What does it mean to Work Hard?

Could you potentially measure it? How can you say that you work hard? What are some of the tools you can use to determine whether you work hard or not?

What a fleeting, intangible feeling the idea/concept of hard work is!

This is a real challenge for me and something I have been pondering a lot about, keen to explore and solve this challenge of what it means to work hard.

I am working on a new Medium article, mostly about hard work, and I found that my thoughts were scattered about this idea. I thought I should put together this other article to make headway about this idea in general.

Lex Fridman & Kevin Systrom talk about Hard Work.

I was listening to the Lex Fridman podcast, with the Instagram founder Kevin Systrom. At some point in the interview, Fridman asked his interviewee, Kevin Systrom about what does it mean to work hard? why is there such push back in our culture against this idea of working hard?

Watch it Here

He explained that, working hard is really tough, and most people do not really work hard. They live in self delusion that they are working hard. They look at all the meetings they had, all the tasks on their to do list and conclude they are really working hard. While to be able to work hard, you need to work about 3 standard deviations above the mean.

Another idea was that, when people say the work smart, not hard, they really don’t know what it means to work hard.

I was intrigued by this thought, an interesting take. My view of hard work pretty much looks like the one they pointed out. That working hard looks different, it looks like dedication, it looks like attention to detail, and surely it also looks like 60–80 hour work weeks.

My desperate search for hard work!

In my life, I have looked for this elixir of hard work almost religiously. I desire to be a hard worker. I struggle with feeling unaccomplished, and maybe this is a personal challenge. I hate feeling like I could have done much more and yet I did not, at the same time, I struggle with eating that frog, and I procrastinate a lot on big boring things I need to get started on.

In the beginning of my business, I was working alone. The sheer amount of things that I felt needed to get done kept on increasing every day. And each new day, I felt like I was being bossed by all these tasks that required my attention. In the beginning of the day, I was so good at writing down my to do lists, checklists of things that needed to get done. And then when the day started, I started being killed slowly by all that needed to get done. I would sometimes not finish some tasks, and some tasks take longer than expected. That would mean that they need to be carried forward to the next day. Which always killed me as I felt like I now had even more to do. I started thinking about the value of working a normal 40 hour work week, felt like that was unsustainable, and started exploring the idea of 100 hour work week (which I have never even attempted yet!) I paint this mental image to show that, I do believe that hard work is important, and I also do believe that hard work is also, hard!.

The Hard Truth

If you are an entrepreneur, a leader of any kind, You know deep down in your gut, that if you were to make anything happen, you would need to work harder than normal. This is not new information to anyone. In fact, I believe that everyone knows that they need to work hard. Just think back to primary or secondary school. This concept was hammered down in our brains that we need to work hard if we wanted to get extra ordinary results. Hard work seems to be operating system that executes the software of success. Generally in our lives, those who work harder seem to get what they desired, and we clap them on because we can see their dedication to their craft, or business, or sport.

Hard Work is Intangible

No one can touch it, no one can potentially measure how much hard work an individual has got inside them. I find this to be very fascinating. That you cannot look at a singular individual and say,

“ah! a hard working person!”

It’s not written on anyone’s forehead, back, or birth certificate that here is a hard working individual.

Because hard work is intangible, maybe we all have an infinite amount of it inside us? maybe we are capable of extra ordinary hard work, and therefore extra ordinary results. That, on a general level, no human is limited. We all have capacity.

Then Could you measure it?

If you cannot touch it, cannot see it, could you potentially measure it? Say if you are trying to build things, as I am trying to build things, could I hold myself toward a standard and ask if I am working hard enough?

Yes, If you know what the inputs of success are!

If a basketball team is to be successful and they managed to draft top players, they now have to turn these players into an A team of winners. Since the players will be playing basketball, it seems fair to say that they need to practice a lot together. Therefore you can say that measuring the practices, the efforts, time, quality and results of a practice session is a determinant of success.

Could this thought be extended into other areas of our lives and business?

Hard Work is a Muscle

Last year, I started messing with the idea, that, “creativity is a muscle”. The more you work on it, the better it becomes. It was an interesting way to start thinking about creativity and it gave me permission to make more, so that I can work on this muscle.
I also think that, hard work is a muscle. To essentially grow this intangible value of hard work, you need to pursue what it means to work hard. In return, you become a hard-working person. A lot of that identity based habit change comes into action. If you are a hard working person, then maybe you can go for longer, you can work harder, you can reach out more than you would normally do.

We Create what it means to work hard.

Eventually in the big scope of things, we create what it means to work hard. If posting one medium article per day is my definition of working hard, eventually I shall be only creating one medium article per day. Maybe inside me, I have about two. Maybe three. Why should I not make that happen? why should I be rational? Such are the thoughts that make an individual decide what it means for them to work hard.

Some other thoughts about working hard

• Nobody actually needs to work hard. If you are an adult, you could sleep, watch tv, travel the world, pursue your passions. There is no rule out there that recommends anyone to work hard.
• It’s better to view work as a blessing of life, instead of a pointless effort that we get to do as human beings. I should do a whole post about this. As we grow up, we should decide what does work mean to us? how do we want this “idea” of work to mean in our lives?
• We will never work enough. I think it’s prudent to also consider that, work will never fully get done. We will get older, or maybe die in the process, but there will still be more things we could do, more ways we could use our time, effort or influence. A sad reality, but a reality all the same.
• We can only achieve hard work, if it’s top of mind. This is another reason why working hard should be a subject of conversation in our lives, our businesses, our ministries etc. If we can be talking about it more, optimizing for it more, we might start to see the benefits of working hard show up in our context. Whenever possible we should measure our time, our efforts and our productivity.
• You cannot cheat the grind. Working hard is working hard in any language. Regardless of how you pontificate and think about what it means to work hard, you have to put in the work in the end. As the famous quote goes “ The dream is free, but the hustle is sold separately.”

Life is not about counting the days, but making the days count.

This is a final thought. We should make our days count. Every single new day is an opportunity to do more, to go further, to make more. I hope you purpose to make today count.