COVID19 Lesson: Fuck Hard Work
Seriously, if I hear one more time some nonsense anecdote about “working hard” I’m going to puke. He works on this day and night! You need to live and breath what you do! When someone is even mildly successful there is a comment about the numbers of hours he or she put in.
The first push back to hard work should be understand the survivorship bias. The world is full of people who work very hard in that literal sense: no holidays, long hours, not seeing their own family, taking very little care of themselves sort of way. What proportion of people who work so hard have fans celebrating how hard they worked? Very little. Nada.
There are also very successful and happy people who don’t work very hard at all in that literal 80hours a week, self flagellation sort of way.
If there is one lesson we have learnt from the COVID19 experience of remote working it is that hard work, long hours in the commute and time spent in the office, does not equate to productivity. Focused time spent on analysis and gaining insights should be celebrated and can give quicker results.
Fuck hard work.
Its a simple concept: effort does not equal accomplishment. If you do the same thing 100 times then you’ll be left behind by the person who tried 100 different things and learnt a lot more.
There is a negative view on the human condition: we’re a bunch of lazy so and so’s who need to be constantly told to work hard. This turning reality on it’s head.
Humans are naturally curious and creative beings, this is an innate quality.
Far too often this notion of hard work is used to entice people to do what they do not want to do, such as: exploitation of labour, accumulating what you don’t need, self development gurus, agile sprints and “startup” disruption with no regard for social consequences.
So the next time we reach for that compliment of hard work pause and think: why the heck is pure effort being celebrated. Celebrate rebellions, doing things differently, challenging the current order, insights and creative solutions.
