alt.hn

6/4/2026 at 4:07:21 PM

Do the Hardest Thing

 https://justinjackson.ca/hard-thing

by levhawk

6/5/2026 at 8:04:12 PM

In my own tiny way, I applied this logic when trying to be a contributor to an existing and popular open source project. I found that puzzling out poorly-written bug report tickets, ignored by the extremely busy experts on the project, I could find work to do.

I started by looking at well written tickets (to-the-point descriptions, minimal reproduction examples), but that method got me no work: some expert on the project would have a pull request for that kind of ticket in just a few hours, whereas I would need at least a week to figure out the root cause and another few days to craft a fix and a test.

So I started looking at ignored tickets, i.e., tickets that had been sitting around for weeks or months with no activity. Those often turned out to be very poorly written tickets with either very little information, or a huge wall of text with much business domain-specific info. If those tickets contained repro examples at all, they were often complex and very long, using external libraries I never heard of, and devoid of table schemas and example data. Sometimes I could get the author to provide more information, sometimes the author would not respond. I might have to infer schemas and make up my own data, try different things based on a stack trace, install libraries I would have preferred to not install, etc. I would work on trying to reproduce the problem for a few days, and at least a few times I struck gold. Then I would work on a self-contained, minimal reproduction case, followed by a week of sussing out the root cause. It was pretty time-consuming, but I was able to get a few fixes merged using that method, such that I was no longer a total stranger on the project (which helped me get other things merged into the code base).

by nabbed

6/5/2026 at 9:04:03 PM

Seems like you tore through some outdated Jira tickets, which is cool, but what was the impact of your work?

Hard doesn't mean impactful. In fact that's one of the biggest mistakes I see junior engineers make! But glad you got that learning experience, as you become more senior you'll definitely develop a better understanding of what drives actual impact.

by steno132

6/5/2026 at 9:12:43 PM

Why are you being so condescending? A person wants to get into an open source project, so takes work he knows others won't finish before him, and you're talking to him like he's a noob (you have no clue how long ago this was). Hell, you don't even know if the tickets were outdated.

by the-smug-one

6/6/2026 at 9:41:39 AM

>impact

Not everything in life is correctly evaluated according to Meta performance review criteria, probably not even what people are doing at Meta.

by ahartmetz

6/5/2026 at 7:15:19 PM

I learned this lesson kind of by accident. I've told this story before but I think it's relevant.

When I dropped out of college the first time around in January 2012, I assumed that my career options were extremely limited. I knew I needed a job, so I applied to pretty much every wage-labor job I could find: McDonalds, Lowes, Starbucks, Aldi, Publix, etc. Almost as a joke to myself, I sent exactly one application to a software developer position on Craigslist for a Flash, Foxpro, and Coldfusion developer position.

The only company that called me back was the software job. I interviewed there, got the job, and thus my career as a software engineer was kicked off.

In hindsight I realized something: the less qualified you are for a job, the more likely a company might be to overlook a lack of qualifications. McDonalds and Aldi and Starbucks have lots of qualified people applying for these positions, meaning that they can be very picky with who they hire.

Now compare this to Flash/Coldfusion/Foxpro developers in 2012. I didn't know any of these at the time particularly well...but to my benefit neither did anyone else! As a result, they didn't get a ton of applications meaning their selection pool was tiny, meaning that they basically had to take whomever they could get.

by tombert

6/5/2026 at 7:23:13 PM

no realization in hindsight about luck? lol

by tuktkyk

6/5/2026 at 7:25:41 PM

Absolutely luck as well. No argument there.

by tombert

6/5/2026 at 8:05:53 PM

If any of your success was determined by luck than 100% of your success was luck.

by Noaidi

6/5/2026 at 8:10:09 PM

That is simply not true. If 6 completely qualified people make it to the last stage of an interview based on their qualifications, but the final chosen person was done by die roll, there was still non-luck involved. No amount of luck would have gotten you to the last stage in this example, and the only way for luck to have mattered is if you also put in the leg work.

by xboxnolifes

6/5/2026 at 9:36:04 PM

I did not say there was no non luck involved. I said the outcome is always determined by luck.

An example will help maybe. If I need $10 and someone tells me they will give me $9 but the last dollar will be give to me based on the flip of a coin, I only can get that $10 if I am lucky.

