“When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”
What a remarkably stupid idea!
These types of mainstream group-think sayings are not only wrong, but they are also damaging.
Let me explain…
It all has to do with where we come from.
You see… Our cultural norms emerge from our ancestors (obviously). And our ancestors were a population which first endured living as peasants subjugated by lords, later as serfs bound to the land, and finally as wage-slaves working in factories bound to the value of currency (i.e. government and central bank).
Only in the latest blip of post-industrial overproduction, have humans experienced a scintilla of freedom, by stepping outside of factories into the world of professional work (i.e. service economy). Yet, that freedom, to the degree that it is experienced by the few who have mastered it, is also completely accidental.
The service economy and the modern corporate world wasn’t built to give workers freedom, happiness or success. It was built to maximize profit to the shareholder. And the people methods of that maximization was designed for a manufacturing/factory environment.
Most people, including most professionals, including those in flashy downtown corporate offices or high-tech organizations with on campus juice bars – all of us professionals, from the lowest unpaid intern to the highest corporate CEO – are born into and are embedded in a culture that treats employees as if we were wage-slaves working in a factory.
Make no mistake: Everything about our approach to work as well as our education system, which modern “leftist pedagogists” call “the banking model of education”, is geared towards control of people as workers. In fact, modern K through 12 education system was specifically designed to create obedient workers to fill factories. And while it may not be the outcome for the CEO, it is nevertheless the spirit of the education system that even the CEO endures.
Beyond our education, it’s also in our culture. Our media, our literature and even our entertainment is carefully crafted to propagate a culture of work and hustle. We are bombarded with emotional and subconscious patterns as well as values, that encourage us approach our work as if we are all workers working in a factory – and that it is a good thing that we are workers in a factory.
Finally, even our macro-economic system was constructed to maximize value creation through capital allocation in a way that depends on the “leverage of populations” (more people, better economic outcomes). Yes… At the nation level, we do indeed have a system that converts the number of workers into dollars. (Incidentally this is why countries obsessively care about maintaining and increasing their populations; their economy is dependent on the replacement rate – larger population, larger GDP, larger win).
OK. OK… I’ll get off this “lecture” mode and cut to the chase…
What I’m trying to show you here is that you have been born into a system that:
Makes You Believe That Hard Work Is A Virtue.
But it’s not!
Hard work is not a virtue.
Trying to knock down a concrete wall with your bare hands is HAAARD work. But it’s not a virtue. There is nothing virtuous about it. There is no application of any virtue in it.
Using a sledge-hammer to break down that wall is a virtue, in the sense that it an application of the virtue of “intelligence”. Using a pneumatic drill, is the application of an even bigger virtue of “modern intelligence”.
And paying someone else to break it down for you is the application of an even bigger virtue of “business intelligence”.
While entrepreneurs, executives and high-value professionals embrace this notion – that working hard is not a virtue, working smart is – your typical rank and file worker, and the vast majority of employees, don’t.
Some rank and file workers are stuck banging on concrete walls with their bare knuckles and wondering, why they aren’t getting ahead. These are the clueless ones.
Others, just stand there doing nothing, and they pretend to hit the wall when someone important is looking. These rank and file workers know what’s going on, but they are forced into a culture where they have to pretend that working hard is a virtue, while they secretly know that it is not.
This is because, most rank and file workers simply lack the power to embrace and verbalize the reality that hard work is not a virtue. If they do, they are seen as lazy, unproductive, unemployable.
Believe it or not, most people, even the lowest ranking employees of our economic system, are not stupid. And they understand that “hard work” or “enduring toughness” or “struggling for success” are actually unavoidable realities at best, and dead-end vices at worst. They are not virtues, and they know it. They just can’t act it out.
By the way, to give credit where it’s due, the capacity to endure hard work might be a virtue. But that does not make hard work itself a virtue, or a desirable experience. It does not mean trying to avoid hard work is a vice. And it definitely does not mean that hard work is rewarded.
Ultimately, hard work is one of the sacrifices you make, usually for other people, when you have no other option.
Make no mistake: In our context of career development and rapid growth, working hard, or pretending to work hard, is the last defense a low-value employee has from getting fired. Lets hope you never have to resort to that technique…
Instead, it is much better for you to realize that:
A High-Value Career is ONLY About Successful Outcomes, and The Hard Work is Incidental
Career success is about becoming the visionary, the rainmaker, or the expert others depend on.
It’s about becoming irreplaceable, regardless of how much education you have, how many years of experience you bring, and how many important people you know.
It’s not about credentials or contacts. It’s about you generating value and also, equally importantly, being recognized as the person responsible for the generation of value.
When you do that, it doesn’t matter how hard you appear to work or how many hours you put in… No one cares!
No one cares, because you help others get their way, and in exchange, you get your way. Whether or not this takes hard work is irrelevant. For some it does. For others it doesn’t.
The point here is that hard work isn’t the critical ingredient of career success. Helping others (especially others in power, and in command of capital) get their way is the deciding ingredient.
Once you see this, and integrate it into your worldview, you become free. You no longer need to pretend and suffer in the culture of toil. You no longer have to get going when going gets tough.
This concept not only transforms your work experience, but it also applies to your job search, as well as your next promotion.
You see… If you live under the culture of toil, you have to create your resume in a certain way, apply to jobs in a certain way, write cover letters in a certain way, interview in a certain way, and negotiate in a certain way.
And what is that way? It’s the way everyone else does it! It’s the way HR expects you to do it. It’s the way you are taught to do it.
