I Worked Hard all my Life. I Regret it

[johnrushx]

I Worked Hard all my Life I Regret it. Harder than anyone I had ever known. Did it bring success? -No. I really wanna say "yes" to justify my hard work and push down those who didn't work hard, but can't lie to myself.

These 3 things changed everything for me:

1. Kill me EGO. Back in the day, I worked hard, but in most cases, I was simply fighting with my own "intentional" mistakes. Most of the things I did came out of my ego. For example, I'd design things based on my personal taste rather than looking for this year's trend and adopting it. Why did I go for my own taste vs the current thing? because of my EGO. 99% of founders in my network make this mistake as we speak, I see it every day now, but I didn't see it in myself back then. Killing my ego led to becoming 2-5x more productive, which means I don't need to work as "hard" anymore.

2. Validation & Brave Confidence. In old times I'd just go and build the sht instead of validating. In 10 out of 10 cases, I'd build crap that nobody needs and right after that, I'd iterate doing 100-hour work weeks with no sleep or holidays. Could I have avoided all that? Of course. Today I validate things before I write the first line of code. I haven't failed a single launch since then. The productivity gain here is 10-100x. In old times a typical product would need 2 years of iterations to get somewhere, now it's "right" from the start because I iterate on the validation stage using different marketing messages. Compare this to iterating with the SAAS, where each new version might take many months of coding, versus me spending a few minutes to redo my marketing message from a new angle.

3. Reinventing wheels. I'd never reuse external libraries or nocode tools or boilerplates. I was too proud of myself. Every boilerplate had "spaghetti code", SDKs were poorly designed, APIs were limiting me....and all sorts of bullsit excuses I could find to reinvent the wheel yet again. Now my typical project has just 5% of my own code and the rest comes from external boilerplates, apis, sdks, nocodes, lowcodes. This is yet another 10x time saver. I don't need to code for 100 hours a week anymore. I can spend more time inventing cool creative marketing ideas that actually move the needle instead of proudly reinventing the CRUD.

The Moral.

If you have to work hard, it means you're not working "smart". Often founders romanticize the "hard" and look for hard ways instead of going for easy ways. I know it's hard to accept it. I was the one who denied it myself for many years.

[satisfice]

You’ve taken the wrong lesson from your experience. Or let me put it this way, you’re telling us that you were messed up and foolish for years and years… but NOW you are clear-headed and wise. Why should we believe you now? Maybe you are being just as egotistical and foolish now, but in a different way.

I’ve worked hard for 40 years, and I don’t regret it. I accept my ego. My ego isn’t sick and neither is yours. We are ordinary mortals, sprinkled with unique and special bits, here and there.

Have compassion for yourself.

Hard work is not different from “smart” work. As you have admitted, being smart is not all that easy. Hard work is not wrong.

But maybe we can agree on this advice: review your life, once in a while… say, twice a day. And then you won’t build up such elaborate regrets.

[leros]

I had a great career for quite a while. I worked hard, achieved a lot, and got paid very well for it. However, I eventually realized I was working so hard out of insecurity. I needed constant achievement at work to feel ok with myself. With some personal growth and some therapy, I no longer need to achieve anything to feel ok with myself. I'm just happy with who I am.

It's put me in an interesting spot. I can't work hard in a corporate job like I used to. The driver just isn't there anymore. It kind of killed my career. I took a few years off work to reset. I've recently started working on my own business as well as some consulting. I'm making way less money than I used to but I'm happier, more relaxed, and I feel like I'm using my time towards things I actually care about. Not sure where this is going career wise but I am hopeful.

[mojomark]

All of this is true, I'd argue, even outside of the SW engineering and product development space.

I appreciate your introspection and honesty. I will be sharing this post with my team. I particularly plan on honing-in on your note regarding validation. I had a very senior SW engineer recently stand up in a specification whiteboarding session and proclaim "this is a fucking waste of time" (while the junior dev's looked at each other with wide eyes that I read as "I was just happy we were finally all getting on the same page with respect to building what the customer is truly asking for").

So... thanks.

[nickd2001]

Helpful honest post :) And a useful warning to others :) Hopefully helpful to the OP to write this and get some responses. To play devil's advocate, some people worked BOTH hard and smart, and probably don't regret it, and the rest of us certainly appreciate them. Some random musical examples - Herbie Hancock, Wynton Marsalis, Doc Severinsen. Or a Comp Sci example - Alan Kay. Is the moral therefore a more nuanced, "work hard but not along the wrong path for too long"?

[Solvency]

Sooo... test an idea before developing it and use third party libraries. Got it!

Is this a future LinkedIn post?

[yellow_lead]

He copy pasted it on Reddit and Twitter/X as well

https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/1bozbss/i_wor...

https://twitter.com/johnrushx/status/1738718385536393712

[qzw]

Yeah, I was looking for a newsletter subscription link at the end there. Kinda feels like we’re on the receiving end of an idea validation campaign.

[datascienced]

A bit unfair. This isn’t a slimey linked in post.

[cafard]

How is it that the hard stuff all seems to involve programming, but in 2 and 3 the smart stuff is marketing?

Also, it is very possible to work hard without wasting effort on reinventing the wheel.

[jp57]

I hate the phrase "hard work". It's so misleading.

When most successful people say that "hard work" is an ingredient in success, they really a combination of traits such as diligence, conscientiousness, and perseverance. "Hard work" is often, but not always, an outcome of being diligent and persevering, but it isn't, by itself, causal of success.

One of the most important things a mentor ever said to me was when my doctoral advisor told me, "no one cares how hard you worked." At the time this was advice about how to compose scientific papers and talks: they should be structured about results and why they're important, and not as a report on your effort. But as advice, it goes way beyond just communications. Really, nobody cares how hard you worked. Now the fact is that sometimes you do have to work really hard to get the things that you want. Other times you don't. But hard work isn't an end in itself.

[anbardoi]

Why would you want to adopt a trend instead of developing with your personal style?

[mikewarot]

Impedance matching.... if you're close enough in idea space for someone to get what you're doing... you'll have a much, much larger audience, than if you're a "weirdo" who doesn't make any sense at a glance.