And you can even put the luck at the beginning. Same situation but the person says I will give you $9 only if you get the first $1 based on the flip of a coin.

The only way you get $10 in those situations is based all on a lucky outcome. No amount of preparation can guarantee an outcome that involves luck.

I know it is hard because most have beeen brainwashed to think all success is based only on merit and hard work, but it is a lie told to us by lucky people.

by Noaidi

6/6/2026 at 4:11:24 AM

Your two examples are extremely different. Walking away with $9 if you're unlucky and walking away with $0 if you're unlucky are two incredibly different outcomes.

Being successful from winning the lottery, versus being successful from working hard enough such that you qualify for a lottery with significantly better odds.

Sure luck is Involved, the outcome is determined by luck, but work is putting a hand on the scales. And in that sense, your prior comment of it being 100% luck is exaggerated

by Jarwain

6/6/2026 at 4:16:15 AM

You can diminish luck, but you can’t get rid of it. That’s my point.

You said it yourself and your own sentence. The outcome is determined by luck. That was my only point which no one seems to want to accept.

by Noaidi

6/6/2026 at 5:06:37 AM

But what is there to accept? I was lucky to be born and not be run over by a truck today. What is the purpose of this information? How do I internalize it and use it to guide my behaviour?

by sirtaj

6/5/2026 at 8:12:29 PM

At least they sent the application, that was effort. So it can't be 100% luck right?

by tripledry

6/5/2026 at 9:37:08 PM

I did not say it was all luck. I said if any part of the outcome depends on luck, effort is meaningless when it come to the result. This is not to say that doing nothing is better, I am just being realistic.

by Noaidi

6/6/2026 at 9:11:22 AM

I might have misunderstood as english is not my native language but the 100% doesn't sit right with me in the original sentence.

In general I feel people downplay the effects of luck by a lot. My thinking is that the effort is everything but meaningless, in fact it's probably the only thing you can control.

by tripledry

6/5/2026 at 10:28:52 PM

But even going with your examples, effort isn't "meaningless", it's insufficient.

by tombert

6/5/2026 at 8:06:57 PM

Even if I agree with that characterization, I don’t see how that changes anything from what I said before.

I am sorry if you got “my success is purely because I am a hyper-talented genius” from my anecdote there, because that certainly wasn’t intended. There was absolutely luck involved, no argument, but my point about “applying to a job I wasn’t qualified for” still can hold.

by tombert

6/5/2026 at 7:28:04 PM

no realization that luck is involved in every opportunity that crosses your path so there's no realizations to be had regarding luck

by stronglikedan

6/6/2026 at 4:42:25 PM

Tried this. My version was dropping 9-5 for spending years learning to code and starting a "company", instead of getting hitched. No idea if it's working out though. Stay tuned.

by Chrise_N

6/5/2026 at 8:15:25 PM

I probably interpret the message incorrectly, because to me "the hardest thing" is usually some class of some famous unsolved problem. The thing is, to be famously unsolved, many of the world's most brilliant people must have already tried and failed to solve it. There's a chance I have an edge they don't, but it's probably not wise to track your career path to the darkest of dead ends purely on the merits of it being particularly dark.

Example: you know what would be harder than anything we're talking about here? Quadrupling the performance of the best compression algorithms. It's hard. In fact, maybe there's some information theory that even says it's mathematically impossible. That makes it really hard, which makes it what all of us should immediately start working on.

The author writes elsewhere that you also have to have an edge, but that's frequently omitted from this "hardest thing" advice.

by ip26

6/5/2026 at 8:27:15 PM

Yeah I feel like this advice kind of reminds me of a lot of advice - you could rewrite it like "Do the hardest thing -- by which I mean, not the easiest thing, and not the actual hardest thing, but the thing with the right amount of hardness, a narrow band somewhere in the vast middle that you'll only be able to recognize once you have enough experience that you no longer need this advice."

by johnfn

6/5/2026 at 8:28:39 PM

I think it's supposed to be interpreted as 'the hardest thing on your list of possible startup ideas', not 'the hardest possible thing in the universe'. I think it's also an alternative way of thinking about a moat.

by cjs_ac

6/5/2026 at 9:12:21 PM

I think author even mentions it on the side: the hardest thing thats also valuable

by jwpapi

6/5/2026 at 9:26:09 PM

Yeah, this type of advice rubs me the wrong way: I feel like the author is thinking of "hard" as though it were back-breaking day labor that any fool could do, but nobody wants to because it's so unpleasant.

