Hard Work Isn’t Sexy
I once knew a person that refused to do math on a whiteboard. They preferred to just think about it to themselves or scribble things on a sheet of paper in private. This really bothered me when I was trying to explain to them concepts, since it’s really hard when you don’t know what their thought process is. One time I got really fed up and just asked them “Why do you refuse to think out loud?”. And they told me that they don’t like people watching them struggle and that I should go home and read up on “Effortless Perfection”.
When I read up on the topic I found out that it applied to a lot of people and their conscious effort to appear well rounded by societal norms. It wasn’t enough that a young person in college was smart, good looking, and had a great personality, but that they should also appear as if it all came naturally. The problem is that whenever you meet these people you tend to ignore all the hours they spent in the library studying to ace that midterm. All the hours in the gym and endless amount of sweat to maintain that figure. All the sacrifices they made to get to where they are now. And the weirdest part is that they want you to overlook that … it’s sexier that way. The idea is that if two people are equally well rounded, then the one for whom it comes “naturally” is preferred.
It is ridiculous that hard work is not appreciated by peers and the phenomenon has definitely bled into engineering. If you asked an engineer if they would rather be smart or hardworking they would almost always pick smart. Many believe that geniuses don’t ever have to work a day in their lives and it’s the general conscientious that smart is sexy in engineering. In a vacuum this is fine, but the consequence is a cultural phenomenon of people who try to make hard work come off as talent. I have seen it countless of times when one engineer in college asks another engineer “How long did that assignment take you?”. The response: almost always a fraction of the time it actually took. One time I had an instructor poll the class and ask a series of questions. “How many people took 2 hours on the assignment?” and about 20% of the class raised their hand. “How many people needed 2 to 4 hours on the assignment?” and no one raised their hands. “How many people took 4 to 6 hours on the assignment?” and still no one raised their hands. It was extraordinary to see the number of people who claimed that the assignment took them only 2 hours. However the key takeaway was that a majority of the class never raised their hands. They were ashamed to admit that the assignment took then more time than their peers. This is not conducive to growth.
Final Product
People focus too much on the final product. Most undergraduate programs are tracked in the sense that there are freshmen who become sophomores who then become juniors and finally those juniors become seniors. But what ends up happening is everyone wants to focus on what the senior can do. In computer science a common thing is for everyone to awe at how a senior has a full time offer to a tech company like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, or Apple. Now that in itself is fine, but a lot times this discourages younger classmen who don’t end up getting internships at brand name companies. Those underclassmen think they are inadequate, because they can’t get a similar job offer. The problem here is that they are focusing on the final product. They forget that the senior was probably at some point a freshmen who couldn’t even get a recruiter to look at their resume. They forget that the senior was probably at some point a sophomore who applied to 30+ companies and only got one offer doing work that wasn’t very interesting. They forget that the senior was probably at some point a junior who finally had enough job experience to get the full attention of recruiters at career fairs. They forget that senior spent the last 4 years of their lives toiling away at the labs, banging their head on the whiteboard, and breathing with the sole intent of perfecting their craft. And the most important thing people tend to forget about a final product is that for every success story that person has there are dozens of failures that you just never hear about.
There are a lot of perception biases in those success stories and it can really you down over time. This is due to the fact you are present every time you fail or succeed and you are likely to fail (a lot) before you succeed. But for everyone else you are only there when they have already succeeded. You see classmates when you are turning in an assignments at which point everyone is done, but you are the only one you got to observe struggle for 20 hours. You hear about what job someone ends up going to only when they update their LinkedIn or make a Facebook status update, but rarely do you get to see all the companies that they applied to and didn’t get offers from, while you had to read everyone of your rejection emails at always the worst time of the day.
Imposter Syndrome
This constant downplay of how hard people have to work to succeed and the perception bias of success creates imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is when someone develops this feeling that are very inadequate to compared to their peers and for the position they are in. Most of the time people with imposter syndrome are well ahead of the curve, but get discouraged when they hear that the assignment that took them 20 hours took their friend only 30 minutes. What’s even worse is that people get discouraged when watching more experienced people perform. When you are starting off at anything it’s easy to confuse experience and knowledge for capacity. For example if you are just starting to learn a skill and a task takes you hours while someone more experienced might only need a few minutes, then it’s easy to think that you just weren’t meant for that. Usually this isn’t a problem when the person who is more experienced is competing at a different level. When Tiger Woods hits a ball and puts a spin on it that you thought was physically impossible for the win you don’t suddenly lose your love of golf. Just because Linus Tovarlds made Git in 10 days, doesn’t mean you love programming any less. This is because with people like Tiger and Tovarlds you always keep in the back of your mind the number of hours they spent in the field and lab respectively. You always remember that they have spent more time perfecting their craft than you have probably been alive. However when it comes to something like school or work you tend to forget how many hours everyone else has put into their craft. You tend to make the assumption that everyone came in with the same background and put in the same number of hours, so the only thing determining success is innate talent.
I think a prime example of this is when freshmen enter Computer Science. A typical intro to computer science course at a large university will have hundreds of people taking the same course in their first semester. What a lot of people tend to forget is that those hundreds of freshmen all come from different backgrounds. Some people literally walk into their first computer science class with absolutely no programming experience. While on the flip side you have some students who have been programming since they were 12, have a parent who is a professor of computer science and the another parent being a lead engineer at a top tech company. Those two people are obviously going to have a different experience of the same intro to programming course. But that’s not to say that the person who is new to computer science is incapable of learning the craft. It just means that they are also going to work twice as hard to achieve half as much compared to their peers who have already invested thousands of hours into the craft.
I think the key takeaway when in this situation is to remember that everyone is moving at their own pace and on their own road to the strongest version of themselves. I think an easy example of this is the gym. When you are working out and there is someone who is lifting more, running faster, and being more explosive, than you shouldn’t let that discourage you from meeting your own fitness goals. Even if your goal is to be stronger and a lot of people are lifting twice as much for three times as many reps you have to remember that everyone started somewhere. The person who is benching 315 for reps today spent years pouring gallons of sweat into that exact same bench to obtain the extra 50 pounds of lean body mass and the technique needed to move those weights effectively. This is true for almost every craft and you need to consistently put in hard work to get there. However putting in hard work isn’t the hard part. The hard part is to put in hard work at moments you feel inadequate and want to give up.
Discussion
Contact Me
Email: bschong2@illinois.edu