The first time I have seen the expression “the hard way” on a book it was on the cover of “Learn Python the hard way". I was at the university and I wanted to learn programming, besides what I knew from statistics classes. The book is pretty intimidating and was recommended by a guy that went on pursuing a PhD. I am not wired that way, and so after some chapters I gave up. It was after a couple of years that with my thesis (developed with R) done, I really got to learn Python at my workplace. Having a clear goal (being productive and contributing to the projects) and spending a bunch of hours writing code was what I needed to learn.

An Hard Exam

Since I am talking of my college years, let me talk about the hardest exam I took: Real and Functional Analysis. Its name gives me still the goose bumps. It was in the first semester of my master and in the classroom the people enrolled for the second or third time were many. In the course syllabus starred abstract integration, Banach-Tarski paradox, Radon-Nikodym theorem, spectral theorem for compact symmetric operators and much more.

I decided that I wanted to pass the exam in a year, otherwise I would give up and begin searching for a job. I have to admit it sounds a little extreme now. I would do my best to pass it. For context, usually I would switch to exam mode a month before the exam session. This time I tripled the months, and spent many hours every day (holidays included) copying, writing and rewriting for learning definitions, theorems and their proofs. Even on New Year’s day I worked some hours on those.

Do Ten Times as Much

Now that the Fubini-Tonelli days are long gone, I entertain myself reading lighter material: blog posts. Going down the rabbit hole of links I ended up, after an isomorphic transformation, on Do Ten Times as Much. Here a little excerpt:

“When I see the contrast between people who succeed and fail, I generally witness a similar gap in effort. During my eight years in college, I spent many thousands of hours reading about economics, politics, and philosophy. Since high school, I’ve spent over ten thousand hours writing. When young people ask me, “How can I be like you?“ my first thought is, again, do ten times as much. Ten times as much of what, exactly? The answer is usually: Whatever you already think the crucial ingredient is.”

Even if the role of other factors, e.g. talent and especially luck, contribute to the final outcome for sure the “10x as much” rule highlights the notion that you have to put in the reps to increase your chance of getting a good result. And often what looks like an overnight success or a magic trick is just the outcome of countless hours of hard work behind the scenes.

Embrace the Grid

Speaking of magic, it comes to my mind the really nice Embrace the Grid. In there, Jacobian shows the necessity of doing the boring and laborious tasks, talking about a trick in which a magician guesses the card choosen by a volunteer. But it is not your standard trick:

  1. The volunteer picks a card from a deck.
  2. He places the card inside an envelope.
  3. The magician asks the volunteer to choose some tea (he comes either from Bucking Palace or Hogwarts) from a plentiful of boxes. They are all sealed in plastic.
  4. The volunteer selects a box, opens it up and then takes a sealed packet.
  5. He opens it and finds his card.

How in the world does it work?

“The card choice is a force. But choice from those dozens of boxes of tea really is a free choice, and the choice of tea bag within that box is also a free choice. There’s no sleight-of-hand: the magician doesn’t touch the tea boxes or the teabag that the volunteer chooses. The card really is inside of that sealed tea packet. The trick is all in the preparation. Before the trick, the magician buys dozens of boxes of tea, opens every single one, unwraps each tea packet. Puts a Three of Clubs into each packet. Reseals the packet. Puts the packets back in the box. Re-seals each box. And repeats this hundreds of times. This takes hours — days, even.”

Conclusion

In many cases you can obtain what you want with limited effort. Sometimes you could even find a shortcut. But other times you just need to embrace the hard way and put much more work than anyone could think reasonable. By the way, the effort for the Real and Functional Analysis exam paid off, and I passed it at the first attempt. However, comparing it to preparing thousands of tea packets it sounds like an easy feat!