Fast
Company, Issue 69, April 2003,
Page 64
By Seth Godin
Your great-grandfather knew what it meant to work
hard. He hauled hay all day long, making sure that the cows got fed. In Fast
Food Nation (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), Eric Schlosser writes about a worker
who ruptured his vertebrae, wrecked his hands, burned his lungs, and was
eventually hit by a train as part of his 15-year career at a slaughterhouse.
Now that's hard work.
The meaning of hard work in a manual economy is
clear. Without the leverage of machines and organizations, working hard meant
producing more. Producing more, of course, was the best way to feed your
family.
Those days are long gone. Most of us don't use our
bodies as a replacement for a machine -- unless we're paying for the privilege
and getting a workout at the gym. These days, 35% of the American workforce
sits at a desk. Yes, we sit there a lot of hours, but the only heavy lifting
that we're likely to do is restricted to putting a new water bottle on the
cooler. So do you still think that you work hard?
You could argue, "Hey, I work weekends and
pull all-nighters. I start early and stay late. I'm always on, always connected
with a BlackBerry. The FedEx guy knows which hotel to visit when I'm on vacation."
Sorry. Even if you're a workaholic, you're not working very hard at all.
Sure, you're working long , but
"long" and "hard" are now two different things. In the old
days, we could measure how much grain someone harvested or how many pieces of
steel he made. Hard work meant more work. But the past doesn't lead to the
future. The future is not about time at all. The future is about work that's
really and truly hard, not time-consuming. It's about the kind of work that
requires us to push ourselves, not just punch the clock. Hard work is where our
job security, our financial profit, and our future joy lie.
It's hard work to make difficult emotional
decisions, such as quitting a job and setting out on your own. It's hard work
to invent a new system, service, or process that's remarkable. It's hard work
to tell your boss that he's being intellectually and emotionally lazy. It's
easier to stand by and watch the company fade into oblivion. It's hard work to
tell senior management to abandon something that it has been doing for a long
time in favor of a new and apparently risky alternative. It's hard work to make
good decisions with less than all of the data.
Today, working hard is about taking apparent risk.
Not a crazy risk like betting the entire company on an untested product. No, an
apparent risk: something that the competition (and your coworkers) believe is
unsafe but that you realize is far more conservative than sticking with the
status quo.
Richard Branson doesn't work more hours than you
do. Neither does Steve Ballmer or Carly Fiorina. Robyn Waters, the woman who
revolutionized what Target sells -- and helped the company trounce Kmart --
probably worked fewer hours than you do in an average week.
None of the people who are racking up amazing success
stories and creating cool stuff are doing it just by working more hours than
you are. And I hate to say it, but they're not smarter than you either. They're
succeeding by doing hard work.
As the economy plods along, many of us are
choosing to take the easy way out. We're going to work for the Man, letting him
do the hard work while we work the long hours. We're going back to the future,
to a definition of work that embraces the grindstone.
Some people (a precious few, so far) are realizing
that this temporary recession is the best opportunity that they've ever had.
They're working harder than ever -- mentally -- and taking all sorts of
emotional and personal risks that are bound to pay off.
Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal
with the things that you'd rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of
standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap
over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier.
And, after you've done that, to do it again the next day.
The big insight: The riskier your (smart)
coworker's hard work appears to be, the safer it really is. It's the people
having difficult conversations, inventing remarkable products, and pushing the
envelope (and, perhaps, still going home at 5 PM) who are building a
recession-proof future for themselves.
So tomorrow, when you go to work, really sweat.
Your time is worth the effort.
Seth Godin is a hardworking contributor to Fast
Company . His latest book, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being
Remarkable, will be published in May by Portfolio.
Copyright © 2003 Gruner + Jahr USA Publishing. All rights reserved.
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