This doesn’t necessarily have to be a poll, maybe more of a discussion of sorts about how hard working you think you are and why?
Myself: I know I’m a hard worker, not because of my stress level, but because I love what I do and work very hard to keep my work up to my own standards. I was raised in a Middle Class family where my father worked his ass off after the navy and taught us the meaning of a buck. If I had a problem with money i.e. say I dropped the transmission in my car and needed the car to get to work, but couldn’t afford the tranny. The money would be there for me to get a new one, but I’d sure as sh*t have to work for it. I worked for every penny I had when I was a teenager.
This carried over to all aspects of my life, and now that I look back at it, that behavior of working hard got me to where I am. My wife is the same way. She works her ass off and is well rewarded for it.
I think working hard has a lot to do with attainable goals. I work hard on a project at home when I can afford to do it. I also think that patience plays huge role in working hard for an attainable goal.
I see kids each year come through my classes that want to immediatly have the big bucks when they graduate, and some don’t realize they will have to work to get it. Granted there are a share of people who are fortunatle enough to have been given everything they need, but the detriment in this is that they rarely know the value of a buck…they may know the power of a dollar, but not the value therein.
So how about the teeming-zillions? Are you hard working? If so why are you that way…If not does it have anything to do with the manner of work you are doing? A surly boss perhaps? Let’s hear it!
I’m a mom - I have to work hard Those little kids are slavedrivers!
I’ve always been a hard worker to the point of annoying my other coworkers when I worked in other places. I figure I’m there and these people are paying me so I better make it worth it to both myself and the boss. I also had jobs I really enjoyed and it makes me happy to do a good job - my favorite job was cake decorator and it was such a rush to give cakes I made to people and have them be so impressed
I don’t really know where I learned it. My father changed jobs at least 4 times a year for various reasons from “the boss is a dick” to “I needed a month off” to “the ex got my check garnished for child support again.” My mother worked every day to the exclusion of all else in her life and spent every other moment asleep on the couch once her daily “Go away I am reading the paper” routine was finished. She never talked about work or emphasized the value of work - it was more a place to be away from us.
Absolutely. Middle class Italian…Catholic guilt…heard bootstrap stories my whole life.
I probably don’t get the credit I deserve for my hard work, because I tend to make it look easy. I don’t stay late in the office to make it ‘look good’ like others, but I rarely miss work, never make excuses, and never used ‘tired’ or ‘busy’ as an excuse. Heck, with cell phones and e-mail from everywhere, work never really ‘ends’.
On days off, I feel guilty for taking vacation. I went to the doc’s today because I might have re-broken my shattered thumb and I felt guilty. I was on a conference call in the waiting room…then rejoined when done. I felt guilty for being at the doc’s! Now, ironically, I shattered my thumb while working for my current employer (office job…was driving a go-kart and crashed during some office charity event).
Hard working because I have pride, guilt and can hear my mother’s voice in my head at all times!
Not really. I tend to ration my time very carefully. I do my job extremely well, but I keep it to 40 hours a week whenever possible. It is my experience that if you deliberately keep your working hours down, you’ll work more efficiently. I find I get a lot more done in my 40 hours than others get done in 60. Jones’s Law of Shelf Space, you see.
My Dad used to work long hours, weekends, go into the office on Sunday type of stuff, and he regrets it. I don’t plan to make the same mistake.
My wife does the whole corporate thing…but let me be the first to say for her…she would love to be a cake decorator! She has taken classes at the local YMCA, and highschool for cake decorating…absolutelt loves it. And →
Very valid and honest reason for working hard…and a great motivation I’d say!
Middleclass Polish…Catholic here and I’ve heard all the boot-strap, I didn’t have a car till I was 40 stories as well.
Heck, I have to be out of work each year for the summer…I usually teach some semblence of summer school to stay busy…not last summer though, I was 'PROJECT-MAN last summer.
I think it is amazing and wonderful to see how much upbringing has to do with our work ethic and general sense of perception of the world…Good time and bad, brought us all to where we are…
wow that sounds corny…
Good. Keeping steady hours is huge when it comes to a wide variety of things…including personal health.
My neighbor is very much like that. He doesn’t get paid enough to stay past his 40 hours. And further more, he was raised in a family of Union workers, and they’ll be damned if they stay past their 40…Why stay past 40 hours and stress yourself into a coronary when you can be relatively stress free and healthy on 40 alone.
