The Hard + Fun Filter

Disclaimer: Still a 26 year old, figuring out life. This is not some life-changing advice, just a thought that’s helped me.

A lot of us implicitly (by our upbringing / parents choices) or explicitly (our own thought process) do what I describe below already. Things that are both hard and fun.

• Hard is often a proxy of what society values and rewards. For example, becoming a doctor, lawyer, or a high-level public official is hard, and these professions often command respect and money. Not all hard things are equally valuable, but many signal rarity and skill.

• Fun is more personal - it’s what you can engage with for hours on end, where the frustration is worth it.

Now the interesting bit is, if you do things which are both hard and fun, then you stick with them long enough and generally end-up with a skillset that is valuable in the market.

In my own life, SPOJ and Codeforces¹ was fun and I got decent at it - but after a point, by and large, it stopped being hard, and I stopped growing. Similarly JEE prep or high-school chemistry was hard, but the fun quotient was too low for me.

Note: Obviously, there are exceptions to this, we all grind through some things that were hard but not fun, and we also do things which are fun but not hard for our personal enjoyment.

Also, hard + fun isn’t enough on its own. You still need a capitalistic lens. For instance, I love playing Counter-Strike. I find it fun and know for a fact, becoming a professional player is hard. But unless I am in the top 1% of this field, the median outcome isn’t great.

So, next time when deciding on something: If it’s hard + fun and has a survivable downside, then go for it, over something that is just hard or just fun.

I didn’t always have this phrasing, but can retrospect a lot of decisions made by me / recommended to me from early on that can be mapped to this. At some point in school, I was winning a lot of coding contests (inter-school level), and my dad casually suggested to stop attending those - primarily because they no longer pushed me. They were becoming “easy wins” - addictive, but not valuable. Later on, they also discouraged me from joining a neighborhood coaching center because that one had too few students, so with the lack of competition I could coast without realizing where I truly stood. At the same time they didn’t push me into an intense JEE grind, because they realized I could not enjoy it enough to stick with it.

Back then, the hard filter was outsourced to my parents and the fun filter came from me. As I’ve grown older, I have started to manage both and am still figuring it out.

As of recently, I took a course on Probabilistic Methods in my Master’s following this filter. I knew that it would be hard, since the reference book’s exercises are non-trivial right from Chapter 1, but also knew that I enjoy probability as a topic. So I took the course, and it was a great learning experience. I couldn’t breeze through the homeworks because of the difficulty but still had the enthusiasm to work through them.

This heuristic is loosely similar to the Ikigai principle, but more capitalistic and less spiritual in nature. It mostly skips over the “what the world needs” part and maps:

• fun => what you love + can get good at
• hard => what you can get paid for (And since less people do the hard stuff, supply-demand gaps sometimes mean you’re accidentally onto things that the world needs.)

Hard + Fun filter is an oversimplification, but often a useful one.