Farming is hard work. I don’t think anyone would argue with that. But how much harder was farming 100 years ago versus today? On the surface, most of us 'value' hard-work. But, what are we valuing? The result or the effort? In other words, what’s the point of hard work?
This is going to sound counter-intuitive, but I believe the point of hard work is turning said hard work into easy (easier) work.
100 years ago, farmers harvesting wheat would head out into the fields with these hand scythes. They would cut the wheat down and then hand gather the wheat. Grueling work.
Today, farmers cut and gather wheat using large mowers and bailers.
No one would argue that farming is still incredibly hard work today…but compared to 100 years? It’s far easier.
To help you understand our skewed perception of value vs hard-work:
What if I were to bring two people into a room at separate times and show them a hand-crafted table? I tell Person A that it took over 100 hours to build the table. I then brought Person B in and told them it took me 2 hours to build.
They would have vastly different perceptions of value even though the outcome…the table…didn’t change. It’s the same table. The same quality.
Look at every job posting…upwards of 95% (I totally made that up, but it certainly feels this way) or more of them list something to the effect of “looking for hard working…”
Again, nothing wrong with hard work, but we elevate effort far above result…even though we are typically measured on result. Good managers rarely care how hard something was…they want the outcome. But then if we produce the same, high quality outcome but with reduced effort, why do we feel like our managers will value us less?
Let’s look at it from another vantage point: a consumer’s vantage point. When you turn your phone on in the morning, do you care how hard the engineers worked on building your device? No. You care that it works. You care that it’s easy to use.
In fact, a few years ago, Staples created a whole marketing campaign around the ‘easy’ button. Many of the products and services we buy, we do so because we want things in our lives to be easier.
It’s such a polarizing concept in our work lives vs personal lives. We have fallen into the lie that value creation is directly related to the amount of suffering we go through; more suffering equals more value. Yet in our day-to-day lives, we attribute value to how much a product or service reduces our suffering. Where we value something more if it reduces suffering and chaos in our lives.
Where did we go wrong with work expectations?
Instead of suffering each day, we need to look at our hard work and find ways to make it easier work. If something is hard today and a year from now it’s still hard, we failed. Our value isn’t in how much suffering we can withstand, rather, our value is in how we took a hard task and made it just a little bit easier. Each day, just a bit easier until hard work becomes easy work.
“But wait” you may be thinking… “if I make my hard work easy, my boss won’t need me.”
The workforce is full of people who fill the whitespaces and voids with busy work. They make the work expand to fit time. That's not valuable. It's low-value contribution; we'd call it "paper-shuffling" in the old days.
Real value…scaling value….is created when we reduce contribution time so we can go solve bigger, more valuable problems. Just a quick example:
Every month, I need to send out ~ a dozen reminder emails to various teams. I've automated each and everyone of them. It's a low value activity. So, I made it easier. The activities still have to get done...but why do I need to remember to do it each week? Even though I'm only saving a few minutes a month, I've made the work just a little bit easier so I can focus on things that are of higher value.
This idea that work should be a constant state of suffering is idiotic. I don’t want to suffer. I want my work to be easier. The hustle-bros out there can call me lazy (and in fact, I had a hiring manager call me just that when I explained this concept to her; didn’t get the job. Got something better instead). I don’t care. Let them live the lie that value is only created based upon your level of suffering.
Sounds miserable to me and I want no part of it. Neither should you.
You should want, instead, to thrive. And the path to thriving is paved by taking hard work and making it easier work so we can enjoy the work we do, bask in the results, find bigger (and more valuable) problems to solve while still living our lives, on our terms.
Make hard work, easy (easier) work because suffering is indeed optional.
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