Why Work Smart When You Can "Just" Work Hard?

One weird trick to waste time and hate yourself!

A few months ago, I visited NY and got dinner with a startup friend whose work ethic and skills I really admire. I told him about my latest desire to learn how to read math textbooks, which I’ve always had extreme difficulty learning from.

“Once I get how to read textbooks on my own, I’ll feel a lot better about myself,” I told him.

To my surprise, he didn’t encourage me the way others did when they heard about this goal. Instead, he asked, “Are you more interested in knowing the material or knowing that you can read from textbooks? If it’s the former, maybe you should watch lecture videos or get a tutor instead.” Translation: are you sure you want to do things the hard and brutal way? If you could allow your ego to get bruised and admit that some ways of learning don’t work for you, maybe you could find a less arduous path.

Over the past few months, I’ve been looking at many of the places I feel like I’m struggling — and oh, there are so many! — and this conversation keeps coming up. It’s a microcosm of a general trait I have that inevitably causes me a lot of pain: I glorify sheer effort and brutality, even if it ends up being ineffective.

I spent some summers back in college half-heartedly preparing for software engineer and finance interviews. There’s a pretty established pipeline for this: ask for referrals, practice Leetcode (a platform with mock interview questions), memorize some statistics or coding structures, and ask your friends for mock interviews. You can speed up the whole process by buying certain courses, and some people go so far as to take Adderall or Modafinil right before their interviews, so they are extra focused and alert. Some people are so locked in that they message in meme groups asking for referrals. A few years ago, this one girl posted in subtle asian traits, this meme group about Asian living, and got referrals to Twitter and Two Sigma, among other tech companies.

What did I do? For the most part, I didn’t ask for referrals, and I often didn’t ask for mock interviews. I just felt so terrified of putting myself out there and getting to know the people in my classes. Instead, I constructed a fantasy in my head. I’m going to get to the same place by just grinding Leetcode all day and not getting referrals! They’re cheating by taking shortcuts, and I’m going to prove to them that I can get the same results!

Needless to say, I did not get the same results. I was in a grocery store last week when I suddenly remembered my thought processes around interviews during college, and I started visibly cringing. I’m honestly so embarrassed and upset about how ineffective I was back then, and how ineffective I continue to be now.

Let me give another example: for the past few years, I’ve found meditation to be extremely painful, to put it lightly. We’re talking impulses to literally kick and scream and punch the air every time I hit the cushion and try to focus on my breath. Inhale, exhale, holy crap I’m going crazy and need to get out of here! Rinse and repeat a few times, until I get so angry and worked up that I stop.

Often when I asked more experienced meditators for advice, they suggested doing metta meditation or more actively pleasant forms of meditation, I would scoff. “That’s not real meditation, it’s not intense enough!”

Finally, a few weeks ago, I was at a Vippasanna meditation retreat, where the emphasized style of meditation was focusing on the breath, which often felt actively hostile to me. I ended up talking to a CS-professor-turned-monk, and I was describing my troubles. “I often tense up and feel a huge resistance to actually relaxing my body, and I want to kick and scream,” I exclaimed.

He looked concerned for me. “You know, you’ll get to meditative states only by relaxing your body. Why don’t you go to a different tradition for now, ones that focus on body relaxation?”

Hearing those words, I had an epiphany that made me feel extremely silly. All those experienced meditators had a point. My blind focus on brutality made me miss one of the main prerequisites of meditation, having a relaxed body. That’s why yoga was originally created, to relax the body for meditation, and here I was on the bench, stubbornly insisting on being as tough as a rock.

What was I doing? I had made my meditation practice needlessly difficult for years!

me on a daily basis, thanks Meta AI!