putting in the hours

 Note: This was inspired by a book that will get a more complete review at a later date.

Note 2: My Supreme No-Nonsense Editor told me my titles suck, so I changed this one 3 times since publishing and I still don't feel enchanted with it.

Can you imagine working this hard?

Thomson wears Ray-Bans, battered running shoes, tight blue jeans, and even tighter T-shirts; a favorite one bears a picture of Calvin, the boy in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, and says: “I hate everybody. As far as I’m concerned, everyone on the planet can just drop dead.” The introduction to his doctoral thesis contains the prologue to Goethe’s Faust, in which Mephistopheles mocks the existence of a good soul. 

Like Faust, who sought redemption in applying science for a larger good, Thomson is a creature of the laboratory. It is his sanctuary, his crucible, his cave. Yet his attachment to it separates him from his peers. …

Once Thomson started something, he didn’t rest. When the first stage of the prep gave way to the more difficult step of clarifying the extract, he immediately set in with a new and more demanding series of experiments…

To manage the widening effort and also because it suited him, Thomson began staying at Vertex two and three days at a stretch, then three and four, then four and five. As the work expanded, so did his compulsiveness. During the day he raced between his bench and the cold room, running several preps simultaneously, he and Fitzgibbon, his assistant, becoming a two-man factory. At night he kept up his vigil while washing glassware, a purifying ritual that often lasted several hours and was still going on when others began arriving in the morning for work. His hands became chafed and swollen from being in detergent and in solvents. His feet swelled from his being on them for twenty-four hours or more between those occasions when he would collapse in a settee in the lunchroom and, with his Ray-Bans still on, sleep from a few minutes sitting up. His face assumed a fluorescent-induced pallor.

I can’t. 

First of all, if I slept that little I would turn into an absolute psycho. Second of all, work smart not hard, ya dummy. I have a really hard time believing John Thomson was achieving peak mental performance on 20 minutes of sleep a day. And he was doing science. Don’t you need some full sleep cycles for that?

And then I think maybe I’m just a lazy piece of shit. I bought into the myth of ego depletion, the ruse of self-care, the quest for work-life balance, and if I just stopped rationalizing all the slacking off I do, I could be at least twice as productive. 

There’s nothing stopping me from being like these people:

Max Tishler

Idolized as omniscient, he also was ubiquitous, working on every project and at every level. No one knew what time he arrived in the morning or left at night because his car was always in the parking lot before and after everyone else’s. He took his family to the Catskills every August, renting a cottage without a phone, but otherwise he never ceased driving himself. 

Tishler now hurled himself into making Sarrett’s synthesis viable. … Chainsmoking, gulping coffee by the thermosful, he seemed to be everywhere - in the labs, in the pilot plants. He was aflame, a pillar of fire. Once, a chemist dropped a highly valuable scarlet-colored intermediate compound on the floor. “That better be your blood!” Tisher thundered, before ordering the precious liquid sopped up and its contents reisolated. 

Tom Starzl

Characteristically, Starzl responded by immolating himself in work. He pushed himself as hard as he always had, but he was now sixty-four and the pace took its toll. …. A competitor once observed that Starzl’s energy quotient is “so far off the scale of most humans that it is almost unbelievable,” but now there was also a measure of desperation to his drive as if he was racing not only against himself and the world, but against time. …

And yet he was also exhausted and prey to an unfamiliar lassitude. He had to push himself harder and harder just to keep up. In June, he took his first vacation in ten years, traveling with his wife, Joy, to Hawaii. …

And then one day he returns from a work trip and collapses on the stairs.

He dragged himself, inch by inch, to the second floor landing,  where he lay sweating and panting for an hour. He then did the same to get to the third floor. He eventually pulled himself into an upright position at his desk. For the next twelve hours, speaking breathlessly into two dictaphones, he answered three weeks of mail before stumbling downstairs and driving home.

The next day the doctors discovered a 99 percent blockage in Starzl’s dominant right coronary artery and told him he risked a heart attack unless he had a bypass operation at once. He refused. He and his team were now rushing to finish more than forty papers in time for the international meeting in San Francisco in mid-August of the Transplantation Society…

Surgery was out of the question, Startzl said. He agreed to an angioplasty… 

“Between the angioplasty and the San Francisco meeting it was kind of touch and go,” he conceded, returning to work the following week. “But it was worth the flip of the coin, I thought.”

