Work Harder, not Smarder
My new year's resolution, in case you care, is "work harder, not smarter".
"Shouldn't that be work smarter not harder?", you may ask. Nope. I mean "harder" not "smarter".
The Tyranny of the Princeton Review
I'm a smart guy. (And also humble, obviously). My nickname in grade school was "Einstein". I scored really well* on the SATs. Since free will is an illusion, I can take no credit for that. I'm lucky that all of the probabilities lined up to give me good DNA, and decent upbringing and a balanced dopamine reward system that made me really enjoy reading. But I've never been a really hard worker. I lack grit and gumption. That doesn't make me an inferior person, but it also doesn't make me a wildly successful businessman or competitive swimmer.
Prince Matchabelli
Elon Musk works a reputed 100 hours per week. He's innately smarter than me. And he works about 5 times as hard as me. He is lucky (and so are we) that all of the probabilities of his life lined up to make him capable of founding Tesla and SpaceX and the other endeavors for which he is famous.
While I admire Musks accomplishments, I do not admire his lifestyle. His aspirations are different from mine. Part of me wishes I had that kind of grit. Another part of me knows that the kind of pleasure that he derives from that much work is in a completely different class from the kind of pleasure that I get from writing a quick blog post like this one. Or in bashing certain Cheeto-tinged demagogues on Facebook.
The Wisdom of Doug
My college friend Doug had a saying: "Let's do something, even if it's wrong". To be fair, this was in response to sitting around in someone's dorm room rather than going out to the local club to trawl for women, but the sentiment stands. Also, Doug was tragically killed in a car accident, so I like to say his name every once in a while to refresh the neurons where he lives on in my memory.
I'd like to think that it is a sense of perfectionism that keeps me from producing consistent output (like the sporadic nature of the blog entries like this, for example). But it's not perfectionism. It's laziness. Just writing it down won't fix it - but it will give me a sense of guilt and shame for when I don't accomplish all of the things that I've set out to do this year. And who doesn't love guilt and shame?
Speaking of which - I've already spent too much time on this post.
Maybe I should also try to work a little bit smarder.
* that was a long time ago, and it wasn't all that well. Like 1380 or something, back when 1600 was perfect. Things have probably changed, but I'm too lazy to look it up.