 7 years of prime youth going
after something that wasn't just hard, but intractable. I can't put into words
what an incredible hit to momentum, network, and skillset that is. A huge part
of professional maturity and productivity is determining value at risk, using
leverage, and getting outsized impacts out of reasonable amounts of effort.

~~~
artpi
Ha! Strong opinions!

I think my failure here is that I did not fully explain, that this applies
mostly to the corporate environment of technology companies, where the risk of
failure is much, much smaller and you distinguish yourself from the rest by
having appetite for risk.

I of course totally forgot, that there is a whole startup world and convincing
people to chase moonshots without any risk analysis should be indeed illegal.
Young entrepreneur: YOU SHOULD WEIGH YOUR RISKS BEFORE YOU GO INTO THE WILD!!

~~~
yowlingcat
I think that this caveat basically completely transforms the post. Take my
admittedly strong opinion with a grain of salt, but I think rewriting this
post with that context at the beginning (and from that angle) would really,
really elevate it. If you get into a comparison of how risk-adverse versus
risk-centric approaches can compare and contrast with career payoffs, I think
you get much closer to a more detailed, useful comparison that helps folks
think about their careers. With that said, I do think that courting risk as
its own reward is flawed. It's risk weighted return that's the powerful part
-- if you could make gigantic impacts risk free, you should do that.

In fact, to a large extent, I think this is a huge part of what senior
engineering is all about. If there are table stakes things to be done that
will make a big impact, you want to learn how to communicate that, negotiate
implementation against roadmap, and then qualify and quantify the impact after
executing. I believe and have observed what makes much of corporate software
engineering so lucrative is the value you can add with relatively low risk.
So, to court risk is give up a systematic advantage. It seems to be quite
backwards to me.

------
jrochkind1
Here's the thing though, the hard things are hard becuase they are actually
hard. OP talks about _risk_ of failure only glancingly, for instance in
quoting someone else: "We shy away from hard work because inherent in hard
work is a risk. Hard work is hard because you might fail."

Right. So what happens when you do what OP suggests, and fail? This can
happen, right, that's what "hard" and "risk" mean.

Some risks are burn-out, and destroying your career. This happens. I have seen
it.

So, what do you to do mitigate those risks while still going after hard
things?

~~~
artpi
What I wanted to convey by quoting Seth Godin is that we should be more
comfortable risking failure like embarassment, getting out of the comfort
zone, etc.

Failure of burnout and loosing your time is the risk of LONG work - not the
type I advocate. It seems that I did not explain this clearly, but I wanted to
point out that "slogging through" is not the right approach.

> Right. So what happens when you do what OP suggests, and fail? This can
> happen, right, that's what "hard" and "risk" mean.

It's a cliche and I wish I would have a better explanation, but:

\- Your failure is above everybody else's success

\- You get instant respect and credibility because you tried

\- You learn a shitton.

------
glitchc
The hard problems are always the fun problems. Yes there's risk, but life is
full of risks. The learning that happens while tackling a hard problem is
immeasurable, will take you leaps and bounds over your contemporaries, and
that will set you apart. Subject matter experts aren't forged by solving easy
problems.

There seems to be a great deal of "careerist" advice in the forums. That path
can certainly lead to contentment, but it's slow, intellectual suicide. I was
on this track before, but gave it up and couldn't be happier.

Edit: grammar

------
teleforce
Definitely agree with this one.

The hard way to be outstanding is to go after a niche and learn your way into
the 20% of that field (did some copy paste here, lazy to repeat arguments).

For example, if you want to be proficient in radar systems you can learn and
read all the books on radar, and probably still become an average research
student of radar technology.

If you can find a hard problem in radar and solve it somehow, you will become
well-known in an established field without becoming a classical expert like
writing book on radar.

------
remmargorp64
The problem with this kind of advice is that it's not really actionable. It's
only useful in retrospect.

If you are able to recognize these situations/opportunities, then everyone
else would be able to recognize them too. It's not like my brain is all that
different from those around me, after all.

You might as well tell me that the secret to flying is learning how to throw
myself at the ground and miss.

Hard problems are usually hard problems for a reason, and when you spend time
on them you often go nowhere.

Maybe better advice (that is actually actionable) would be something like
this:

 _" Try to tackle hard problems that nobody else wants to tackle during 20% of
your time, on the odd chance that you might stumble upon an easy solution and
get big rewards from it."_

Sort of like diversifying your stock portfolio. Keep some of your eggs in the
nice stable investments with low returns, but maybe invest some allocated
percentage on some riskier long shots too.

------
nathan_compton
This essay is a bit weird because it systematically avoids talking about the
reason people (rationally, I might add) avoid hard problems: they are risky.
Yes the rewards are great, but so too is the risk of failure.

I, personally, have seen people pursue this strategy, flame out, and get fired
for it.

I work to provide stability for my family. I don't take risks unless I get an
explicit request from management to do so, and thus someone else to take
responsibility. The whole idea that employees should be dynamic and "ask for
forgiveness, not permission" is truly perverse in a capitalist context: your
employer wants you to take the risks, but they definitely will take the
benefits if you succeed. If you fail, hey, its your fault.

Doing risky stuff is fine but I don't do it unless I've got backing from
management.

