Hard Work Isn’t What You Think It Is
Or, the future belongs to those who do hard work
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
I was chatting with a friend of mine the other day. He said something interesting that stayed with me: “There’s so much mediocre content in the world, because it’s so easy to create them. It’s hard to find hidden gems in the midst of so much trash.”
This stayed with me. I for one find it hard to discover quality YouTube channels. Their recommendation engine is beyond mediocre, to say the least. It works very well to discover hedonic entertainment videos. But if you really want to discover deep entertainment content, it’s impossible.
It got me thinking, if you are a creator, how do you get yourself visible, especially if you think you have average talent? That’s what today’s essay is all about.
On to this week’s essay! It’s about ~1600 words.
Note: If you find this issue valuable, can you do me a favour and click the little grey heart below my name (above)? It helps get the word out about this budding newsletter. 😍
Q: Do average folks have any chance to make it in creative fields?
Good Will Hunting is one of my favourite movies, and not just because I’m a fan of Matt Damon.
There’s a scene in the beginning of the movie where Ben Affleck’s character Chuckie hits on a few girls, claiming to be a Harvard student himself. When another Harvard student intervenes and tries to humiliate Chuckie, challenging his knowledge of American colonial history, Will steps to Chuckie’s defence, matching the guy step-for-step with historical facts he’d memorised.
Among other things, Will Hunting has genius-level talent for memorising facts. He even mentions the page number from where the guy was quoting. When he leaves, Casey Affleck’s character Morgan says, “My boy is wicked smart!”
You gotta be in awe of such talent. When I watched the movie for the first time as a kid, I so wished to be as wicked smart as Will Hunting. Life would be smooth, finding success would be so easy, and just about everything would be effortless for me.
As I grew older (and become slightly wiser) I came to realise that while having talent is good, you don’t always have to be wicked smart to make it big in your career. Average folks would do just fine, as long as you are willing to do the ‘hard’ work.
Today, let’s talk about talent. More precisely, let’s talk about why you don’t need a lot of talent, a tonne of creativity, or unique skillsets to have a successful career. What you need is hard work, and hard work isn’t exactly what you think it is.
Take the YouTuber Mark Rober, for example. His videos are super entertaining. They are funny and you can watch them all day. You also get to learn a thing or two, which is definitely nice. Having worked at NASA, he is definitely an excellent engineer, but what makes his channel one of the best is his excellent presentation. He has good content but its packaged extremely well.
He makes engineering videos, but they aren’t like any other channel. He makes goofy machines that bring out the inner child in all of us. He tells his stories in a super engaging way (with great camera work and beautiful music). This takes hard work!
People have a wrong notion about hard work. Hard work isn’t about putting your head down and grinding it out. That’s lazy work.
Let me explain that with two personal stories.
I’ve been writing every week since 2018. With time, I’ve garnered a good readership and I’m proud to say that I’ve got a decent number of paid readers. This newsletter is the highlight of my creative career. What do I credit for its success? Hard work!
But at the same I’ve failed to launch a (successful) YouTube channel since 2019. Not once. Not twice. But thrice. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. I published one video a week. I had good content, but despite trying multiple times, one of two things happened. Either the engagement wasn’t great or I stopped enjoying the process of making videos all together. In hindsight, even though I did a lot of work, what I didn’t do was ‘hard’ work.
Hard work is about putting creative effort. Hard work isn’t about following a routine or a step-by-step process. That might have been the case earlier but times have changed. With the barrier to entry non-existent in almost every creative field, the competition is huge.
Just “getting things done” isn’t enough anymore. Doing things differently is more important than ever. In fact, it’s the most important thing.
What constitutes hard work? Hard work is about mixing and matching, adding unobvious elements (from other domains), and putting a considerable amount of effort to make things interesting.
Hard work is about putting effort in presenting and not just building.
It doesn’t need a lot of talent. But it does need lots of love and dedication.
When I was making YouTube videos I wasn’t doing any of those. Even though I was spending a lot of time researching, writing, recording, editing, and publishing, it was just rote work — whatever made it easy to publish something. It was the oppostie of hard work — it was lazy work.
With so many players in the field fighting for the audience’s attention, how you present the message has become ever more important — even more important than the message itself.
