Harvard CS197: AI Research Experiences

Proof You Can Do Hard Things

Advice for Research Students (and others)

An Opinionated Guide to ML Research

There is a very good reason to take Calculus. It’s to prove you can do hard things.

The ability to do hard things is perhaps the most useful ability you can foster in yourself. And proof that you are someone who can do them is one of the most useful assets you can have on your life resume.

Our self-image is composed of historical evidence of our abilities. The more hard things you push yourself to do, the more competent you will see yourself to be. If you can run marathons or throw double your body weight over your head, the sleep deprivation from a newborn is only a mild irritant. If you can excel at organic chemistry or econometrics, onboarding for a new finance job will be a breeze.

But if we avoid hard things, anything mildly challenging will seem insurmountable. We’ll cry into TikTok over an errant period at the end of a text message. We’ll see ourselves as incapable of learning new skills, taking on new careers, and escaping bad situations. The proof you can do hard things is one of the most powerful gifts you can give yourself.

Calculus is a great way to prove you can do hard things if you have no other proof to show. But if you’re learning programming and building apps in your free time, or winning soccer championships, or writing a novel, then you are doing hard things. Probably harder than Calculus.

This is also why there’s so much survivorship bias and bad advice in the “C students hire A students” trope. Most C students are not doing other hard things instead of school. They’re just goofing off, so they end up working for the A student.

But some C students are getting C’s because they’re obsessed with other projects. Hard projects. And that obsession with doing hard things lets them blow past their Excellent Sheep peers over time. So if you have a C student who’s obsessed with something hard, you probably don’t have to worry. If they’re getting high and watching TikTok, well…

Romeen Sheth on Twitter

Everyone should have a north star

• success is what you make of it; money, influence, impact, balance, intellectual satisfaction. There’s no right or wrong; it’s different for each person. The worst thing you can do is build a life around somebody else’s definition of success

Values are easy to have, hard to uphold

• Your values shine through in difficult times - Extending Marc’s example, it’s not difficult to wrap up at 5 pm on a quiet Tuesday. In a crisis situation, it is difficult, but not impossible. If it’s truly a value, it will be upheld in rain or shine.

Compounding is magical

• It is so difficult to measure the compounding quality of non-quantitative actions. In business, we see the impact our decisions have daily; these are easily measurable and can be measured over hyper short duration timeframes. It’s why we gravitate towards them - instant gratification.

What we don’t see however is the impact of daily decisions that aren’t easily measurable, e.g. an individual conversation with a colleague, a sit down dinner with a family member, daily inward reflection. In my experience, these decisions don’t breed instant gratification, but they are so important - they’re the source of enduring and sustainable long term gratification.