I guess I’d have to say no. I excel at my job, but I do not put any excessive effort into it. I am prepared, confident, and knowledgeable, and that helps me succeed, but I work as little as possible to keep me at my level of achievement.
I do a lot of things, but I am judged ultimately on the revenue produced in my territory, so I always have an objective ranking to look at. As long as I am at or near the top, I will slack off with the best of them. I work very hard at times - last week I made a last minute trip to Salt Lake City, getting up at 4AM to get to the airport, made three business calls there, then flew to Boise that night, getting to my hotel at 10PM (16 hour day), had two meeting there the next day, and finally got home around 8PM Friday. And I didn’t look at an email or check my voicemail all the long weekend. Right now I have an action item from my boss that is going undone because I see it as busywork. I’ll deal with it later. Tomorrow I’m going to play golf.
I work as little as I can while maintaining my standards.
If something needs doing, I can get it done. I’m good at my job, and knowing exactly how long something will take to do means optimum messing around on the internet time here at work. Its not hard to do, so I don’t put as much effort into it, but deadlines are always met, and bosses are happy with what I do.
They don’t pay us overtime, so I don’t do overtime, and they don’t really pay me enought to care either.
So my answer would be no. I do enough to get the job done.
I’m a hard worker once I have the motivation to start working. At my last job, I was given an incredibly large amount of responsibility in a very, very short amount of time. I worked very, very hard because I wanted to impress my boss, prove that I was absolutely necessary to my department, and because I wanted a salary increase. However, I was given absolutely not assistance, no political support (in marketing, company politics are almost as important as the actual work you do - another reason I no longer work there), and no raise, despite the fact that I had made it possible for them not to have to replace the two people they had fired before I got all their responsibilities. So of course, I was bitter, burnt out and I got sloppy because I found it didn’t matter that my work was high-quality - what mattered was that my manager and her boss, the marketing officers, were mismanaging the department and were looking to place blame, which they did on a lot of people, including me. I was pissed and decided it just wasn’t worth my time to stay there, so I left. Having left, their Web site is NEVER updated, they’ve had to hire a new manager, and additional staff. I couldn’t be more pleased - the manager I was working under was an awful manager and it was satisfying to see her dig her own grave once I was gone.
Once I quit my job there, I began working for myself as an independent contractor and will be opening my own company this month. I’m a very hard worker during the day - mostly because I have to be to succeed. I have to market my company, I have to do the accounting and administrative stuff, plus do the work that I get from incoming clients. But it’s satisfying, and I’m more than willing to do it because, even if I’m making very very little money right now since I’m just starting, my earning potential is directly affected by the quantity and quality of my work. So when I bring in work, I know it’s because I’m good and not because some bitch of a manager is dumping her responsibilities off on me. That gives me all the incentive I need to be a hard worker.
My crushed and bruised ego has not weathered graduate school very well. In my second year of graduate school, I had a miserable time. I fell behind in a couple of difficult classes and just couldn’t catch up. I read and reread the book. I worked examples in a vain attempt to match what was in the text. I wrestled with problem sets late into the night. I tried to get help from the professors, one of whom was well-meaning but not very helpful, and one who obviously didn’t want to be bothered and was no help at all. I cried. A lot. I struggled the entire semester to keep my head above water, but I learned next to nothing. They don’t really give out F’s in this program, or D’s even if you hand in the homework, no matter how miserably you’ve done, so in those two classes I got a C- and a B even though I clearly felt that I deserved F’s.
I learned for the first time in my life that sometimes even though I might work my hardest and give my best, I could be too stupid to figure it out. I also learned that pouring my blood, sweat and tears into an assignment and getting a 20% on it hurt a hell of a lot more than putting a minimum of effort into it and getting a 20% on it.
Since then, it has all been downhill. I can occasionally get sucked into an interesting problem and feel the thrill of intellectual accomplishment I thrived on in the old days. But most of the time, I’d rather goof off than get work done. There are many interesting ideas to read about and think about and play around with that have nothing to do with my research. It takes a ridiculous amount of mental effort to just get focused on work, and, though occassionally by some miracle I make some miniscule amount of progress, I have the attention span of a gnat, and I allow myself to get distracted by something else far too easily.
This all applies to research and crap. When I’m actually accountable to someone else, like when I’m teaching, I can get things done and be fairly disciplined about it, and I can cheerfully shoulder an extra burden to help out a student or a colleague. But at this point I halfway believe that I’m never going to get my thesis done, or do any other productive scientific work ever again in my life. (I don’t think I really need a sad smilie here, do I?)
