About Work

George Hegel once said that "Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion." That is both true and misleading. The truth is that nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without a lot of hard work.

We've all seen the Hollywood version of great works. A passionate Joseph Fiennes, as a Shakespeare in Love, sits down and whips out a sonnet. A callow Mark Hamill, impersonating a Samurai protege in Star Wars, becomes a Jedi after a few sessions with an old warrior. A brilliant Mickey Rooney, as a Young Edison, always knows what to do ... for laughs, or to save the day. How many times have we seen a teenaged computer hacker break into the terrorist or extraterrestrial computer in less than five minutes? As Scott Adams wryly observed, in real life it takes more than six well-chosen keystrokes to penetrate a well-defended computer.

Thomas Edison himself disagreed very strongly with this notion of how to accomplish great things. Genius, he said, is 1 % inspiration and 99 % perspiration. Hollywood does not entirely disagree: witness Charlton Heston enduring The Agony and the Ecstasy while painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Nevertheless, there is little visible drama in watching someone sit and think and walk and think and doodle and think and take breaks and ...

So what do people really do?

First of all, no one just sits down and paints a painting. They take many studies, starting with initial sketches (sometimes hardly recognizable, just to get a sense of the shape), and then in an increasing and varying sequence, to get how the shapes fit together. (As an idea, see some of Michelangelo's studies for the Sistine Chapel.) This is true in all fields. Performers, like athletes, dancers, actors, comics, and lawyers practice intensively (a concert musician may practice six hours a day). Artists make preliminary sketches and even preliminary paintings, authors make many drafts (Donald Hall once went through over 200 drafts of one of his longer poems), and mathematicians use up immense amounts of scratch paper to generate what turn out to be deceptively simple-looking formulas.

All this takes time and energy, and that was Hegel's point: it is passion that motivates us to commit the necessary time and energy. But passion is merely where it begins: passion, like faith, is dead without work. If one feels passion for something, one has to harness that passion to commit the time and energy to work.

The accomplishment in front of us here is: learning. How does one learn something? How does one learn to do something? One must study, and one must do homework. This takes time and energy.

But there is more than just devoting time and energy: people learn and develop in response to challenges. This is axiomatic in some sports: the "no pain no gain" in weight-lifting is based on the observation that someone who routinely exercises on weights well within their range never develops further: only by pressing their range (either by using greater weights, or more repetitions, or slower repetitions) does someone develop (bigger muscles, endurance, or strength, respectively). In learning to, the routine is to press on two frontiers:

• Speed. In this mode, one practices a lot typing very fast -- faster than one actually can reliably -- regardless of how many mistakes one makes.
• Accuracy. In this mode, one practices a lot trying to be accurate, even when this slows one down.

It is not surprising that we would work this way: the human mind and body responds to challenges, not to routine. If one stays within one's comfort zone, there is nothing to adapt to, no need to develop. The mind and body being frugal, few resources will be devoted to unnecessary development. Of course, you may consciously know that development is necessary, but the mind and body are designed to respond not to needs of which one is consciously aware, but to demands that one actually makes of one's mind and body. The economic principle is: resources are applied to demand, not needs, and demand arises from efforts made, not plans or desires.

So what about learning? It is known that studying what you already know ("overlearning") improves one's short-term retention of the material; this is why cramming before exams works. There is some evidence that one's long-term memory of the material depends on how much one uses it afterwards. And of course, to be really good at something, one has to do it a lot: witness the 6 hours a day that concert musicians spend practicing. In fact, in Daniel Willingham's 2004 AFT Educator article on Practice Makes Perfect, there is a description of a 1993 study of some students, divided into "good" and "best" violinists by some music teachers, that the best students spent perhaps 30 % more time practicing than the good ones.versus

For some quotes by historical figures, see my page on work and labor.