保罗·格雷厄姆：如何高效工作

关于如何努力工作，似乎没什么可学的。每个上过学的人都知道这意味着什么，即便他们选择不去努力。有些12岁的孩子就非常刻苦。但当我问自己是否比上学时更懂得努力时，答案绝对是肯定的。我深知，若想成就伟业，就必须付出极大努力。

It might not seem there's much to learn about how to work hard. Anyone who's been to school knows what it entails, even if they chose not to do it. There are 12 year olds who work amazingly hard. And yet, when I ask if I know more about working hard now than when I was in school, the answer is definitely yes. One thing I know is that if you wanna do great things, you'll have to work very hard.

小时候我并不确定这点。课业难度参差不齐，有时不需要特别努力也能取得好成绩。而那些著名成年人的成就，看起来几乎毫不费力。难道真有人能凭借天赋逃避艰苦努力吗？

I wasn't sure of that as a kid. Schoolwork varied in difficulty. One didn't always have to work super hard to do well. And some of the things famous adults did, they seemed to do almost effortlessly. Was there perhaps some way to evade hard work through sheer brilliance?

如今我知道了答案：不可能。某些科目看似简单，是因为学校标准太低；名人看似轻松，是因为多年练习。他们只是让一切显得容易罢了。

Now I know the answer to that question. There isn't. The reason some subjects seemed easy was that my school had low standards. And the reason famous adults seemed to do things effortlessly was years of practice. They made it look easy.

当然，那些名人通常也极具天赋。伟大成就需要三大要素：天赋、练习和努力。具备其中两项就能做得不错，但要达到极致，三者缺一不可。你需要卓越天赋、大量练习和全力以赴。

Of course, those famous adults usually had a lot of natural ability too. There are three ingredients in great work. Natural ability, practice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, but to do the best work, you need all three. You need great natural ability and to have practiced a lot, and to be trying very hard.

以比尔·盖茨为例，他不仅是同时代商界最聪明的人，也是最勤奋的。他说'二十多岁时我从未休息过一天，一天都没有'。梅西亦是如此，青年教练们回忆时，最先提及的不是他的天赋，而是他的奉献精神和求胜欲望。

Bill Gates, for example, was among the smartest people in business in his era, but he was also among the hardest working. I never took a day off in my twenties, he said, not one. It was similar with Lionel Messi. He had great natural ability, but when his youth coaches talk about him, what they remember is not his talent, but his dedication and his desire to win. PG.

若必须选出二十世纪最伟大的英国作家，我可能会投伍德豪斯一票。当然，没人比他更举重若轻，但也没人比他更勤奋。74岁时他写道：'每次新书创作时，我都觉得这次在文学花园里摘到了酸柠檬。不过想来这倒是件好事。'

Woodhouse would probably get my vote for best English writer of the twentieth century if I had to choose. Certainly, no one ever made it look easier, but no one ever worked harder. At 74, he wrote with each new book of mine. I have, as I say, the feeling that this time, I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature. A good thing, really, I suppose.

这让人时刻保持警觉，迫使你把每个句子重写10遍，甚至20遍。你觉得这有点极端？但比尔·盖茨更极端——十年间从未休息一天。这两人都拥有常人难以企及的天赋，却也付出了常人难以想象的勤奋。

Keeps one up on one's toes and makes one rewrite every sentence 10 times, or in many cases, 20 times. Sounds a bit extreme, you think. And yet, Bill Gates sounds even more extreme. Not one day off in ten years. These two had about as much natural ability as anyone could have, and yet, they also worked about as hard as anyone could work.

两者你都需要。这看似显而易见，但在实践中我们却觉得有点难以把握。天赋与努力之间存在一种微妙的排他性。部分源于流行文化中根深蒂固的观念，部分因为真正的异类实在太罕见。如果卓越天赋和强大驱动力都很稀缺，那么两者兼备的人就是稀缺的平方。

You need both. That seems so obvious, and yet in practice, we find it slightly hard to grasp. There's a faint xor between talent and hard work. It comes partly from popular culture, where it seems to run very deep, and partly from the fact that the outliers are so rare. If great talent and great drive are both rare, then people with both are rare squared.

