It’s so obvious that it sometimes doesn’t. Both by observation and my own experiences, sometimes no matter how hard you work, you hardly get anywhere. Then there’s other times you barely lift a finger, and good things happen.
Why do so many people swear by this myth?
I have not met anyone who believes that hard work always pays off. Most successful people I know believe that hard work almost always produces better results than indolence.
Because if you compare two otherwise equal people, the hard worker will end up ahead, financially and otherwise, 97.8%* of the time.
But what if you work hard at the wrong things and/or the wrong way? :smack:
I don’t know, but it seems to be a persistent belief. I am of the opinion that we should all be working smarter, not harder. Seems to me if you pride yourself on having to work hard you’re not doing something right.
It’s not guaranteed to every time but I think that if you’re willing to work hard and persevere that the results will almost without question turn out pretty good, far better than for those who are lazy or slackers. Plus, where’s the satisfaction in doing anything less?
Do your best, take matters into your own hands instead of leaving them to chance, and you’re likely in for a pretty satisfying ride.
Two things at work here:
hard work doesn’t always pay off but it has a better chance of paying off than the alternative.
Hard work, undertaken by a dummy, will still provide pretty disappointing results. And, hardly anyone thinks they’re a dummy, so they end up drawing the wrong conclusion that hard work just didn’t pay off.
Don’t buy into that cliche – especially since the people who use it are just asking their people to work harder, anyway. Do you really think they’d be happy to have someone spend only half his day working because they’re working smart? Or, if that happens, won’t they just pile on more work (if they don’t fire you for it)?
Certainly working hard (and smart – there isn’t really much difference) pays off. At the very least, you get to keep your job if there’s a crunch. Does it always work? No. But slacking off pays off even less.
It’s not that we believe it will always pay off, it’s just that, all things being equal, there is a demonstrable correlation between effort and reward in many, if not most, facets of life.
I think working hard and working smart are two different things.
I will use a simple example:
Hardworker: Cannot fit the square peg into the round hole. He tries and tries, hour after hour. He pushes with his hands and eventually gets a hammer, and still does not get the peg into the hole.
Smart worker. Tries to fit the square peg into the round hole once or twice. He then figures out that it just won’t fit. So, he looks for a square hole and then tries to fit the square peg in it. Voila, he gets it in!
Working hard and smart is best. Just working smart is second best. Just working hard…well, good luck.
There’s a huge difference between working hard and working smart. Working hard on a project when there is an easy, smart solution at hand can waste time, money, and resources. You seem to be equating slacking off with getting a job done and having extra time available. Just because I can get the job done in half the time it takes someone else doesn’t mean I’m going to be sitting on my ass playing solitaire the rest of the time. I’m paid to do a job, not sit in a chair a certain number of hours. The time, energy and resources I save on one job can be spent lining something else up around the corner, preparing myself for something down the road, or increasing my knowledge and understanding of an area in which I’m lacking.
I’ve had bosses that made mine and everyone else’s jobs ten times as frustrating and futile because of their need to ‘work hard’. One of them even billed themselves as “The hardest working firm in the business” but they were a laughingstock to their colleagues because of their inability to find effective solutions in a smart and creative way for their clients. Instead of thinking things through, or figuring out an efficient way to do things they went with the way that would make them look like they were really burning the candle at both ends. Most of these bosses have either burnt out physically or mentally, and saw contracts and clients lost to firms who could get the job done well, on time, and on budget.
Because people want to believe in balance - the innate belief in karma is huge.
You reap what you sew. What goes around comes around. The ant wintered well, but the grasshopper starved to death.
If somebody else loses their job, it’s comforting that they must not be as good as you. If somebody’s child is killed, it’s comforting to find out that the parents were somehow immoral - that makes you less likely to face such a horrible event.
If a tsunami kills thousands, it must be for a reason - God must be mad.
If terrorists kill thousands by flying planes into buildings, it must be because of gays.
Working hard (almost) always pays off, as long as you are working for yourself. Working hard for someone else’s gain…good luck.
If you have your own dream, your own goals, very specific, and you work hard at them, you will probably succeed. I think preserverence is as much the key as hard work, though.
Paying off (success) is a combination of factors:
Effort expended
Original talent (the ability to work smarter)
Luck (sometimes dumb, sometimes not so dumb)
If you give each of these a 0-3 point scale (0 being no effort, no talent and no good luck (but no bad luck either - luck can be positive or negative), success happens around five or six. So having a 3 towards hard work won’t get you over the edge, but with some luck and some talent, it will help.
You can be the luckiest guy in the world, but blow it by being a talentless bum. You can be the most talented guy in the world, but if you never bother to apply it you won’t have much success.
Since hard work is the one of these you have the most control over, its good advice.
You’ve saddled your first example with working stupid, not hard. Who else takes two hours to figure out what should take two minutes; use the hammer to round the square peg’s corners so it’ll fit right into a round hole.