Mason Yamashita

Each time a heavy atom didn’t work out, Yamashita had to try to grow new crystals under new conditions. He then had to collect an entire data set, which took about a week, before he could generate computer maps showing whether a derivative would work. The entire turnaround took about three weeks, and each failure plunged Yamashita into wider desperation. He was working all the time, staying at Vertex most nights, napping for forty-five minutes or an hour on the floor by the X-ray generator before rousing himself with a cigarette and a Pepsi and hurling himself back into the numbing cycle of growing new crystals, collecting new data, crunching new numbers, making new maps, encountering new failures. As it had for Thomson before him, the world now receded, disappearing completely behind his obsession with his work. …

His behavior became increasingly erratic. In the two months since Moore had first identified the protein’s backbone, Yamashita alternately was aloof and obsessive, dispirited and rash. One Monday in January, after working until 4 AM, he said “It’s good that we lost. This is my work, not my life.” A minute later he changed his mind: “I guess if I’m willing to work on this bullshit all night, I’m taking it seriously.” He worked slavishly, leaving Vertex only on Sunday nights to volunteer in the emergency room at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a grim change of scene but one that Yamashita enjoyed. 

These characters from The Billion Dollar Molecule: One Company's Quest for the Perfect Drug are all real humans (despite much evidence to the contrary) involved in the world of pharma, mostly at Merck or Vertex Pharmaceuticals. The book covers the first few white-knuckled years of Vertex’s existence, trying to will its way toward survival. They were attempting to develop an immunosuppressant and raise enough money to keep the company afloat (more details in the coming actual book review). It took many people sleeping less than an hour a night for months, living at the lab, crashing motorcycles and setting sinks on fire in fits of desperate hysteria (those were Thomson and Yamashita, respectively, and I think it proves that going psycho when you don’t sleep is the rule, not the exception).

And the program failed! They weren’t even chasing the right drug target! What a letdown. For the purpose of argument, I think we should assume it could have succeeded, it’s impossible to know ahead of time. So under those circumstances, were all the torturous wee hours of the morning worth it?

I feel pretty conflicted about people working this hard. On one hand, I very much admire the drive these people have to work hard - harder than anyone I know personally - on extremely hard and important problems. One the other hand, I have a hard time believing they’ve really gone about it the best way. (How many times can I use the word “hard” in one paragraph?). Downtime gives you space to step back and reassess what you’re doing, sleep is pretty important for cognitive function (shut your mouth Alexey Guzey), and what’s the point of life if you won’t enjoy at least a little bit of it?

But even if I can rationalize, these people make me feel lazy as fuck. It reminds me a lot of the extreme altruists from Strangers Drowning. When you hear stories about people dedicating their lives to blending up cow thymus to isolate a target that isn’t even guaranteed to lead to a drug or starting up a hospital in the middle of the jungle, it’s really tempting to tell yourself: “There’s something wrong with these people. They must lack a personality or be driven by some selfish compulsion or be doing something wrong.”

And you also tell yourself “I could never do that.” 

But… you totally could. You get to choose what to do with your time and you could stay in a lab for 72 hours straight or give all but $10,000 a year to charity. You just choose not to. And most of the time we get to ignore it because we’re all not doing that, so we don’t have to consider it an option. We never really have to defend ourselves.

I do think I have good reasons for not completely sacrificing my life to one thing. But it’s good to make sure you can justify it from time to time. Especially when it can nudge you toward doing just a little bit more. 

Reasons to be less lazy

• The productivity angle: There do appear to be some cases where the marginal returns are pretty high on the extra long hours, but the context matters a lot. If your work is independent, you can work more without the constraints of others and still get a lot done. Or if you can find people who are willing to work 100 hour weeks alongside you, you can probably get a lot done collectively. This is why founders with equally dedicated employees and mad scientists can work crazy hours and in many cases it’s probably worth it - startups like SpaceX and Vertex fall under this umbrella. We don’t need any more mad scientist examples, but from the founder side, Elon Musk is famous for working over 100 hours a week (though he is blunt about the toll it can take on you), Bill Gates didn’t take weekends, Steve Jobs worked a “slightly more reasonable” 60 hours a week. Achievements like theirs take lots of dedication and they clearly had it.

• The moral angle: If you buy Tyler Cowen’s arguments from Stubborn Attachments (which I generally do), economic growth is one of the best ways to achieve a better quality of life for those in the future. Growth means showing up and working hard. There are undeniably a lot of people who do not work particularly hard, and if we have a stronger work culture which nudged everyone to giving just 10% more, we would have more growth and this would be generally good for society.

• The personal angle: There’s often an intrinsic reward for hard work. These cases tend to overlap with circumstances where people can get a lot more done if they work more and I don’t think that’s much of a coincidence. For example, founders that work harder might have a better chance of a successful company which is likely to be personally gratifying. In cases where the work might not be personally gratifying in itself, companies might also build in reward systems (bonuses, raises, promotions, equity) as a substitute. It might be worth it to work yourself hard for a giant raise.