I am not a hard worker. I’m just trying to not get fired. The problem depends on who you talk to. My doctor might indicate that it has something to do with ADD and the fact that since I was undiagnosed until the age of 23 or 24, I have absolutely no motivational skills vis-à-vis work, and no organizational abilities either. If you ask me, however, I’ll just tell you that I’m a lazy piece of shit.
Podkayne - take it easy…you’ll be fine. Did you go to grad school right after college or did you wait. I was overwhelmed when in grad school as well, in no small part because I took no time off. If I had, I would have lost my fellowship…so obviously I went…You’ll be fine.
I like to think I’m an incredibly hard worker, but I think I need to slow down a bit, as I’m starting to get a little burned out. I’m 27, and over the past year I’ve gone from one of the crew to managing all the technical aspects (behind the scenes stuff) of one of the largest regional theatres on the west coast. I routinely work 50 to 60 hours a week, and while we’re putting a new show in, I work between 90 and 110 hours per week (that lasts for two weeks) then back down to my “normal” 50 to 60 hours while the show runs.
No one here is really demanding that I work as much as I do, but if there’s work that needs to be done, I do it. I guess that comes from my father, who was a teacher, a coach, and did pretty much anything else in the summer do make ends meet. If I’m home while other people are working, I get very guilty about it. If I’m late for anything, I hear my father saying, “If you’re not 5 minutes early, you’re late.”
I’m trying to teach myself to work less, but every time I take time off, I’m glued to my cell phone in case anything bad happens. I love my job, the responsibility, and the sense of accomplishment I get when we open a new show, but I really need to slow down a bit.
Apparently I am a hard worker, as my boss tells me I need to slow down occasionally. Which is just silly; if that were true, I wouldn’t have time to post here.
I also love my job; the burnout rate is high, but I think that’s any career. And the rewards far outstrip the drawbacks. I will admit to bouncing around in different areas of nursing; in 13 years I’ve gone from med/surg ward to ER to oncology to gastro, to Utilization Review (ICK, but the pay was good) and now nephrology. Keeping busy is not difficult, not getting emotionally attached is.
That pays the bills. My primary career is the same as tanookie’s, and it is every bit as rewarding/exhausting/frustrating/fun as she says.
Speaking of the parent thing, Phlosphr, what’s happening with the baby plans?
We’re not allowed to work overtime at my job, so I can’t do that. But I do work very, very hard.
I’m an extremely sensitive person, and a characteristic we sensitives often share is conscientiousness. It kills me to think a doctor would look at my charting or procedures and think “Ugh! WHAT is she thinking??”
I’ve always been like that, and it seems about half my coworkers have either been hard workers or very very lazy. I would like to be more in-between, as I stress out too much when I try to be perfect.
But OTOH, it does make the day go by very fast when you’re a busy little bee.
Man, my gf is gonna be pissed when I get home and my ego’s to big to fit in the door.
In response to your statement, I’m actually just one of about 50 people (on our next show, anyway) that have a hand in pulling this show together that the audience will never see. The show “goes on” only when everybody is working (and thinking) together. That sense of community is a) Part of why I love my job, and b)The reason why I work so hard, because I can’t afford to let anybody else down.
I’m told that I’m a hard worker; I was one of a half-dozen or so tutors honored for our work in the program this past semester, out of almost twenty in the entire program. At one point I had more student hours assigned per week (including staffing rooms for drop-in help) than anyone else in the program, and that included two guys with college degrees.
That said … I had a bunch of free time. I was frequently done early with students, and the main reason I had so many students was that they kept on magically fitting into my schedule (with one exception). I never worked more than 20 hours in one week (I woulda welcomed 'em with open arms), though I did pull more than one ten-hour workday.
I figure I did what I was supposed to do, by my standards (make sure the people who are there get what they need), and if my success meant I was a hard worker, so be it.
Still trying Thanks for asking! We have been to a fertility doc in NYC we know and essentially, we are both fine, it’s just timing is all. All the chromosomal, and DNA factors are in check. We’ll hopefully see a lil’phlosphr in the next few years!
Try making a list of 100 reasons not to have a baby, drive down to the local park/lake/river to watch the submarine races, then jump in the back seat of the car with your wife. Make sure she swears that she is ‘on the pill’ then go fo it. Try to do a half-assed job of pulling out.
I love the dichotomies here…