Most of our lives, we work hard. We wake up early to start going to school, believing that it would only last for a few years. However, it often leads to college, and to university, on what seems like an endless expedition. We are up until midnight in the library studying for a degree, and spend hundreds of hours learning a profession or building a business, to achieve what is prescribed to us as a successful life. During this long pursuit, we rarely have a genuine moment or two for ourselves. We never get a proper chance to ask ourselves whether we are happy or satisfied with what we are doing; perhaps fearing that the answer would hurt too much. Finally, one day, often unexpectedly, the end arrives. By that time, through a steady grind, we had managed to achieve what was expected from us: successful careers/roles as professional or businessman, husband/wife, father/mother, etc with a healthy portfolio of assets. Not very long afterwards, people are found saying kind words about us at our funerals and at the after-parties; by that time, we had already left on another journey.
There is no doubt that we must work, because living is not cheap. There is a list of good and very sensible reasons for working, which have been drummed into us since childhood. In capitalist societies, work, social status and money have become common labels to evaluate a person. Therefore, we get told that the biggest thing to come out of our work isn't what we get for it, but what we become for it. Most people, who work hard to make both ends meet, often hear how they could develop a more positive attitude and have proper experience by making their hands and legs work harder. Maslow described a classical hierarchy of human needs that cannot be fulfilled without doing work. These needs include: physiological, safety, love/belonging, self-esteem and self-actualisation. For physiological and safety needs, we must work to have sufficient income for food, supporting the family, and sustaining a community. To satisfy love/belonging, self-esteem and self-actualisation, people ought to work long hours for greater achievements and acquire a higher social status. In order to realise our full potential, it seems nothing worthwhile can be secured with half efforts.
Work, from a sociological perspective, is anything that a person undertakes with the aim of being productive in a way that meets his human needs. This work involves mental and/or physical exertion but does not always have to include an exchange of money. However, different jobs have acquired different social functions. For example, farmers produce wheat by planting in the land; business people exchange goods and transfer wealth through diverse transactions; lawyers provide legal services by applying their knowledge; and doctors help patients recover from diseases. By working, people forget time and its duration to engage in solving their problems and overcoming difficulties. Dedication flourishes work, and its tedious repetition is surpassed by getting offered agreeable rewards. The individual creation through work, adds value to the product; and the person experiences pleasure of sunsets rather than complaining about the faded moonlight. Wages, salaries or bonuses are given to employees as compensation; promotion is thrown in as an incentive. Employers devise performance evaluation systems to encourage employees to make more profit. Compensation may also be a weighing factor when people choose their careers; it is a form of insurance, providing wage replacement and medical benefits to employees who get injured or die on the job.
I resent the self-righteous statements from politicians, media, and corporate executives about how we should be working hard. This essentially implies that except them, people, especially those who are poor, do not work hard. Such statements are offensive, as millions of us work hard; much harder than those financiers and politicians ever did. Only a couple of centuries ago, people worked as much as they needed to, and only a few people worked hard. It was a question of attitude and ambition. If you worked at something, you could only do it up to a point; beyond that, you did not work. Hard work and practice were there to make a person better at whatever he was doing. Our social systems have since been built on top of psychological biases that serve as mental shortcuts. Effort moralisation is a bias that leads us to value displays of effort. That might be sensible at the individual level, but a tendency to attach moral value to effort, leads the society to overvalue jobs that show off industriousness, rather than the creation of value. Jobs that involve hard work for its own sake get maintained in the economy at the cost of people who could use that time in more productive or enjoyable ways. Since labour is paid for, ultimately by the consumer, effort moralisation ends up imposing or raising the taxes we pay.