你遇到的大多数人，若某一方面突出，另一方面往往欠缺。但若你想成为异类，两者缺一不可。既然实践中你无法改变与生俱来的天赋，那么尽己所能做出伟大成就，归根结底就是拼命努力。当你有学校那样明确的外部强加目标时，努力是直截了当的。这需要一些技巧。

Most people you meet who have a lot of one will have less of the other. But you'll need both if you wanna be an outlier yourself. And since you can't really change how much natural talent you have in practice, doing great work insofar as you can, reduces to working very hard. It's straightforward to work hard if you have clearly defined externally imposed goals as you do in school. There is some technique to it.

你必须学会不自欺、不拖延（拖延是自欺的一种形式）、不分心，遇到挫折也不放弃。但这种自律程度，只要愿意，连年幼的孩子似乎也能做到。我从小领悟到的是如何为既非明确定义、也非外部强加的目标而努力。要想成就非凡，这两者你都得学会。最基本的层面就是：无需他人督促，自觉应当工作。

You have to learn not to lie to yourself, not to procrastinate, which is a form of lying to yourself, not to get distracted, and not to give up when things go wrong. But this level of discipline seems to be within the reach of quite young children if they want it. What I've learned since I was a kid is how to work toward goals that are neither clearly defined nor externally imposed. You'll probably have to learn both if you wanna do really great things. The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working without anyone telling you to.

如今，当我不努力时，警钟就会响起。我无法确定努力时是否在进步，但能确定不努力时必定停滞不前——这种感觉糟透了。这不是某个瞬间突然领悟的。和多数孩子一样，我曾因学习新事物而享受成就感。随着年龄增长，这逐渐转变为无所事事时的厌恶感。

Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off. I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm working hard, but I can be sure I'm getting nowhere when I'm not, and it feels awful. There wasn't a single point when I learned this. Like most little kids, I enjoyed the feeling of achievement when I learned or did something new. As I grew older, this morphed into a feeling of disgust when I wasn't achieving anything.

我唯一能精确追溯的转折点是13岁停止看电视。与我交谈过的几个人都记得在这个年纪开始认真对待工作。当问及帕特里克·科里森何时觉得虚度光阴令人反感时，他说：‘大概是13、14岁吧。’我清晰记得那时坐在客厅，凝望窗外，疑惑自己为何浪费暑假——或许青春期确实会引发某些改变。

The one precisely dateable landmark I have is when I stopped watching TV at age 13. Several people I've talked to remember getting serious about work around this age. When I asked Patrick Collison when he started to find idleness distasteful, he said, I think around age 13 or 14. I have a clear memory from around then of sitting in the sitting room, staring outside, and wondering why I was wasting my summer holiday. Perhaps something changes at adolescence.

这很合理。奇怪的是，认真工作的最大障碍可能是学校，它让所谓的‘工作’显得枯燥无意义。我必须先理解真正的工作，才能全心全意渴望去做。这花了些时间，因为即便在大学，许多工作也毫无意义。有些整个院系都是如此。

That would make sense. Strangely enough, the biggest obstacle to getting serious about work was probably school, which made work, what they called work, seem boring and pointless. I had to learn what real work was before I could wholeheartedly desire to do it. That took a while, because even in college, a lot of the work is pointless. There are entire departments that are pointless.

但当我认识到真正工作的形态时，发现对它的渴望自然契合其中，仿佛它们是为彼此而生。我怀疑多数人需要先理解工作本质才能爱上它。哈代在《一个数学家的辩白》中精彩论述了这点：‘我不记得童年时对数学有何热情，当时对数学家生涯的想象也毫不崇高。在我眼中，数学无非是考试和奖学金。’

But as I learned the shape of real work, I found that my desire to do it slotted into it, as if they'd been made for each other. I suspect most people have to learn what work is before they can love it. Hardy wrote eloquently about this in A Mathematician's Apology. I do not remember having felt, as a boy, any passion for mathematics, and such notions as I may have had of the career of a mathematician were far from noble. I thought of mathematics in terms of examinations and scholarships.

