First, what do you want to achieve by working hard? Money, status or testing the limits of your abilities? If you pass your life on hard work – is this going to be a better life?
Across diverse cultures we can see two extremums:
Cultivation of a slow way of living and peacefully enjoying less resources. Statistics show that these cultures bring more happiness per capita, than cultures focused on hard work.
Pressure on working hard – which makes a society richer but not necessarily happier.
In both cases the biggest challenge is that it is hard to escape such system if you are embedded into it. By living slowly, you may not accumulate enough resources to go somewhere else if you wish so. In a high-pressure society, your cost of living may be high, making it hard to take a break from it as well.
When travelling, I have seen that slow lifestyle can be very boring. People who have naturally a lot of energy and live in such societies tend to focus their huge energy on some unnecessary details, as they do not have any interesting challenges in front of them (in slow living countries the variety of jobs, entertainments and available lifestyles is usually limited).
On the other hand, in places with high pressure on hard work you may find amazing opportunities. However, the pressure makes many people focus on too many unnecessary details, as they are not able to let anything go and prioritize what matters most for them.
That lead me to a conclusion that it is good to be challenged, however it is essential to choose the right challenge and avoid distractions with unnecessary details.
How to challenge yourself?
As said, doing nothing can be very boring. Hard work and challenges are needed to maintain the sense of meaning. But is every effort equally meaningful? Is it only about effort level?
Some people say you should work smart, not hard. For me working smart is to maximise the output from any input. I love Pareto 80/20 rule saying that usually 80% of our output depends on 20% of the work we do. This is why I constantly ask myself whether what I am doing is useful and towards which objective. Should I keep doing this or take it out?
In long term projects it may be very hard to estimate direct input-output relationship between what we are currently doing and the output long term. One good strategy I found for this is that it is always good to do the work from which we can learn.
In this way, even if the work will not bring expected results, it still will not be a waste of time, as it can help us to move forward with the learnings gained. Therefore, I never chose the work based on monetary output it brings, but based on the learning output and how much it can help me in the future.
Some people associate hard work mainly with the number of hours spend on it. It makes sense to some extent, but I have seen a lot of examples that the 12h workday does not have to lead to a better outcome than an 6h workday. I would say there are two main reasons for this (I) getting tired (II) not every work produces equal outputs, so prioritizing tasks with highest output change the overall effect of the day.
I think the best approach to hard work is to maximise creative and useful output from what we do. This requires a lot of energy. Creativity and problem-solving works best when we are rested. This excludes very long hours, because we need quality hours, which – we must accept – are going to be less than 12h per day (according to some research, 4 h of deep work per day is a great success).
To keep being rested when still having a lot to do is about prioritizing and eliminating distractions.
Distractions
It is not only important to put high quality hours into hard work, but it is equally important to avoid losing energy for things which are of low value. A day has only 24 h and the amount of energy we have (not only time!) per each day is hard to stretch. You can keep high energy level by reconsidering your diet and doing sports. But this is not unlimited. Overdosing coffee does not work because any excessive stimulation is later paid back by a dip in energy. Cutting sleep too much is a total nonsense for anyone who wants to be effective in quality work.
This is why I think that as much as the hard work on the to do list, the elimination of distractions has the same importance. Hard work is not only about how much you can do but also how much of unnecessary distractions you can eliminate from your schedule.
That does not mean that we should become a working machine, because a good quality entertainment, can make us a better people and can trigger a lot of inspiration.
If I would define a distraction which is good to get rid of, I would say it is something what does not make you a better person.
Hardness
What is hard for one person can be easy to others. Everyone has a unique set of skills and shortages. This makes some types of work effortless for us, and other types of work painful. Therefore, the fact that we perceive something as hard does not really mean that it is also hard for others or that it is useful.
Many people say that solving hard problems moves the humanity forward – which is true, but that does not mean that every hard problem solved will lead to that goal. Also, we consider problems as hard if they are hard for most of the people – not necessarily due to lack of potential abilities but also lack of experience in a given topic. For example, if you are a scientist, you may be working on a problem, which many people would consider difficult, but since you spend all your days on it – it is not that hard for you. At the same time, another problem, widely considered by others as easy, can be difficult for you.
Does it have to be hard for you, or does it have to be hard for most of the people?
Well, maybe it is good to choose the hardest task which you can manage. If you choose to do something beyond your skills, you won’t be able to make it work. If you chose something too easy, you will get bored and frustrated, even if the work is useful for others or considered by others as difficult. But still, this is not enough to choose, because each of us could identify a lot of examples of a work which would be the hardest they can manage - in different areas of life.
Balance
I think hard work does not have to be the longest and the hardest what you can possibly do but rather something aligned with your skills and objectives.
Doing such things together with eliminating distractions can keep your energy at much higher level than unnecessary self-imposed suffering of doing things you do not really like to do and chasing goals you do not really care to achieve. In this way ‘hard work’ can become a form of entertainment. This is also a good strategy to keep longer hours without getting too tired.
If the work can be an entertainment, what about work-life balance? The balance should be kept between doing and not doing (a total rest), not by trying to reach too many objectives at the same time.
I think it is good to choose one objective and try to refine every detail of it. Any next, secondary objective should be aligned with the top objective. In this way, you are never losing time, as even if some of your secondary objectives will not work, you are always moving towards the top objective.
And when you stop to have a rest and you are not moving forward for a moment? You can enjoy the landscape around you. This is why to stop and reflect is also necessary, as otherwise what would be the point of working hard if you would not enjoy the results?
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