Hard work

Conventional wisdom is that hard work is a virtue.  If you work hard, you will achieve success.

I think we need to question the notion that work needs to be hard to be adequate.

Some people, when they read that, will have the visceral reaction of "Oh, you just don't want to work!"

But that's not the argument I'm making here today.

For the purposes of today's blog post, I'm not questioning the "work" part, I'm just questioning the "hard" part.

(I know there are other people questioning the "work" part and I'm not going to get in their way, that's just not my topic here today.)

When I think of everything I've ever done well, I've never worked hard at any of it. I simply...did it. I carried out the necessary actions, did the thing, and it was done and done well.

So, you might be thinking, what would happen if I did work hard at it?

And the answer is that it would be impossible to work hard at it, because I finished it before the work got hard.

Analogy: you can't sprint one step. You simply take the step, and you've completed it before you can even get up to a sprinting level of effort. (Unless, of course, you can't take any steps.  But then you can't sprint one step either.)

There are also quite a few things in life that I've worked hard at.  And, despite my hard work, I never reached the point of doing them well. I basically knocked myself out to achieve mediocrity.

Before we even look at it from our own perspective as workers, if we look at it just from the perspective of having a functional economy and society, people knocking themselves out to achieve mediocrity is the last thing we want!

If you're in the market for a product or service, you want that product to be made or that service to be provided by someone who knows what they're doing.  The more important it is and the harder it is to do, the more you want someone who's certain they can do it well.  

 

You want a beautician who makes people way uglier than you look way hotter than you've ever aspired to, no one who isn't sure if they can make eyebrows like yours look good but they'll try their best. You want a renovator who thinks the work you have in mind is so easy they don't see why you don't do it yourself, not one who's unsure whether it's possible but is willing to give it the good old college try. You want a surgeon who could do your surgery in their sleep, not one who for whom it's a reach goal.

 

Essentially, if someone is working hard, it's a sign that something is wrong - insufficient training, too-tight timelines, not the right person for the job, etc.

 

Maybe, instead of valuing hard work, we as a society should be working on eliminating it.