You “smart” worker still didn’t complete the assigned task. The round hole remains unfilled.
A smart worker may complete a task easily. A hard worker completes it and then looks for another. Good way to stay employed or gain a leg up on your competition.
This gets said a lot, too, and I don’t think it’s any truer than what the OP is saying. Do people who say that ever have their own business? I mean a BUSINESS, not selling stuff off eBay.
I won’t deny that “working for yourself” gets you a bigger upside, to be sure, but that’s coupled with a massive increase in risk, and start-up costs.
Show me a guy who has two kids, a wife and a mortgage and let’s ask him to just start “working for himself” or “take this job right here with benefits and job security”.
I know so many people working for someone else who are getting paid 75,000-125,000 per year, putting money away, have a house, a family. None of them are going to be the next Bill Gates but they’re still getting ahead and doing it for someone else’s gain.
On the other hand. . .take my wife’s business. The last few years it’s been profitable, but it lost money for a few years. If we didn’t have a steady paycheck, it wouldn’t have gotten off the ground. People make it sound like it’s easy to just “Start your own business”. Like you just have an idea, take out a loan, and pretty soon you’re making money hand over fist.
My brother-in-law owns a sign company and commercial space. He’s at the shop 12 hours a day 6 days a week, and usually 4 hours on Sunday. He’s ALWAYS busy. He’s also in debt up to his ass, had to sell his house to move in with my in-laws, can’t seem to make a dime of profit. He has competition, huge costs. He has to bid on jobs.
And some of the “successes”. . .I know people who have rinky-dink store fronts in spaces they’re renting. . .businesses that wouldn’t break even if they had to pay a manager, guys who default on their bills, would be nearly out of business if one of their trucks broke down.
I know that you could give just as many examples the other way, but I’m just trying to say that it’s a big oversimplification to claim that “working for yourself” is the easiest way to get ahead. You don’t hear about the failures.
Re-read Trunk’s explanation. A ditchdigger who works twice as hard digs his hole twice as fast. He also gets twice as tired and probably twice as much work dumped on him for his trouble. Same pay though.
A ditchdigger who works smarter goes and gets his backhoe operators license. He makes a higher union wage and sits in an airconditioned cab.
A really smart ditchdigger sets up his own construction company and pays someone else to actually dig the hole.
Which one do you think most people are?
And lets not fools ourselves here that we really work all that hard. Most people consider simply doing their job to be working hard. That’s the bare minimum. Do you help mentor other coworkers so that the entire group improves? Do you learn the business of why you do what you do?
Look, if you guys really were that hardworking (and smart), you would have graduated from a top school with top grades, several summers of relevent internships and maybe even some extracurricular activities. You would be in a highly competitive job with the best and the brightest in the industry. You would be starting your own businesses or working as some kind of independent consultant. You would be networking with your boss and with people in the industry to keep abreast of opportunities both internal and external.
The point is, most people show up at their desks and do what their told and then wonder “why doesn’t my hard work get me ahead?”
I don’t think this is necessarily a character flaw so much as it is a byproduct of our education system. School basically teaches a mindset of do these tasks you have been assigned as well as you can and if you meet the requirements you will advance to the next level. The real world does not work like that. In fact I would argue that the real world is more like the non-academic aspects of highschool. To get “ahead” you need to network with the right people, make the right friends, join the right activities, present the right perception. Doing your classwork is the bare minimum. Like doing your work in a job, that just keeps you from getting fired, it doesn’t make you stand out.
People like to think they are in control, therefore, if they work hard they believe they have some control of their life and situation and can make it all work out. Obviously, this fails a lot of the time.
I’ve realized that I’m sick of working hard. I don’t think it’s really gotten me very far at all, and a lot of hours have been wasted doing things I don’t like to meet that end. I haven’t figured out a solution to it, but I don’t think “working harder” is the answer.
I totally agree. Working hard increases your expectation value (in this case, adding all the possible fortunes and weighting them by their probability). It’s the only component you have control over. The two richest people I know (multimillionaires in their late 30’s) are hard-working people who are the first to say that their successes had some component of luck.
For Dangerosa’s system, I’d say you should use the product of all three (effort, talent and luck), not the sum. (My several instances of good luck: being born in the USA & going to public schools in NY in the early 70’ss, having my first job after college practically dropped in my lap, and not being the subject of my parents’ abuse (that honor went to my sister)). There are cases where very hard-working people don’t succeed, and there are talentless hacks raking in millions, but the way to play the percentages is to work hard (and not be an idiot cramming square pegs into round holes).
Opportunities have large random components, but I think they typically cluster near hard-working people. (I don’t have a proof of that, but I got an extremely lucky assignment early in my career because I’d just asked my boss if there was something else around that might help “stretch me.”)
Yes, I would like to add “having support from the right people” to Dangerosa’s equation.