Reasons I am perfect just the way I am

I have plenty of rationalizations lined up for being lazy but here are a few strong ones:

• The productivity angle: Like many people, I can often solve problems after I take a break from them. I think of a solution in the shower or on a run. Or just coming back with fresh eyes after a night of sleep (a whole night? CRAZY) makes it easier to see the holes I was digging myself. The marginal productivity of continuing to dig that hole is negative. Most of the time the marginal productivity of the 20th hour in a day is very very small, if not negative.

• The moral angle: I’m a shitty person when I work too much. I get tense, I get unreasonably frustrated by distractions, I get worked up over small inconveniences, I get really snappy. Part of being a net positive human in the world is not having a shitty attitude and not being a shitty person. I’m not contributing enough to whatever problem I’m working on to justify that negative energy (I don’t think this holds for geniuses, and I think there’s plenty of space in the world for people who want to be assholes while they solve big problems, it’s just not me).

• My Supreme No-Nonsense Editor pointed out that perhaps I could just try to be less of an asshole when I’m tired. Point taken. But it’s also going to be harder to control myself the more tired I am - I think with some practice I could probably extend the level of tired I need to get before I am a serious asshole, but there’s still going to be some tipping point and it doesn’t make sense to go past that too often.

• The personal angle: Time off work is time I can enjoy doing other things. This is obviously good. I don’t think I need to spend much time making the case for this one. There are also many places that don’t do a good job of financial/other rewards commensurate with work time. If that’s the case, and you also get limited intrinsic value from working hard, why do it?

Some other random thoughts about work

• Sometimes I struggle with the idea of what counts as work. For example, I work for a pharma company, does reading this book in my free time count toward work for my job? I did learn some things from it that will affect how I think about problems. That’s also true when I read something like The Scout Mindset - does that count as work time? That’s also true when I read Astral Codex Ten and not infrequently when I’m scrolling Twitter. But those all feel like free time to me - am I actually a really hard-working person? (No.)

• Related - many many many successful people cite reading a ton as a large contributor to their success. I’d guess they would count reading as work (if you are reading the right sort of thing). I’d also guess they’d say if you are not making time to read, you are doing something seriously wrong.

• If you require people to work 80 hours a week to hold a job or act like it is the only way to succeed in [discipline], it is going to limit the people who want to do that job. You can try to convince me it’s necessary, I will be skeptical in most cases. That means you’re missing a lot of productive work and ideas from people who value their time, and getting a lot of diminishing returns from the extra 40 hours a week of the people who don’t have a life. I know there are arguments about the people working 80 hours a week outcompeting the people only willing to work 40 - I buy this in some cases; in many, I continue to doubt the quality of the work and you can take that with however many shakers of salt you want (I already said at the top I’m rationalizing my own behavior).

How to know if you have a good equilibrium

Not really sure on this one, sorry guys. I know a lot of people who work a ton of hours and as an outside observer it doesn’t seem necessary to me and I kind of doubt they’ve really considered if they’re working “the right amount”. They don’t seem to get much intrinsic or extrinsic reward for the extra hours, and honestly, it looks to me like they’re just trying to fill their day. Often these people don’t even spend time to broaden their knowledge in the field they’re working so hard at - reading, podcasts, and casual thinking time outside your day-to-day tasks are worthwhile. If you have zero interests outside of work and drinking, perhaps you need a hobby. 

I also know a lot of people who don’t work hard at anything and I kind of doubt they’ve really considered if they’re working “the right amount.” They don’t seem to think work has the potential to be rewarding, though I am often confused about what they value instead. It does not appear to me that they work hard at anything in their lives. If you are confused about the concept of hard work and why anyone would ever do it… perhaps you need to do a little soul searching about what you should do with your time. I suggest 80,000 Hours as a place to start!

My Supreme No-Nonsense Editor kindly pointed out that I’m not actually as lazy as I depict myself. Compared to the average person, I’m definitely not lazy. Here’s a clearer picture of where I am on the spectrum: I work around 45 hours a week at my job, and those are usually solid hours of work - I’m not great at taking breaks. Some weeks I work much more, very occasionally I work until midnight. My job has unlimited PTO, and I take more than the minimum recommended amount (and am generally successful at avoiding work on the days I take off, though I will answer occasional messages). I spend a large portion of my free time reading (sometimes writing) and my vacations are typically active and social with people I care about. I really love what I do at my job and believe that it matters, and I love the way I spend my free time. Neither feels like a slog, but it means the tradeoff feels really hard in both directions. I change my mind about it all the time and I definitely don’t feel like I’m at a “good equilibrium.” But maybe it’s difficult to ever really settle it, and you have to make do with a good average over the long term.

Anyway, there will be more about the actual pharma side of this book in the next part. When I get around to working on it.