The bitter lesson of my (young) career

A few years ago, Rich Sutton, one of the pioneers of modern artificial intelligence, wrote an essay called "The Bitter Lesson." The lesson, in essence, is that the biggest breakthroughs in AI have come from embracing simple ideas and scaling them up with massive amounts of computation. Researchers who tried to build intricate, clever systems were often outpaced by those who just threw more processing power at the problem. The "bitter" part is the realization that brute force is often more effective than elegance.

I've come to believe this lesson applies just as much to our careers. For the young and ambitious, especially those starting without a map, the most common advice is to "work smart, not just hard." It sounds good. It's what you'd tell a friend. But it's also advice that, for many, is dangerously misleading. The bitter lesson of my young career is that for those of us who start outside the "in-the-know" circles, working smart is a luxury we can't afford. The only reliable path forward is to work dumb.

The Bubble

If you're reading this, you are probably in a bubble. You're on LinkedIn, you follow thought leaders, and you understand the unwritten rules of professional life. You know that computer science is a more direct path to a stable career than classic literature, and that Princeton is, with few exceptions, a better launching pad than a local community college.

This isn't to say you haven't worked hard. But you operate with a set of assumptions and a base of knowledge that is not available to most people. Outside this bubble, the world is a far murkier place.

I grew up in that world. I'm from a rural town where there are more farmers than any other profession. I taught myself English at seventeen. The idea of "coding" was as foreign to me as the dark side of the moon. I had no concept of what a place like Harvard could offer, let alone how one even began to apply. The path to a different life wasn't a matter of choosing the "right" fork in the road; it was about hacking through a dense forest with no trail in sight.

My education in getting to the U.S. for college came from Reddit threads and cold emails to strangers, most of whom never replied. I spent countless hours on questionable websites, sifting through noise for a single grain of signal. I learned about the Common App during breaks at my job. It wasn't a strategic or "smart" process. It was a brute-force attack on a problem I barely understood. It was work, plain and simple. And it was the only thing that worked.

That experience taught me something fundamental: when you don't know what the right thing to do is, your only option is to do everything.

The Privilege of "Working Smart"

The advice to "work smart" always comes from a good place. It's about prioritization, focus, and directing your energy toward what matters most. In theory, it's impeccable advice.

But there's a catch. Working smart presupposes that you know what the "right things" are. It assumes you have a framework for what is valuable and what isn't. This knowledge is the most underrated form of privilege. It's having parents who can tell you which internships matter, attending a school with a dedicated college counselor, or simply growing up in an environment where the path to success has been illuminated by those who have walked it before you.

Most young people, the ones outside the bubble, don't have this. They don't know they should learn to code. They don't know the difference in signaling power between various universities. They are operating with a map that is mostly blank.

I see my past self in them. It wasn't until I was fired from my job during the pandemic that I had the mental space to think beyond my immediate surroundings. That unexpected freedom, that break from the grind, was a lucky accident that allowed me to chart a new course. Now, having found my way into the bubble—I'm about to graduate from Harvard, I know VCs, I go to fancy dinners—I understand the privilege I now hold. And I see how the advice I receive today would have been useless to me back then.

The Case for Working Dumb

So what do you do when you're young, full of energy, but have no information? What is the answer when you don't have a guide?

My answer is likely to attract some criticism, but it's the only one I believe in: you work double, triple, quadruple. You don't choose one road out of four; you start walking down all of them until you have enough information to know which ones to abandon.

This sounds like a recipe for burnout, and it can be. But if you are young, you often have one significant advantage: fewer responsibilities. No mortgage, no family to support. You have a surplus of time and a deficit of information. The most logical way to spend that time is to convert it into information. And the only way to do that is through sheer volume of effort.

First, you work hard. You use up your energy to explore, to fail, to learn what the landscape even looks like. Only then, once you've bought that information with your sweat, can you start thinking about working smart.

Working smart is a privilege earned through experience or handed to you by circumstance. If you don't have it, don't be fooled by the elegant advice of those who do. The bitter lesson of AI is that brute force often wins. The same is true in our careers. Forget elegance. Be relentless. The "smart" part can come later.