~~~
Rerarom
The thing is sometimes hard things are actually easy because there is a simple
solution that hasn't been tried because people haven't worked on the problem
because it seems hard and they don't feel smart enough.

The trick is to recognize these situations.

~~~
bpt3
This is excellent advice.

I hope the author updates the article to explicitly include this suggestion,
and I'll be looking for opportunities where this misunderstanding exists.

~~~
nathan_compton
Is it excellent or a clever way of phrasing something empty? Presumably
identifying hard problems that are actually easy problems is itself a hard
problem, otherwise someone would have surely already figured it out (if the
ends are valuable).

I mean its great if you can figure out such a situation, but how much time
should you spin your wheels trying to find an easy solution to a hard problem
before you're wasting your time? Also a hard problem exactly because its hard
to figure out how hard a hard problem really is.

~~~
bpt3
I disagree.

In my experience there are plenty of "hard" problems within organizations that
in reality aren't actually hard to solve. The issue is that the organization
has created policies or processes that make the problem hard to solve, and
breaking through those artificial barriers can be fairly simple once you find
the right approach.

Also, it's much lower risk to spend a limited amount of time exploring whether
there are untried solutions to a "hard" problem than it is to publicly declare
war on an actual hard problem and hope you find a solution.

~~~
Rerarom
Note that I was thinking of problems in terms of scientific research rather
than business stuff but it was intentionally vague so that people can apply it
to their own domain.

------
valdiorn
I struggle with a more basic issue here; there are plenty of things at my
current job which are just "accepted". Lots of "this is the way it has always
been", but are actually really bad for productivity and our ability to do
business. I've tried to set out plans to address a few of these issues, and
I'm willing to accept the risk that, if I fail, it might reflect so poorly on
my career that I'd be fired to have to find a new job.

My problem is simple; how do I convince the person above me in the pecking
order that they should even give me space to attempt the project? I keep
getting rejected, presumably because if my project fails, it might also
reflect poorly on them, and they're not willing to take the risk.

I guess the same would apply to people looking for funding for their mad,
overly ambitious startups or projects.

tl;dr: how can you "go after hard things" if nobody is willing to back you
because they think it's too hard.

~~~
Timberwolf
I spent four years at an organisation rife with this. I found two major routes
for getting to work on hard problems.

The first was joining initiatives that were in such utter disarray people were
willing to take any risk to get out of the "someone's gonna get fired for
this" hole. They were typically rich in hard problems (the chaos was usually
caused by failure to address one or more of them) and people liked the idea
that someone else was taking on responsibility and becoming the person who was
most likely "gonna get fired for this". I was happy taking that risk,
considering the payoff in getting to work on interesting problems worth it.

In the absence of disarray, I had to go down the much slower route of finding
small things that received so little attention I could just _do_ them; nobody
cared about them enough to worry about success or failure, and the time input
was small enough nobody got upset about it. Over time the cumulative impact
would gain me enough trust to take on something bigger, and assuming that went
well things would snowball from there. In this way I "trained" one of my
bosses from flipping out at the most minor suggestion to pretty much leaving
me alone to get on with what I felt like, on the basis I would usually find
things to do that reflected well on him.

Unfortunately I never worked out how to get anywhere with the kind of person
who benefited from the hard problems not being solved -essentially those
profiting from either the prevalence of bullshit or non-essential things being
done as per points 3 and 4 in the article's section on what happens when you
do tackle the hard stuff.

I'd also caution in my experience it wasn't useful in advancing my career at
the same company - I did see a big benefit in credibility but it was among
peers and the people I depended on to "get a VIP pass around bureaucracy".
This has been general across organisations in my experience: the career stage
benefits only come when I move on and have a load of experience in problem
spaces I simply wouldn't have encountered had I kept my head down and merely
done my job.

------
DrNuke
Without a bigger plan such as a domain-knowledge interest for personal,
academical or business purpose, once you really hit the wall your game is
pretty over though? Slogging is hard.

------
activatedgeek
This article is probably sloppy but also somewhere implicitly implies - doing
hard work requires privilege.

I think this is something that many comments here also allude to. By hard work
I mean working on hard problems and not a slogger. By privilege I mean a mix
of leverages via knowledge, experience and career circumstances.

------
tanilama
Or you need to think hard why everyone else avoids it in the first place.

------
thomble
Did Elizabeth Holmes write this article?