Ancient Greeks counted work as a burden, and in the Hebrew Bible, work was considered a labour for extracting food from the unforgiving earth, which was linked to the original sin of Adam and Eve. The Bible concurred that work was a result of that transgression. The Protestant work ethic, however, saw creation of wealth by working to full capacity as an assurance for securing redemption. This view was adopted by the capitalist thinkers, including Franklin and Weber, who observed that a man should work not only because he had to but because he wanted to, as it was a sign of virtue and personal satisfaction. There has since been a push back against this view from countercultural groups who argue that the link between working more with producing more is broken. Working hard is not automatically an admirable feature, but only a tool for generating more capital for people at the top of food chain. In a post-industrial society, people do not have to work hard to survive; and many of their unmet needs will be sustained not by producing more but by producing differently. Even before embedding artificial intelligence (AI) on a large scale, technological change on an extraordinary level has caused massive drop in the volume of labour in the industrial, administrative and service sectors.
As children, we used to do so much. In a single day, we attended school, did homework, played with friends, watched cartoons, enjoyed video games, fought with siblings, prayed, made Lego ships, read story books, argued with parents, etc. After doing so much in our childhood, we grow up to settle in a single career for the next 30-50 years. No wonder, this often feels boring, as there have been so many versions of us; and there could be many exciting ways for us to live and work. Unfortunately, the world has chosen to follow Adam Smith, the 18th century philosopher, who described that the division of labour massively increases collective productivity, therefore, if people specialise in one area (making rivets, bricklaying, etc) they become faster and more efficient in their work, and the level of production greatly increases. Later, Karl Marx agreed with him, but argued that it would make individuals wealthier by specialising, but their lives would be boring and their talents compromised. In his utopian communist society, Marx shunned specialism and wanted everyone to have many different jobs. This makes sense, but remains an unrealistic dream for our generation, as we have collectively chosen to make work pay more rather than be interesting.
Malcolm Gladwell has theorised that it could take up to 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master something. It is not just about the hours; you need to be obsessed with your goal
I am not rejecting the notion that work gives us an opportunity to escape from some of the customary difficulties of being ourselves. Work also exists to protect us from extremely demanding process of idling. For a few hours, every day, we set aside the qualms and miseries of our inner lives, and experience a simpler and more decisive way of being though work. After emotionally tumultuous weekends, we often welcome Mondays for the more straightforward version of ourselves; and be a part of an establishment that is more stable and proficient than we are. Nonetheless, I have a problem with the concept of “workism” - the elevation of work from being something people do to make a living, to a source of meaning and self-worth. For many, work has gone from being a job to a career to a “calling”, which has left them with a quasi-religious devotion to their work. For them, it might have become a valuable source of meaning in a time when participation in actual religions is declining. But others, may find themselves trapped in this culture of workism. They don’t want their work to fill such a central role in their lives, but they are forced to compete with those who do. They may find their character measured by the yardstick of hard work, even when there are other values they might prefer.
I hope I am not giving the message that hard work is bad. In fact, hard work has been the bedrock of everything we’ve built in our civilisation. Dreams are just dreams, and plans are only good intentions, unless they translate into reality through hard work. It can also help with character-building (eg, self-esteem, confidence, skills), especially in our formative years. However, I would encourage people to examine why they are engaging in hard work. If their vision of life is not a new discovery, are they working hard in pursuit of excellence? We should ask ourselves whether their labour is devoted to producing things of value, or whether they are just caught up in a culture that they do not support. Whether their hard work is about showcasing their achievements, using the noise from without to drown the whispers from within, a flight from unsustainable internal sadness, finding peace, not having too many (or any) real friends, or having no idea what to do with themselves other than running away?
There are a lot of people who in fact use work or hustle or have selfish ambition as an escape from real responsibility or real purpose. In such cases, the hard worker is just as dysfunctional as the indolent. On the other hand, Aristotle takes us to the next level by declaring, “Excellence is a habit”. This habit is made constant or gets turned into an “addiction” through the excitement that comes after one has completed a challenging task. We only want to relax until we are ready to renew that feeling all over again. However, it is not very common to have a passion; most of us don’t. Yet, if we are blessed to outwork and outlearn everyone else in search of happiness or uncovering the hidden opportunities through hard work, energy of the universe will guide us for the sake of this unique calling. Otherwise, we will be risking far more than we should, by failing to heed this call, because “A star that is determined to shine cannot be hidden”.
