

Stop the Presses: Essay Shows That Hard Work Can Be Unpleasant - diego
http://diegobasch.com/stop-the-presses-essay-shows-that-hard-work-c

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yangez
Here's the big thing that you missed in PG's analysis:

>The most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is
unconscious. Your unconscious won't even let you see ideas that involve
painful schleps. That's schlep blindness.

Thus defined, schlep blindness isn't the _unwillingness_ to do hard work.
Instead, it's the unconscious aversion to ideas that have unpleasant tasks
associated with it. This idea is actually pretty profound and it's good to
have an awareness of it.

~~~
diego
That concept is made up by him. I, as well as many other people, am absolutely
aware of great ideas that involve painful schleps. I've discussed startup
ideas with different people since the 90s. A reason to discard an idea was
"that's a cool problem, only we'd be in for a world of pain."

I don't see any evidence to support his assertion that "your unconscious won't
even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps." It's just psychobabble
to me.

~~~
jfager
You should read Daniel Kahneman's _Thinking, Fast and Slow_ , which says
basically the same thing in thorough detail. The fact that you know of some
number of difficult things that you've seen and considered says very little
about whether there's a cognitive bias against doing so in general - how can
you even start to quantify all the things that you may have missed?

~~~
diego
I've read it. Daniel Kahneman says something very different than what Paul
Graham says. Graham is making an unsubstantiated assertion about a very
specific hypothesis for which he has no evidence: that people generally fail
to see ideas that would require hard work. That's not one of the many very
specific biases and cognitive illusions pointed out by Kahneman which he
substantiates with studies and experiments.

~~~
jfager
The unifying characteristic of the many specific biases and cognitive
illusions Kahneman discusses is that System 2 systematically defers to System
1 to avoid doing work. I appreciate your point that Graham's specific claim is
not substantiated by direct experimental evidence, but I think it's likely
that the task of picking a business idea is subject to the same biases as any
other task. It's certainly not as ludicrous a suggestion as you're making it
out to be.

------
rpeden
I think this analysis is a little unfair. It may be true that pg wasn't really
saying anything new. That doesn't mean that it wasn't worth writing about,
however, because it is one of those lessons that seems to continually go
unlearned.

I don't believe his allusion to the inverse correlation between the age of
founders and the likelihood of big successes is entirely unfair, either. Of
course there are exceptions, but in general I've noticed that as my friends
grow older, they have become more risk averse. They seems to be much more
likely to talk themselves out of pursuing big ideas by enumerating all of the
ways in which they might fail.

Having said that, I think there's a lot of value in older founders who can use
their experience and judgement, but are still willing to adopt a "damn the
torpedos, full speed ahead" attitude when they realize that a lot of hard,
boring work lies between them and their goal.

~~~
diego
The obvious question is, how many of your older friends are founders? The fact
that someone is an older founder means he/she is less risk averse than other
people.

------
nostrademons
I think that this is only half of what PG was trying to say. It's not just
that hard work can be unpleasant - it's that hard work can be unpleasant _and
this blinds people to working on problems with large impact, simply because
they will hard_. He's describing a very particular failure mode of potential
startup founders that he sees.

If this weren't a real problem - why are so few people trying to tackle actual
problems that make millions of people miserable? Like health & sanitation in
the third world. Or fixing the political process in the U.S. (and everywhere)
so that people with less than a million dollars actually have a voice? Or
matching up the millions of job seekers with the millions of jobs that go
unfilled because there's nobody suitably skilled for them? Or finding a
sustainable energy source so that we can maintain our lifestyle when the oil
dries up?

~~~
wisty
Lots of people are trying to tackle these "actual problems". There's just no
money in it, so it doesn't get funded.

Or if there is money in it, people criticize things. Oprah has practically
become a saint, for opening a school that graduates ~100 students a year.
Foxconn provides hundreds of thousands of migrant workers with the money they
need to send their kids to school, and they are practically the devil
incarnate. It's complicated.

~~~
dextorious
"""Oprah has practically become a saint, for opening a school that graduates
~100 students a year. Foxconn provides hundreds of thousands of migrant
workers with the money they need to send their kids to school, and they are
practically the devil incarnate. It's complicated."""

How good of Foxconn. If only they didn't make ten times the money or more off
of each migrant worker while forcing him to work in shitty conditions
capitalizing on the fact that they are kind of the only game in town and/or
have agreements with fellow factory owners to keep the wages down/conditions
bad...

~~~
wisty
Foxconn - revenue $59.3 billion, profits $2.2 billion (2010). They can't
really afford to raise their costs that much. OK, a large part of their
revenue might be components, but even then, they aren't exactly rolling in
cash.

------
QuantumGood
Well, most first-time parents confess surprise at how difficult it being a
parent turns out to be. Among them are parents who did their research, knew
lots of other first-time parents, and didn't believe they would be surprised.