我曾想胜过其他男孩，而数学似乎是最能让我决定性胜出的方式。他直到大学期间读到约旦的《丹尼拉耶斯核心》时，才真正理解数学的本质。我永远不会忘记阅读这部杰作时的震撼——它启发了我们这代无数数学家，让我第一次领悟到数学的真谛。要理解真正的工作，你需要学会识别两种虚假：一种是哈代在学校里遇到的那种。

I wanted to beat other boys, and this seemed to be the way in which I could do so most decisively. He didn't learn what math was really about till partway through college, when he read Jordan's core Danilayes. I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that remarkable work, the first inspiration for so many mathematicians of my generation, and learned for the first time as I read it what mathematics really meant. There are two separate kinds of fakeness you need to learn to discount in order to understand what real work is. One is the kind Hardy encountered in school.

当学科被改编用于教学时往往会被扭曲，有时扭曲到与实际从业者的工作毫无相似之处。另一种虚假则内在于某些工作类型本身——有些工作本质就是徒劳的，充其量只是无意义的忙碌。真正的工作具有某种坚实感，虽不都是《原理》那样的巨著，但都让人感觉不可或缺。

Subjects get distorted when they're adapted to be taught to kids, often so distorted that they're nothing like the work done by actual practitioners. The other kind of fakeness is intrinsic to certain types of work. Some types of work are inherently bogus, or at best, mere busywork. There's a kind of solidity to real work. It's not all writing the Principia, but it all feels necessary.

这个标准虽然模糊，但刻意如此，因为它需要涵盖多种类型。当你识别出真正工作的形态后，还需掌握每日投入的时长。单纯增加工时并不能解决问题，因为多数工作都存在临界点，超过后产出质量就会下降。这个限度因工作类型和个人而异——我从事过不同工作，每种都有不同的极限。

That's a vague criterion, but it's deliberately vague because it has to cover a lot of different types. Once you know the shape of real work, you have to learn how many hours a day to spend on it. You can't solve this problem by simply working every waking hour because in many kinds of work, there's a point beyond which the quality of the result will start to decline. That limit varies depending on the type of work and the person. I've done several different kinds of work, and the limits were different for each.

对我来说，高强度写作或编程的极限是每天五小时。而经营初创公司时，我可以持续工作至少三年。若持续更久，可能就需要间歇休假。只有越过极限才能发现它。培养对工作质量的敏感度，这样你就能在因过度工作导致质量下降时及时察觉。

My limit for the harder types of writing or programming is about five hours a day. Whereas when I was running a startup, I could work all the time, at least for the three years I did it. If I'd kept going much longer, I'd probably have needed to take occasional vacations. The only way to find the limit is by crossing it. Cultivate a sensitivity to the quality of the work you're doing, and then you'll notice if it decreases because you're working too hard.

诚实在这点上至关重要——既要觉察懈怠之时，也要识别过度工作之刻。若你认为拼命工作值得敬佩，请摒弃这种想法。此时你不仅效率低下，更是在表演勤奋——即便观众只有你自己。寻找工作极限是个持续的过程，而非一劳永逸。

Honesty is critical here in both directions. You have to notice when you're being lazy, but also when you're working too hard. And if you think there's something admirable about working too hard, get that idea out of your head. You're not merely getting worse results, but getting them because you're showing off, if not to other people, then to yourself. Finding the limit of working hard is a constant, ongoing process, not something you do just once.

工作难度与个人状态每小时都在变化，因此需要持续评估努力程度与工作成效。但努力不意味着持续自我逼迫——以我的经验（应该具有普遍性），通常只需在项目启动或遇到节点时偶尔鞭策自己，这些时刻最容易拖延。

Both the difficulty of the work and your ability to do it can vary hour to hour. So you need to be constantly judging both how hard you're trying and how well you're doing. Trying hard doesn't mean constantly pushing yourself to work, though. There may be some people who do, but I think my experience is fairly typical, and I only have to push myself occasionally when I'm starting a project or when I encounter some sort of check. That's when I'm in danger of procrastinating.

但一旦进入状态，我通常会保持下去。驱动力因工作类型而异：做Vioweb时，对失败的恐惧推动着我。那时几乎从不拖延，因为总有待办事项。如果能通过行动拉开与追兵的距离，何必等待？

But once I get rolling, I tend to keep going. What keeps me going depends on the type of work. When I was working on Vioweb, I was driven by fear of failure. I barely procrastinated at all then, because there was always something that needed doing. And if I could put more distance between me and the pursuing beast by doing it, why wait?

