Hard Work: You're Using Those Words Wrong

Some of the oldest advice most of us can probably remember getting is that one has work hard to get ahead. Or, in many cases, to get anywhere. And it's good advice. Outside of a lucky few, none of us will get the things we want without first putting some kind of down payment of our energies into the pot. And hard work--done right and when remotely rewarding--often carries benefits that are purely for its own sake.

The trouble is that, as with any words in the English language, frequent repetition chips away at meaning and eventually relevance. The concept is replaced with a mantra. It becomes civic religion--a matter of unthinking faith. Before long, we're working ourselves to death and killing our own productivity for the sake of getting to say that we're working hard. We mistake being busy for being productive or, worse still, for being valuable and fulfilled human beings. How many monomaniacs do you know who are fully functional and satisfied people? Work--something we do for the benefits it brings in time of idleness--has become a raison d'etre unto itself. 

Hard work--divided from things like skill and knowledge and devotion--is only a partial virtue. It's sadly become a simplistic, almost solipsistic platitude. It is, of course, a part of the equation. Talent and know-how can get a person decently far on their own but to go much further, one needs to put in grunting, sweaty effort. That's what we mean most often. Physical application, what some still call "elbow grease." This must be paired with an investment of resources--time in particular, but also money and, yes, luck. These elements are what, boiled down, we call "work." And this is fine, as long as we bear this in mind when we talk about "work" and "achievement," rather than turning solid advice into derivative cant. 

As with most things, this misunderstanding was incubated by the Puritans. They loved work. Funny thing there is that the Puritans also liked punishment. Pleasure, that was a dirty word. Idleness, too; that's when the Devil found you. "Joy" in general--a wretched concept. But work and suffering and the banality of martyrdom: that was where salvation lay. We continue to embrace this philosophy long after we've developed things like central heating and indoor plumbing to ensure a quality of life the Puritans could never imagine (and would likely shun us for, anyway--witchcraft and all that). Work, in our language, is now separated from pleasure. They are different spheres entirely thanks to our deeply messed up fore-bearers and we, perhaps understandably, value the more productive sphere even at the expense of its natural balance.

It's become such a singular value that it's taken on meanings that are actually harmful: modern day corporate go-getters, whose eagerness can become catastrophically dangerous. The rest of us are told to keep up, whether we reasonably can or not. Now we have the phrase "workaholics;" how many cues do you take from other -aholics? Eventually "hard work" reaches the end-of-life-cycle for any phrase: political platitude, tailor made for all-star bloviators. It's become such a catch-all for any discussion on success and merit that it's taken on bizarre proportions, even being used to rehabilitate Auschwitz's original motivational poster. 

An unsuccessful person must not have worked hard enough, it is said. But this conveniently ignores the fact that some people have to work a lot harder than others to get to the same ends--and that there's no scientific measure for "hardness" of work, anyway. It coldly dodges the reality that even the hardest fought battles can be undone with relative ease by an uncaring universe. And it just plain forgets that while hard work is the most egalitarian key to success, it is one among several necessary keys. 

One person endeavors to transport a boulder from a quarry in Colorado to Mars' Valles Marineris. Another creates a new, trendier, less invasive social networking site. By any measure, the boulder-moving was harder work while the network-building was smarter work. And the networker almost certainly reaped greater benefits from her task than did Sisyphus. So you see how the phrase "hard work" can lack real meaning when used inappropriately. A convenient phrase with vague applications and even vaguer implications.

Most of us have probably been told at one point or another that we've worked hard at something. And it might be true. But verifying hard work is awkward: different tolerances for work loads, tasks that look harder/easier than they are, extenuating circumstances, etc. I received such praise from family and friends when I finished Nos Populus. Trouble was, I rarely considered the book to be "work" while writing it. It only became such when it was hard-going and my output was either lousy (qualitatively) or negligible (quantitatively). When I was actually making progress on the book and proud of what I was doing, it was a hobby that I loved and so it never felt like "work." I may never be fortunate enough to experience something like that in what I do for a living. But at least I can supplement my day job with it, giving me the balance of productivity and joy that the 21st Century office job often eschews.