Here’s a common story that many of us are told throughout our lives.
Work hard and you’ll get good grades.
Work hard and you’ll get into a good college.
Work hard and you’ll get a good job.1
Basically, desirable outcomes (getting good grades, a good job, etc) are closely coupled to the idea of working hard.
To illustrate this further, imagine this social interaction.
You: “How’ve you been doing man?”
Friend: “Good dude, I’ve just been hustling, working hard on the job, you know how it is.”
You: “Cool man, sounds like things are going well.”
Sounds like a pretty common interaction right? Your friend is working hard and striving towards something, so your friend must be doing well.
Very rarely do you interject in a concerned fashion, asking questions like “But do you enjoy what you’re doing?”
That interjection is quite unusual in American society because the glorification of hard work is just part of being an American.
Just think about Teddy Roosevelt’s quote around how “Nothing good ever comes in easy.” Upon hearing this, we Americans won’t blink an eye and will instead solemnly nod our heads in agreement. But what Teddy’s saying is extremely radical: a thing can only be good if that thing was hard to attain.
It’s a crazy (and incorrect) statement, yet most of us are too indoctrinated in hustle culture to see it that way
Surprisingly, we can even see in the data how much American society emphasizes hard work. Just look at how the number of annual vacation days in America falls far below that of our Western counterparts.
This is a tremendous departure from how humans have traditionally viewed hard work. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb succinctly notes, “Only in recent history has ‘working hard’ signaled pride rather than shame.”
To Taleb’s point, obsession with hard work is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the early 20th century, Max Weber noticed this trend and attributed this newfound enthusiasm for hard work to the “Protestant work ethic.” Weber argued that the strong work ethic in predominantly Protestant countries (America, Netherlands) had its roots in Calvinism, a Protestant sect that saw hard work as a sign of being one of God’s chosen.2
While a strong Protestant work ethic is certainly beneficial for a country’s GDP, I’m not so certain that working hard should be seen as inherently good. The goal of working hard in any sphere (engineering, writing, ethics) should be to get good enough at something so that things become easy and natural.3
So, the next time someone talks about how hard they’re working, ask them when they think things will get easier. For their sake, I hope it’s not too far off into the future.
I’m still trying to figure out what comes after this part. I think it’s got something to do about getting married and having kids.
I’d argue that the Bible, if anything, values ease above hard work. Consider the story of the Good Samaritan. A Samaritan, without any sort of hesitation, helps a dying man from the road, takes him to an inn, and pays for the man’s upkeep for an extended period of time. Would the Samaritan be seen in a better light if he had hesitated and agonized over whether or not he should help the dying man? If anything, the easy generosity of the Samaritan makes his good deed all the more graceful and almost miraculous.
Saint Thomas Aquinas put it better than I can: “It is not the difficulty of loving one’s enemy that matters when the essence of the merit of doing so is concerned, excepting in so far as the perfection of love wipes out the difficulty. And therefore, if love were to be so perfect that the difficulty vanished altogether—it would be more meritorious still.”
For example, I’m learning to snowboard so that I get eventually get to the point where I’m not falling flat on my ass every 10 feet.