如今驱使我写作的动力正是文章中的缺陷。在每篇文章之间，我会像狗决定趴下的位置那样焦躁地转悠几天。但一旦开始写作，就无需自我鞭策，因为总有错误或遗漏在推动着我。我会努力聚焦于重要议题——许多问题的核心坚硬难解，边缘则较为轻松。

Whereas what drives me now writing essays is the flaws in them. Between essays, I fuss for a few days, like a dog circling while it decides exactly where to lie down. But once I get started on one, I don't have to push myself to work because there's always some error or omission already pushing me. I do make some amount of effort to focus on important topics. Many problems have a hard core at the center, surrounded by easier stuff at the edges.

努力工作的本质是尽可能向核心靠近。有些日子你或许力不能及，只能处理边缘的轻松事务，但始终应朝着核心方向前进而不停滞。人生方向的重大抉择正是这类硬核问题——核心处是重要但艰难的议题，边缘则是次要且轻松的。

Working hard means aiming toward the center to the extent you can. Some days, you may not be able to. Some days, you'll only be able to work on the easier peripheral stuff, but you should always be aiming as close to the center as you can without stalling. The bigger question of what to do with your life is one of these problems with a hardcore. There are important problems at the center, which tend to be hard, and less important, easier ones at the edges.

因此除了处理具体问题时的日常微调，偶尔你还需做出关乎毕生方向的大调整。原则不变：努力意味着瞄准核心，挑战最具雄心的课题。但这里说的核心是真实核心，而非当下共识。关于重要问题的共识常存谬误，无论普世认知还是专业领域皆然。

So as well as the small daily adjustments involved in working on a specific problem, you'll occasionally have to make big lifetime scale adjustments about which type of work to do. And the rule is the same. Working hard means aiming toward the center, toward the most ambitious problems. By center, though, I mean the actual center, not merely the current consensus about the center. The consensus about which problems are most important is often mistaken, both in general and within specific fields.

若你正确地质疑共识，这往往代表着开创新局的宝贵机遇。更具雄心的课题通常更艰难——虽不该回避这个事实，但也不应将难度作为绝对标准。当你发现某个雄心领域对你而言性价比超高（或因天赋异禀，或因创新方法，或纯粹源于热爱），务必放手去做。最伟大的成就往往来自那些为难题找到捷径的人。

If you disagree with it, and you're right, that could represent a valuable opportunity to do something new. The more ambitious types of work will usually be harder. But although you should not be in denial about this, neither should you treat difficulty as an infallible guide in deciding what to do. If you discover some ambitious type of work that's a bargain in the sense of being easier for you than other people, either because of the abilities you happen to have, or because of some new way you've found to approach it, or simply because you're more excited about it, by all means, work on that. Some of the best work is done by people who find an easy way to do something hard.

在认识真实工作的形态之外，还需找到适合自己的领域。这不仅是匹配天赋所长——并非身高两米就必须打篮球。适合与否不仅取决于才能，更与兴趣息息相关。对某个主题的深度热爱能激发出任何纪律都无法企及的工作动力。

As well as learning the shape of real work, you need to figure out which kind you're suited for. And that doesn't just mean figuring out which kind your natural abilities match the best. It doesn't mean that if you're seven feet tall, you have to play basketball. What you're suited for depends not just on your talents, but perhaps even more on your interests. A deep interest in a topic makes people work harder than any amount of discipline can.

发掘兴趣比发现才能更困难。才能类型少于兴趣种类，且童年时期就开始被评判，而对某个领域的兴趣可能要到二十多岁甚至更晚才会成熟——有些领域甚至早期根本不存在。此外还需警惕几种常见的认知偏差：你是真对X感兴趣，还是因为它能带来巨额财富？

It can be harder to discover your interests than your talents. There are fewer types of talent than interest, and they start to be judged early in childhood, whereas interest in a topic is a subtle thing that may not mature till your twenties or even later. The topic may not even exist earlier. Plus, there are some powerful sources of error you need to learn to discount. Are you really interested in x, Or do you wanna work on it because you'll make a lot of money?

或是因他人会对你刮目相看？还是父母期望使然？找准人生方向的难度因人而异——这是我成年后关于工作最重要的认知之一。童年时我们总以为每个人都有天职，只需将其找出即可。

Or because other people will be impressed with you? Or because your parents want you to? The difficulty of figuring out what to work on varies enormously from one person to another. That's one of the most important things I've learned about work since I was a kid. As a kid, you get the impression that everyone has a calling, and all they have to do is figure out what it is.