Originality is good, but originality without good packaging won’t get you very far.
What did I do differently with my essays? I focussed on making them super easy to read. I made it a point to simplify complex topics. I made it a point to read as many books as possible so that I could bring in ideas from multiple disciplines. I didn’t write anything original for a long time, but I made it a point to look at obvious things from a different point of view.
I also tried to make them entertaining. I read books on writing. I copied the styles of writers I admire. I didn’t just hit publish every week, I put considerable effort to make them worth my readers’ time. Something I didn’t really focus on with my YouTube videos.
I have average talent, to be extremely honest. This isn’t a humble brag. Some of the smartest folks I know have average skill or talent. But what sets them apart (and is also the secret sauce behind their success) is that they put a tonne of effort in keeping their eyes and ears open to new ideas, constantly learning new things, juxtaposing them to create something novel and interesting. What sets them apart is the hard work they put.
Hard work needs creativity. But I want to make it super clear that creativity isn’t just a skill, it’s also a mindset and an attitude. If you think you have average creativity or you weren’t born with it at all, you can learn it — just by watching, observing, and tinkering.
Observe things, experience them, learn about them, and mix and match them. The brain is plastic. It changes with exposure and practice.
The more you experience new things the more you learn, and the more capable you become in seeing the world with varied lenses, thinking about problems from multiple angles, and considering possibilities that were previously inconceivable. That’s creativity in a nutshell. When you think of it this way, it’s more of a framework than a skill.
Let me illustrate with an example. Say you want to teach engineering on YouTube. But then there are several thousand other successful YouTube channels that teach engineering. How can you stand out?
If you are thinking of putting tonnes of effort in making quality tutorials, that won’t cut it. Even if you have average content, what will set you apart is how you package it differently.
How do you do it? Well, you copy from others, but not from the obvious places. How about copying the teaching style of The Coding Train? Can you teach physics the way Daniel Shiffman teaches programming? Or maybe how Eddie Woo teaches maths? Or maybe how Wisecrack teaches liberal arts?
You can take cues from books as well. How about copying Walter Lewin’s or Steven Strogatz’s, or even NN Taleb’s style and tone? Can you put the engineering lessons into the unique storytelling structure of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire where each chapter is told from the point of view of a character?
Teaching engineering on YouTube in the most obvious way (like you would do in a classroom) isn’t really hard work. It takes a tonne of effort, and you might really be a good teacher, but strictly speaking, it isn’t hard work.
Hard work is the process of discovering your own unique voice. How do you do that? You (try to) copy bits and pieces from other places and to put them together.
Daniel Shiffman teaches programming by creating simulations and games. Can you do something similar? Can you teach engineering using a physics engine? Instead of speaking like yourself, can you imitate Sean Connery or Clint Eastwood or Shah Rukh Khan? Can you play multiple characters while teaching a lesson, like BB Ki Vines?
Similarly, if you are a painter, can you take inspiration from maths? If you are a writer, can you take inspiration from movies? If you are a photographer, can you take inspiration from novels?
The key is to explore multiple disciplines. Take cues from them. Have an open mind. Be curious. Push your limits. Try new things. And don’t be afraid to look dumb (at least in short term). Because that’s the only way you’ll be comfortable in trying newer dumb things if the last one doesn’t work. Novel ideas always look dumb, until they don’t.
The future belongs to those who do the hard work. Do it, because nobody else is doing enough.
Timeless Insight
Keep your humility personal. Be humble among people who are close to you, people who know you very well — your friends, your close confidants, and your advisors.
But when you are among the masses, be secretly humble, but be openly persuasive. Phrase things in such a way that make you seem above doubt, and well accomplished.
Great persuaders don’t deal in subtleties or grey areas. Everything they do appear to be the best, top of class, and world leading. There’s a reason we worship gurus and pundits.
What I’m Reading
In a world where nothing is stable or dependable and almost anything can happen, the first rule of the road is to be honest with ourselves about our limitations and vulnerabilities.
— William P. Green, Richer, Wiser, Happier
Tiny Thought
The “us versus them” mindset coupled with our social nature implies that we have an innate need to belong to clearly defined groups.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, your favourite Netflix series. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