The sort of people it's usually directed at, though, are knowledge workers (like computer programmers). "Hard" in our context is "something I don't yet know how to do". Always. No exceptions. Every time. If I know how to do it, it's trivial. If I don't, I have to figure it out.

And in my experience, the "do the hardest thing" VC-founder cheerleader types (who are always telling you, never themselves) absolutely lose their shit when they see somebody trying to figure out how to do something. Reading docs? Setting up controlled experiments? Why are you wasting time with all of this nonsense and not just getting to the "hardest thing" so I can bill the client and you can move on to the next "hardest thing"?

by commandlinefan

6/5/2026 at 7:52:05 PM

It's a good philosophy, but I always cringe when I hear it. Only because I once worked with someone who would always proclaim they were going to tackle the hardest thing first. Real ego play, from him at least.

by MattPalmer1086

6/4/2026 at 4:13:02 PM

In the current era of urge to make things faster/more, that article felt refreshing. Good things take effort and time to create, and it is not something bad, it's just the way the things become good.

by levhawk

6/4/2026 at 5:43:34 PM

(Author of the post here) I think the key point is that even bad businesses take time and effort to create!

The distinction is between "low-hanging fruit" ideas ("Let's start a cafe!" "Let's start a WordPress theme business") and "high-value, high effort" ideas ("It's 2003. Let's build VoIP software.").

by mijustin

6/4/2026 at 7:50:35 PM

Sure, I agree. I was more about encouraging to not be afraid of something hard.

Today's narrative pushes people to try vibe code as much ideas as possible, even in parallel, but I don't think it's a fruitful approach. One should not be afraid of doing something non-typical (hard) if they belive in the idea. And if you believe, dedicate some quality time for it. If you don't believe - why bother even with prototypes?

by levhawk

6/5/2026 at 6:57:35 PM

Well what if you take on an extremely ambitious project like writing a programming language complete with DAP step debugging, a full LSP, etc, etc?

That takes a lot of quality time to just figure out the right syntax and semantics, let alone having to figure out how all of these complex pieces fit together!

by williamcotton

6/5/2026 at 6:54:24 PM

Agree. But the tricky part is how much you believe in the idea. It is hard to be faithful to the right idea. One is influenced by other people, especially one's boss if it's in an corporation.

by davefromearth

6/4/2026 at 9:53:53 PM

100%

by mijustin

6/5/2026 at 8:50:53 PM

Where is Skype now? what good is creating something just to sell out and have it destroyed? High value? Skype's value right now is $0.

by Noaidi

6/5/2026 at 7:28:07 PM

Idk, I often felt the opposite. I naturally tend towards working on hard problems but my feeling is that if I chose instead to focus on an easier "thing" I could execute really well and be overall more successful.

by giacomoforte

6/5/2026 at 9:28:40 PM

Spending time doing deep work on hard problems also doesn't go so well with the "track your hours against approved JIRA tickets and compare your logged hours against your estimates at review time" that every corporate culture devolves into. If you're looking to survive the next round of layoffs, quick wins are your best bet.

by commandlinefan

6/5/2026 at 6:57:25 PM

Liked this post a lot, well done! Definitely appreciated that it was a site that actual has a unique design, and isn't just another Medium article...

A book on a similar subject that I don't see mentioned very often but which I quite enjoyed as "Tough Things First" by Ray Zinn [0]. Not the most popular one, but really down to earth and approachable ideas. Kind of like PG's "do things that don't scale," just applied on a broader timescale.

[0] https://toughthingsfirst.com/book/

by ljoshua

6/5/2026 at 9:39:35 PM

Sounds great, but what if the hardest thing is impossible for unknown reasons? I think you need a sort of on-ramp of steadily harder things so that if you fail at one thing, it's not the only thing you've ever done, and you still retain enough credibility for people to support you while you try again or try something similarly hard.

Unfortunately, the safety net necessary to support oneself while they do the hardest thing isn't guaranteed.

by __MatrixMan__

6/5/2026 at 7:49:47 PM

I worked for a camera company that made [still makes] some of the best cameras ever.