电影和灌输给孩子们的简化传记里就是这么演的。现实中偶尔也会如此。有些人像莫扎特那样，在童年就找到方向并坚持到底。但也有人像牛顿那样，在不同领域间辗转探索。或许回溯时我们才能确认，那就是他们的天职所在。

That's how it works in movies and in the streamlined biographies fed to kids. Sometimes, it works that way in real life. Some people figure out what to do as children and just do it, like Mozart. But others like Newton turn restlessly from one kind of work to another. Maybe in retrospect, we can identify one as their calling.

我们或许希望牛顿把更多时间花在数学和物理上，少研究炼金术和神学，但这不过是后见之明导致的错觉。当时并没有他能听见的天启之音。因此，当某些人的人生快速聚焦时，也总会有人终生都找不到方向。对这些探索者而言，确定工作方向与其说是努力的前奏，不如说是努力本身的重要组成部分，就像联立方程组中的一个方程。对他们来说，我早前描述的过程还包含第三个要素。

We can wish Newton spent more time on math and physics, less on alchemy and theology, but this is an illusion induced by hindsight bias. There was no voice calling to him that he could have heard. So while some people's lives converge fast, there will be others whose lives never converge. And for these people, figuring out what to work on is not so much a prelude to working hard as an ongoing part of it, like one of a set of simultaneous equations. For these people, the process I described earlier has a third component.

除了衡量你有多努力和表现有多好之外，你还得思考是否该继续这个领域或转向其他方向。如果努力却收效甚微，就该及时转向。道理说来简单，实践却困难重重。不要因为首日努力无果就轻言放弃，你需要给自己启动的时间。

Along with measuring both how hard you're working and how well you're doing, you have to think about whether you should keep working in this field or switch to another. If you're working hard but not getting good enough results, you should switch. It sounds simple expressed that way, but in practice, it's very difficult. You shouldn't give up on the first day just because you work hard and don't get anywhere. You need to give yourself time to get going.

但该给多少时间？当顺遂的工作陷入停滞时又该如何应对？这时该给自己多少缓冲期？什么才算好结果？这些判断可能极其困难。如果你探索的是少数人涉足的领域，甚至可能连好结果的标准都无从知晓。

But how much time, and what should you do if work that was going well stops going well? How much time do you give yourself then? What even counts as good results? That can be really hard to decide. If you're exploring an area a few others have worked in, you may not even know what good results look like.

历史上从不乏误判工作重要性的人。检验工作价值的最佳标准，就是你是否对其感兴趣。这听起来像是危险的主观判断，但很可能就是你所能得到的最准确标准。你才是那个实际工作的人——谁能比你更清楚工作的重要性？又有什么比兴趣更能预测其价值？

History is full of examples of people who misjudge the importance of what they're working on. The best test of whether it's worthwhile to work on something is whether you find it interesting. That may sound like a dangerously subjective measure, but it's probably the most accurate one you're gonna get. You're the one working on the stuff. Who's in a better position than you to judge whether it's important, and what's a better predictor of its importance than whether it's interesting?

但要让这个检验生效，你必须对自己绝对诚实。事实上，关于努力工作的整个命题最惊人的地方就在于：每个环节都取决于你的自我诚实。努力工作不是把旋钮拧到11那么简单，而是需要时时精准调节的复杂动态系统。你必须理解真实工作的形态，看清自己最适合的领域，尽可能瞄准其核心本质，时刻准确评估自身能力与当前表现，并在保证成果质量的前提下每日全力以赴。

For this test to work, though, you have to be honest with yourself. Indeed, that's the most striking thing about the whole question of working hard, how at each point, it depends on being honest with yourself. Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It's a complicated dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point. You have to understand the shape of real work, see clearly what kind you're best suited for, aim as close to the true core of it as you can, accurately judge at each moment, both what you're capable of and how you're doing, and put in as many hours each day as you can without harming the quality of the result.

这个系统复杂到无法取巧，但只要你保持一贯的诚实与清醒，它自会呈现最优形态，让你获得常人难以企及的高效生产力。

This network is too complicated to trick, but if you're consistently honest and clear sighted, it will automatically assume an optimal shape, and you'll be productive in a way few people are.