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On Doing the Impossible — LessWrong

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"Persevere." It's a piece of advice you'll get from a whole lot of high achievers in a whole lot of disciplines. I didn't understand it at all, at first. At first, I thought "perseverance" meant working 14-hour days. Apparently, there are people out there who can work for 10 hours at a technical job, and then, in their moments between eating and sleeping and going to the bathroom, seize that unfilled spare time to work on a book. I am not one of those people—it still hurts my pride even now to confess that. I'm working on something important; shouldn't my brain be willing to put in 14 hours a day? But it's not. When it gets too hard to keep working, I stop and go read or watch something. Because of that, I thought for years that I entirely lacked the virtue of "perseverance". In accordance with human nature, Eliezer1998 would think things like: "What counts is output, not input." Or, "Laziness is also a virtue—it leads us to back off from failing methods and think of better wa

x On Doing the Impossible — LessWrong Challenging the Difficult Ambition Hamming Questions Frontpage 138 On Doing the Impossible by Eliezer Yudkowsky 6th Oct 2008 8 min read 41 138 "Persevere." It's a piece of advice you'll get from a whole lot of high achievers in a whole lot of disciplines. I didn't understand it at all, at first. At first, I thought "perseverance" meant working 14-hour days. Apparently, there are people out there who can work for 10 hours at a technical job, and then, in their moments between eating and sleeping and going to the bathroom, seize that unfilled spare time to w

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