“Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Work hard until you no longer have to introduce yourself.”

“Work hard in silence. Let your work make the noise.”

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” ― Ira Glass ¹

You can get to the top-10% by either working hard OR smart, but you can only reach the top-1% by working hard AND smart.

Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress. Working hard for something we love is called passion.

Assiduity: Sit down and do it until it’s done.

你必須很努力，才能看起來 毫不費力。

Heaven’s Reward Fallacy

Humans tend to have an expectation that…

• they will be justly rewarded and praised for all of their hard work and sacrifice.
• there will be a reward in the end if they sacrifice enough, work hard enough, and struggle hard enough that.