Their Quality was astronomical (with, of course, the rare exception).

It was the kind of thing that I was repeatedly told, by my peers in other companies, was impossible.

But my bosses wouldn't accept that. They could be real pains.

We did make top-shelf gear, but you won't really get rich, doing that (unless you're a SpaceX person, I guess).

I think the people that make a lot of money, do that by finding a "sweet spot," in improving the Quality of everyday stuff.

by ChrisMarshallNY

6/5/2026 at 8:54:18 PM

"brb gonna go broker world peace"

naw but this kind of mindset ended up burning me out at times; some of us clearly take general ideas like this in different ways than intended perhaps

but I think the actual "trick" here is about finding unfilled niches rather than necessarily doing "the hardest thing"

by erelong

6/5/2026 at 9:30:27 PM

They removed an important word in the quote from the original - the phrase isnt "do the hardest thing", the original quote was "do the hardest thing possible"

The addition of that last word is the difference between the chance at eventual success and the human burning out on world peace, time machines, free energy devices.

by malux85

6/5/2026 at 8:53:18 PM

This correlates with tackling the monkey first: https://blog.x.company/tackle-the-monkey-first-90fd6223e04d?...

by conformist

6/5/2026 at 9:07:52 PM

Agreed. I feel like Alphabet (who wrote this post) has kind of lost track of what they're espousing here.

Self driving cars were the "monkey" 10 years ago but now they are largely derisked. I'd like to see Alphabet working on the next generation of innovations. For me personally, I'd like to see them work on:

- Teleportation. - Talking animals. - A cure for death.

I'm not seeing them work on anything remotely as ambitious these days!

by steno132

6/5/2026 at 8:29:09 PM

So, the hardest thing for me would be to leave my job and focus all my time in starting my own business. Leave friends and family behind to put all my effort on it. Is it worth it? No.

by dakiol

6/5/2026 at 7:37:35 PM

My hardest thing took about 7 years to build (with a child getting born and slowing things down a bit) but still. Good to hear that I’m not the only one :)

by dt3ft

6/5/2026 at 10:37:53 PM

Care to share? Would love to hear your story!

by ElasticBottle

6/5/2026 at 7:59:35 PM

Do the hardest thing or do the easiest thing cheaply

by pandoro

6/5/2026 at 8:18:25 PM

Which of course pays off precisely because doing the easiest thing cheaply is usually hard.

As someone once said: any fool can do for $2 what it takes an engineer to do for $1.

by javawizard

6/5/2026 at 8:20:17 PM

People who are drawn to the hardest thing for its own sake can be exploited, like game developers and postdocs.

by Animats

6/5/2026 at 8:41:57 PM

This is dumb. Don't do hard things, do things which have a high ROI.

I could try to swim across the Pacific Ocean, walk across Siberia or consume a family size portion of McDonalds in a single sitting. All those things are hard. All those things have zero to negative ROI.

Doing hard things won't get you anywhere. Most hard things are useless. And a lot of the most valuable things are not hard at all.

by steno132

6/5/2026 at 9:38:07 PM

To be a contrarian, you could possibly become very famous if you swam across the Pacific Ocean or even walked across Siberia. Not sure on the McDonald's though, might be harder to get sponsorship for that.

by royal__

6/5/2026 at 8:45:26 PM

I don't know if there's a way to say this without coming off as rude, but if the hardest thing you can come up with is podcast hosting, then maybe you didn't spend too much time thinking about hard things? If it works for you, great, you do you, but I don't think it lines up with the title nor the premise of the article even remotely.

by Etheryte

6/5/2026 at 8:21:06 PM

St. John of the Cross in the Ascent of Mount Carmel,

"You should take care always to be inclined

not to the easiest thing, but to the hardest;

not to the tastiest, but to the most insipid;

not to the things that give the greatest pleasure, but to those that give the least;

not to the restful things, but to the painful ones;

not to consolation, but to desolation;

not to more, but to less;

not to the highest and dearest, but to the lowest and most despised;

not to the desire for something, but to having no desires.”

by metanoia_

6/6/2026 at 10:47:22 AM

The 'hardest thing' here being podcast hosting. Lmfao.

by xyzsparetimexyz