Some people may not know or agree what constitutes as hard work. This is beyond Robert Owen’s “Eight hours’ labour, Eight hours’ recreation, Eight hours’ rest”. Malcolm Gladwell has theorised that it could take up to 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master something. It is not just about the hours; you need to be obsessed with your goal. If your agenda is to change the world or make a significant difference, it is not possible by doing 9-5 work in a 40-hours week. People who changed the world were workaholics – recent examples include, Nelson Mandela, Churchill, Einstein, and Picasso. Think about professional athletes who have achieved remarkable success. Imagine the number of hours they spend in the gym, rehab, cryotherapy, massage, and planning/having proper diet and sleep, before they create the magic on the playing field. Achieving massive success always means making big sacrifices. It’s not just the number of hours you work per week that matters, it’s also the quality and the focus you bring to that work. Success is the sum of all the small efforts repeated every day. It is not just one long race or a match; it is winning many short races and matches, day in day out. Hard work also defines your character, as “some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don’t turn up at all.”
We enjoy the pleasures of life because someone worked hard to create them. Dreamers who put their dreams into action have given us medical breakthroughs, space exploration, democracy, and the rule of law. The question is whether we should follow our dreams? There is no substitute to hard work, but where and how it should be applied? When it comes to choosing what to do with our lives, we are presented with difficult choices early on: to pursue passion or play safe. The latter usually involves a reliable profession, which is boring but leads to a comfortable life. The former is often a high-risk choice full of excitement and potential glory, but it could easily wind up in poverty and humiliation. Both require hard work, but it does not feel like work when you are enjoying what you do. We often like to play it safe; but let us try and explore the concept of “safety”. We will never be safe doing something we hate or pursue out of cowardice. In the modern world, our back-up career is someone’s passion, therefore, it places us at a huge risk of failure. Our “safe” choice might ruin us because it is someone’s first choice. By contrast, what we love and are obsessed with, but did not choose, could have multiplied our chances of success. In the end, it is never safe to use one life we have for forcing ourselves to do what we know we won’t enjoy or even succeed in.
Working hard for something we don't fancy is stressful; hard work for something we love is passion. However, discovering that passion, and motivating ourselves to pursue it long-term, is not easy. Rather than getting chocked by internal sceptical murmurs, we should seek help from outside to determine our passion. Dream up your passion to pursue, and present it to a group of family and friends who are kind, imaginative and wise. Their responses will suddenly make your plans more plausible, as a vote of confidence from others lends us self-confidence. Due to public declaration, we will not only be motivated, but also accountable to them. Hard work from here onwards is like compound interest in a bank; the money grows faster. The trick is to focus on the elements of the work that you find enjoyable, and promise yourself internal rewards (eg, greater knowledge, new skills) and external rewards (eg, fame, money) for achieving milestones. Watch out for a typical burst of motivation early, and a slump in the middle, where you are likely to stall. Thankfully, research has uncovered ways to fight these “short middles.” If you break your goal into smaller and SMART (Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound) sub-goals, and weekly instead of quarterly targets; there’s no chance of giving in to this irritating slump. Achieving sub-goals and goals will keep you excited and happy via adrenaline and dopamine secretions; let your biology do rest of the talking.
Our preoccupation with working hard to earn more money is somewhat understandable, but we keep wanting more than we need. It seems we haven’t discovered the purpose of life, as we haven’t found what farming was to Cincinnatus or poetry to Rumi. Passions are not for the few only; we all had them when we were children. It’s just that the popular philosophy of modernity doesn’t invite us to work out what our real devotions might be. Nothing in our education system allows us to imagine that discovering things that matter more than money, is the foundation of genuine satisfaction and autonomy.
There might be no shortcuts to any place worth going, but our lives might be more balanced if we learn to re-allocate the concept of social status. There might be courage in climbing the Mount Everest, but looking after children at home daily, is not a piece of cake either. There are races for money, fame and prestige, but there are also races that measure other kinds of gallantry. The heroic hard worker isn’t necessarily the one in a corporate boardroom; it might be the one writing these lines sitting in his study. Perhaps there should be a new definition of hard work that suitably honours our potential, and changes lives in the process.