James L. Elia

Blog #4: Why "Work Harder" Hardly Works

09 October 2025

Overview

I'm reading Thinking in Systems by the late Donella Meadows, and I came to a section on a system trap called "seeking the wrong goal":

"System behavior is particularly sensitive to the goals of feedback loops. If the goals - the indicators of satisfaction of the rules - are defined inaccurately or incompletely, the system may obediently work to produce a result that is not really intended or wanted."

- Dana Meadows, Ph.D.

A more casual blog

I made this blog to put interesting thoughts onto silicon and to practice writing outside of an academic audience. However, I quickly strayed from this, wanting my blogs to be increasingly "impressive" and professional. I spent an entire day on Blog #3, for example. Considering this website also serves as an online resume, I hope you can forgive me for showboating.

The goal of my feedback loop drifted away from fun writing practice, leading to less frequent posts as I brewed up more "impressive" topics. Rest assured, I am readjusting my goal. Blog posts will be more brief and casual from this point forward. I hope this will allow me to post more frequently and with more levity.

Hard work is not sufficient for success

The title of this section feels like a truism. Yet, how often do we tell struggling people that, if they work hard enough, they'll get the result they desire? Especially in American culture, hard work is seen as one of the most desirable traits. Even worse, we measure hard work temporally: "Alice shows up early and stays late", "Bob is here every weekend", "Charlie is burning the midnight oil".

Hard work can be useless, or even counterproductive, when applied in the wrong place, time, or method. This is especially poignant in biomedical research where 100 microliters (a layman's drop) of antibody can be over $1000 USD and can be ruined in any number of creative ways, like storing it in the fridge instead of the freezer, the freezer instead of the fridge, or sneezing at an inopportune time.

Even worse, I once witnessed a genuinely hard worker put bleach on invaluable patient samples thinking it was a gentle salt solution used for washing cells. I have no doubt this could've been prevented if the person was well-rested and spent more time planning. Try telling the family of a deceased patient "we accidentally destroyed the tumor sample your loved one donated, but cut us some slack! We work hard, after all..."

Hard work is necessary for success

I am not hating on hard work. Out of necessity, I've worked 100 hours in ten days. Out of masochism, I've run ultramarathons. When well-directed, it is hard to imagine a better trait than determination. But hard work is a covariate of success, not a driver.

"Hard work is a roaring river, but good planning is the water wheel."

- James Elia, not-yet Ph.D.

To use system-speak, the goal of the feedback loop should be meaningful results, not hard work. An intertwined goal is thus efficiency, or the amount of meaningful results per unit of effort. In a serious environment, the person consistently delivering results will win out every time, and the brags about long hours will fall on bored ears.

How to be efficient

My goal is not to whine but to try and encourage a shift in my dear readers' perspectives on time well spent. Below is a list of some strategies I've found to help make me more efficient and results-oriented:

• Spend more time understanding your task before executing
  • Create binary tests upfront that tell you if something is worth pursuing
  • Ask the main stakeholders questions about the "why" of the project
  • Identify common pain points that you can fix for others and avoid for yourself
  • Recognize irreversible steps (points of no return) and make final checks before continuing
• Always look for levers (a good rule for life and video games alike)
  • Identify bottlenecks (what is the rate-limiting or effort-draining step of this work?)
  • Parallelize your effort (nest short active work inside of long passive work)
  • Reject tradition without reason ("that's how we've always done it")
  • Recognize non-linearity (does 2x effort lead to > 2x results?)
• Be generous! Effective people will want to work with you
  • Give credit (people will rarely think less of you because you received help)
  • Ask team members what their goals are and assign them tasks accordingly
  • Turn the other cheek (slights are rarely meant, and everyone has bad days)

James