The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
Published 2014 · 1 pages · 70,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Business & Self-Help, Memoir & Autobiography, Nonfiction
How hard is The Hard Thing About Hard Things to read?
The Hard Thing About Hard Things scores 16 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 22 out of 100
- Tech and business vocabulary. Very accessible.
- Sentence structure: 22 out of 100
- Abstraction: 25 out of 100
- Practical advice grounded in specific war stories.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Anecdote-rich with practical management insights.
- Narrative indirection: 80 out of 100
- Direct, chapter-by-topic structure.
- Symbolic density: 80 out of 100
- Hip-hop lyrics as chapter epigraphs.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Dark humor about startup suffering.
- Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
- Each chapter provides clear advice.
- Structural complexity: 18 out of 100
- Topical chapters. Simple organization.
How The Hard Thing About Hard Things is regarded
The Hard Thing About Hard Things holds a literary regard score of 36 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.