Hard Work is a Bullsh*t Lie That Won't Make You Successful
It's time to murder this factory-worker, industrial age lie
Hard work is like a cancer.
I watched a new episode of Gordon Ramsay’s tv show Kitchen Nightmares last night. The restaurant owner who was also the head chef began randomly dry-heaving throughout his work day.
It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.
He’s just mid-conversation and feels the need to vomit, then starts making loud vomiting noises. Turns out he was trying to save the restaurant his wife and him built by working harder.
His health was screwed, and she wanted a divorce.
The strategy didn’t work well. Gordon tried to save the restaurant, but a month after the filming of the show, it disappeared forever. No happy ending… because hard work doesn’t have one.
Hard work is illogical
In the factory worker industrial age, you get paid for how much work you do.
Often the pay is by the hour, and you work 9am to 5pm as a minimum. If you want more money, then you work more hours. If you want to become a manager or CEO, then you work long hours to look dedicated.
I worked like this as a banker for 10+ years.
The badge of honor in my office was staying back until 10PM and missing dinner with your wife and kids. No joke. And I fell for it until I lost every woman I tried to love and couldn’t work out why.
But hard work now has nothing to do with how much money you earn. You’re paid not based on how hard you work, but on how much value you create.
People who think hard work is a useful strategy are delusional. They come from the factory worker, industrial age that the internet and AI destroyed.
The hidden time creep of most forms of work
Job interviews used to scare me.
It was like playing the lottery. I’d walk into the interview and go back and forth for an hour. But really all I wanted to know was the answer to an impossible question:
“Sir, how many hours will I be working each day?”
You can’t ask this question. It breaks every job interview rule. And even if you have the guts to ask it the answer you get will be a lie. Why?
Because an employer can make you work as many or as fewer hours as they like. How many hours you work is based on the demand for your skills. If another employee quits tomorrow then you might have to pick up their work.
This nightmare could exist for 1 month or indefinitely.
See the issue? Every job has a time creep factor that can’t be measured. So even if you hate hard work, the truth is if you work normal jobs forever, then it’s built into your life by design.
Time creep is the #1 reason why I quit working 9-5 jobs. A job is a great place to start but a bad way to live for the rest of your life.
When we work too hard something breaks
Hard work seems smart.
We often tell ourselves we’ll do it short term. But we don’t. It’s addictive because it makes us feel like we’re getting more progress.
Every time in my life when I’ve worked too hard for extended periods of time, I’ve ended up getting sick. So the gains I got from the hard work are nuked by 1-2 weeks of getting a cold or flu.
And if sickness doesn’t knock me out then hard work will likely cause me marriage problems. My wife will start arguing with me more. My toddler will start only wanting mommy. Why?
Because when you don’t give your loved ones enough time you become a stranger. The hard work cult conveniently forgets these two downsides.
Hard work forces you to chase shiny objects like a puppy dog
I speak to a lot of people who work hard.
They apply to join my writing challenges, courses, group coaching, or masterminds. When I ask them why they work so hard and are too busy to work on themselves, it takes a while to get to the root cause.
It’s often because they’ve been trapped by the spell of a shiny object. They’re trying to do too many things instead of embracing the power of only doing one thing.
I have this problem too. My email inbox is full of shiny objects. If it’s not Lady Gaga’s manager, it’s Tiger Woods’ uncle trying to get on a Zoom call. Or it’s the opportunity to attend a Tony Robbins event or jump on a podcast with Dan Go.
I say no to all of it. None of it is on my goal list. My obsession is writing online. This obsession is so powerful there’s just no time left for anything else.
It’s either I have extreme focus or I experience death-like feelings.
The quickest hack to adopting this way of life is to ask: “Is this a shiny object?” It’ll help you snap out of the trance that shiny objects create.
Once you remove all the shiny objects there’s a lot less work to do. Now hard work becomes a distant memory.
Most people work hard with tunnel vision
They can’t zoom out and see what they’re doing.
They have no idea why they do it. They’re just hypnotized to keep going because they don’t know any different.
Venturing into the uncertain life that doesn’t require hard work, bizarrely, is too scary. So they keep running on the hamster wheel hoping for a miracle or a lottery ticket to save them from themselves.
Indecision creates a major incision in the center of your brain.
This forces you to live with tunnel vision. You can’t see the opportunities or other ways of living. So you lie to yourself that you must keep going. One day you wake up with regrets and it’s too late to change because you’re 95 and stuck in a nursing home with a bunch of other people who wished they didn’t work so hard.
Author James Clear points out one other problem:
“You don’t need to worry about progressing slowly.
You need to worry about climbing the wrong mountain.”
The average person is running a million miles an hour up the wrong mountain, thanks to hard work.
If they slowed down, they’d realize that trying to make partner at some consulting firm that doesn’t give a f*ck about them and would happily lay them off in the next recession isn’t a good long-term option.
But they can’t see it.
They’re a race horse with blinders on their eyes. They’re running so hard that they’re not far away from the farmer taking them to the slaughter house to chop them up into nice chunks of horse meat.
If you’re working hard you probably need a sudden pause, followed by a hard reset. Most things work better when you turn them off then on again.
The transition away from hard work starts here
So if hard work no longer matters and value does, then your challenge is to increase your value as soon as possible.
The uncommon solution here is to re-engineer your skill stack. That means updating your current skills, and adding new skills.
The best skills to add are micro skills:
Writing online
Copywriting
Persuasion/Sales
Sending better direct messages
Launching digital products
Self-publishing eBooks
One-page websites
Public speaking
Vlogging
eCommerce
Each skill isn’t hard to learn.
On their own they seem insignificant, but when you start to stack digital skills, your value rises sharply.
The best way to add new micro skills is to do it after hours. This might seem comical given we said hard work is stupid, but at the start, it’s the easiest way.
I just did it by replacing Netflix with an hour a day of learning a new skill. Didn’t make me work hard at all.
When your value goes up you aren’t forced to work as hard. When your value reaches a tipping point, you no longer need to work a standard job anymore.The uncommon luxury we all should be chasing
The hard work cult wants you to work harder and delay your dreams to some random point in an uncertain future.
They want you to be more productive and go faster. More meetings, more pitches, more computer time, more spreadsheets, more data, more hours.
But the real luxury is this: going slow.
Being unrushed each day is a superpower. It makes you more present and that leads to an increase in happiness.
We don’t enjoy life when we’re trying to go fast. Every day vanishes and we can’t even remember what we had for breakfast yesterday. What a sad way to live.
Increase your value so you can experience the luxury of going slow.
P.S. Since I kept it real with you in this post, do me a favor.
Give me a blunt honest answer to this question.
Are you *really* doing your best with your online writing?
This is so true. I’m learning more skills now and finding my natural abilities to boot that 9-5 hid from me all those years! 💜
I'm reading this and seeing myself. 'Most people work hard with tunnel vision' - that was me. Putting in 70+ hour work weeks brought me zero accolades.
I was teaching a guy in our lab who had a long-term vision. His lack of experience was more than compensated by the funds he was raising. He won two research grants and hired two PhD candidates. He had a team so he got more done in less time.
I still work hard but my focus is on things that could buy back my freedom. Writing online is one of them. Great post, Tim.