Talking about your “years of experience”, advertising how much of a “hard worker” you are, filling your communications with corporate speak while spending your afternoons glued to LinkedIn looking for your next “opportunity”… Send another 50 applications, hustle! That’s the way I’m talking about: I call this the hard way.
Unfortunately, that hard way has nothing to do with career success. Sure, some people might be successful despite following that hard way, but their success is not a result of the hard way. They simply happened to follow the hard way while they were getting successful, and they got successful because of another reason.
The Key To Career Success is Career Skills
Career success, at it’s core, is about the smart application of the right career skills at the right time, in the right place to generate maximum results with minimum effort. (Btw – career skills are not job skills like “Project Management” that help you do the job, they are people skills like “getting that damn interview even when there are no job postings” that help you get the job)
Remember, we weren’t taught to work hard and follow the hard way by people who wanted us to be successful in the way you wish to be successful today. We were taught to work hard and follow the hard way for a different reason…
Education, including the education around how you apply for jobs and play the corporate game, was never about your career success. It was always about the generation of a work force for the collective good. It wasn’t for your benefit. It was for the benefit of the status quo and the national economy.
We were all programmed to be young toilers as children, so that we would remain compliant and cope with the perpetual failure of five figure salaries and 40 hour workweeks. We were programmed to operate in a system where our yearly raises can’t even meet annual inflation – a number they try to hide by manipulating indices (They measure inflation with a “basket of goods”, think a package of groceries. Many decades ago, the package started with actual goods like 1 lbs of ground beef, chicken, etc. Now, the basket has turned into a joke; For instance the beef is replaced with dog food to make you think that your dollars get you more than it actually does. They can’t fix the inflation. But they can easily fix the index).
That’s the harsh truth. That’s the system our programming co-creates.
Fortunately, we don’t have to continue with that programming… But to break that programming, we have to FIRST overcome your natural skepticism that there can be an easier way. Because…
Skepticism Keeps Us In Our Place
If you are somewhat skeptical about the possibility of an easier way, it’s completely normal. After all, you’ve been taught to believe that career success should be hard. It’s also natural to assume that “if there was an easier way everybody would do it”.
I used to feel this way. Many of my students felt this way too.
Why wouldn’t they? They were also taught to “work hard”, “put your time in” and “work your way up with patience”. They were told that you couldn’t possibly ask for a promotion six months into your hire, or that you couldn’t get them to double your salary because it wasn’t on the budget, or that you would never be given a management job this early, or you couldn’t get them to hire you when there was no open position…
On and on, we were all told that what we really wanted couldn’t be done. We were taught that’s not how things work. We were told what we wanted was impossible.
And every single time, when we figured out how things actually work, we could bend those so called rules and get our way!
By the way, we didn’t get our way because we toughed it out. We got our way because we stopped playing by their rules and started playing by the deeper principles at work.
How To Accelerate Your Career Development
In order to get started on this path, you have to first free your imagination… The rational, expected, ordinary way of career development is a dead-end path, because it is not meant for your benefit. It’s a race to the bottom. It’s a saturated market. It’s a red ocean.
To explore a career development path that serves your interest, you have start by stepping outside of what you might consider “reasonable”, even if only as a thought experiment.
Just entertain the thought that there might be a different way to achieve your career goals.
Stop for a second and imagine: What if you too could double your salary with just a phone conversation tomorrow?
Preposterous. Yes. Or maybe. Or perhaps not at all.
But definitely worthy of a thought experiment if it helps re-orient you beyond the programming that’s keeping you in your place.
Imagine: What if you could get the kind of job that you used to dream about, but gave up on, because you never found it. What if you could get that job by emailing out a single resume to an email address that you’re not even meant to email because it gets HR mad?
Or… What if you could get promoted and move up from the rank-and-file class to the executive class, without having to go to night school or get an MBA or spend 3 years under the wing of some middle manager? What if you could get promoted tomorrow after a brief and friendly meeting with a “mover and shaker”?
What if you could have the kind of job that rewarded you for your results, rather than how busy you appeared and how hard you seemed to work? What if your job could be a delightful, meaningful, impressive experience where everyone around you stopped being bosses, co-workers or stakeholders, and instead, turned into worthy business friends?
These examples, and your reaction to these examples are meant to demonstrate the extent of your programming. To the degree you consider these ludicrous, is the degree you have bought into the cultural construct of the modern corporate game.
They demonstrate the degree to which you not only play by the rules, but also uphold and defend the rules, of the corrupt corporate game.
You weren’t consulted when these rules were being set. Why then, are you defending them? Wouldn’t you prefer this alternative I’m mapping out?
Do you prefer a world where you have to work hard? Or would you be willing to play in a world where working smart has disproportionate returns? A world where you can get your way without the “hard work”.
What if your approach could determine which world you experienced?
Remember: When it comes to your career, if you have to appear to work hard… Tough things out… If you have to struggle… If you have to put so much effort into your hustle that it throws out your back…
You are playing in a world where you’re not meant to win.
In other words, if you rely on your job skills (how well you do your job), you are being comodified, and by definition, not in control of your career.
Learn career skills instead, or more accurately, develop career skills on top of your job skills. I’m not exaggerating when I say this – for anyone who isn’t born into financial freedom – developing career skills is not optional, especially if you want a successful life with job security and meaningful work.
It’s your decision.
Once you decide that you deserve more.
Only then can you have more.
And only when you stop playing by the rules of the rigged system that is designed to control you, can you start achieving the career success that actually excites you.