Embrace the Grind

I was talking to a friend the other day about life hacks and he said: what if life hacks, in the end, make you a hack? No one wants to be a hack. A hack job is a job poorly done. No matter how much we glorify hacks as workarounds to success, nothing gets you there except actual work. The grind, the hustle, the hours on end putting your head down an... See more

“Grind it out. You can make something look like magic by going further than most reasonable people would go.”

July 2023

If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it.

Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise sh... See more

Laborious solutions will often have more prestige in the short term. They cost a lot of effort and they're hard to understand, both of which impress people, at least temporarily.

Whereas some of the very best work will seem like it took comparatively little effort, because it was in a sense already there. It didn't have to be built, just seen. It's ... See more