It turns out that believing you are prepared for something and actually being
prepared are often not the same thing, hence the "blindness" pg refers to.

You say "Don't be fooled, what pg is doing here is thinking like the VC that
he is." I say, don't be fooled by analyzing the source, "schlep blindness"
really does exist.

He's also writing about fear and perfectionism. And I find his admonition to

"...ask 'what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?' ... there's
plenty still broken in the world, if you know how to see it."

to be useful.

It's fine to point out his (VC) bias, but I think you're doing a disservice in
not pointing out that he's also giving useful advice.

~~~
diego
I'm not convinced. He says:

"There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses.
One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call schlep blindness. Schlep
was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. It
means a tedious, unpleasant task."

I wouldn't say we don't see them. The problem is we don't want to take on
them. Founders know that the odds of getting rich are slim, so they (we) want
to have fun during the journey. Investors on the other hand, want to make
money. They don't care if founders have fun. They need to convince founders to
do unpleasant things that have a chance of doing spectacularly well.

~~~
nostrademons
I think you're interpreting "don't see them" in a way different from how PG
meant it. Of course we "see them", as in "are aware of them". There're pretty
common threads on HN and Reddit where people lament "Oh, wouldn't be awesome
if <big hairy audacious goal> were solved!"

I think he meant "see them" as "see them as something that could realistically
be solved by my startup". And that's not really divorceable from being willing
to take them on. After all, if you recognize that something is a problem and
recognize that you can solve it - why wouldn't you? What's holding you back?

~~~
diego
I could solve problems that are extremely unrewarding to me. Some problems are
very unsexy to most people. In order to tackle those problems you must be
motivated by either extreme altruism, or a belief that your odds of success
are high. The latter is probably unrealistic and irrational for most problems
worth solving.

~~~
AznHisoka
Some problems are also beyond most of our scope. Most people here think
they're extremely smart. smarter than the average person. But all we really
possess are superior technical skills. In reality, we just own a tool others
don't. But solving those hairy problems requires special insight/research
outside of technology. Having those technical skills(coding, design, user
experience, etc) is just a pre-requisite and let's you into the arena.

------
plugzero
I disagree that the point of the article was to make the obvious point that
hard work is unpleasant. Rather, I thought he was trying to illustrate that
there are components of many tasks that are easy to discount the importance
of. Instead of attending to certain details that seem pointless on the margin,
or may have less obvious benefit, the focus may be placed on more mission-
critical tasks. It's not that those other tasks don't require hard work; it's
that it may be easier to place the focus on them because it's more apparent
why they need to be done.

Perhaps, it would do everyone some good to focus on the things we suck at
doing or can't see the obvious benefit to doing.

------
arctangent
One of the general failings of smart people is that they tend to breeze
through school without ever trying very hard, and thus lack some of the
necessary skills when faced with an arduous problem. This is probably what PG
is getting at.

------
Tichy
"He makes it sound like he just invented faster-than-light travel, even though
every person who ever ran a successful business can tell you this"

I don't think he wrote it for people who run successful businesses, but for
other hackers. The thing is that as a hacker it does not seem unreasonable to
possibly get away without doing unpleasant work. After all you enjoy
programming, and most business tasks seem algorithmic. Your business is going
to be making the computer work for you, hence no Schlep.

It really only makes sense if you consider the target audience.

------
billpatrianakos
I respect PG very much. His past successes, YC, and his essays are great. He's
not infallible though and I'm glad someone had the balls not just to put their
disagreement in writing but to post it here on HN too. The author makes some
good points and if the Schlep Blindness essay was written by anyone else there
wouldn't be such a knee-jerk reaction to come to his defense like there is
here. This community pays a lot of lip service to being the best, the
brightest, critical and independent thinkers but then we all end up looking
like hypocrites in situations just like this one. While there's no doubt that
PG is am exceptional person I really think his celebrity and a ton of
groupthink influences our interpretation of what PG says and how we react when
someone doesn't fall in line to compliment him or do anything but disagree
with what he says. I also shouldn't have to litter my opinion here with
qualifications about how I think PG is great but without doing so I'll
probably get bullied into submission via downvotes and various snarky
comments. When the author of this article pointed out that the PG essay was
basically telling us what we already knew while tricking us into thinking it
were so profound the lightbulb went off in my head that inspired this. Anyway,
we should all take what PG says like something any mere mortal would come up
with. Some of its good, some not as good. Putting him on a pedestal impedes
pour ability to think critically about the content of the writing and let it
pass as high quality no matter what.

~~~
gustavo_duarte
The two top-rated entries in the HN comments for PG's essay are disagreements,
both stating that the essay is flawed. I'm not so sure the groupthink is
really that bad here on HN.

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mjwalshe
And working at a start up isn't "dirty" work try working as as a sewer cleaner
or a miner for example.

