Come to America. Find a job. Live frugally. Save your money. Work as hard as you can.
It was normal to see my parents working 12 hour days in jobs they were only paid to work 8 hours for. Going above and beyond was expected. The idea of “quiet quitting” couldn’t have been more foreign to them.
As a child of immigrants, these were the values that were instilled in me. It’s how I’ve thought about work ethic for the longest time. Keep your head down and work. The rest will take care of itself.
That’s precisely why it’s so hard for me to convince myself of the following truth:
In the digital age, hard work is overrated.
The advice has become cliché as 30 second Naval clips have propagated social media. But damn am I starting to believe in it. A glaring example might help explain my point.
In the northeast, late November is when the red autumn leaves fall off the trees all over your front lawn. Naturally, you aren’t going to rake those leaves and trim the shrubs yourself. For $400, we hired someone to come spend 8 hours cleaning up our lawn. Note: that’s $400 total ($50/hour), not $400/hour.
The man spent 8 hours raking leaves, trimming trees, and placing branches into garbage bags for collection. At the end of the day, he looked physically and mentally exhausted.
The same day, I was doing some client facing work myself. I’ve been helping a few real estate investors build models to evaluate opportunities. They’ve agreed to pay me $400/hour for my services. In one hour of running numbers, I'm able to make what the landscaper made in 8 hours of back-breaking yard work.
Now, the point of the story isn’t to boast about how great I am. There are consultants billing their clients 10x what I’m charging.
The landscaper we hired is objectively working harder than I am. Even if we both work 8 hour days, I’m sitting in my sweatpants, drinking a hot cup of coffee, and he’s out in the 35° weather doing manual labor.
No matter how hard the landscaper works, he can’t match my rate. There isn’t enough leverage.
Which brings me to part two of the pill that’s tough to swallow:
What you work on is far more important.
The same day, I came across an interesting podcast from Danny Miranda. These two guys are crushing it with their short-form media agency.
They target content creators who are already creating long-form content. From there, they create new scripts and animations to help those creators go viral through short-form media.
Because the target creators are already doing pretty well, the agency is able to charge as much as $50k/month! My dinky little consulting gig doesn’t sound so cool anymore does it?
So far, we’ve covered three problems:
Cleaning up messy yards
Analyzing real estate deals
Distributing content
While numbers 2 and 3 might sound equally important on paper, they’re not.
A solution to problem number 2 only helps a specific set of people.
A solution to problem 3 helps the whole world. We are all fighting for attention and eyeballs on our work.
No matter how hard I work on consulting clients, I can’t match the short-form agency’s rates. There isn’t enough leverage.
This is precisely why the digital age is so fascinating. I’m not sure Henry and Dylan are working much harder than I am, but they’ve chosen a wider-ranging problem to solve than I have.
Which brings us back to the opening mic drop – hard work is overrated. Spend more time thinking about the right problem for you to uniquely solve.
Of course, I’m not diminishing hard work. Once you’ve decided what problem to solve, work as hard as you can to solve it. Wake up earlier, sleep later and eliminate distractions.
But, please, don’t make the rookie mistake of working on something that just isn’t that important.
Great topic! It seem the crux of this consideration is the human tendency to avoid meaningful work, rather than hard word. Meaningful work makes us vulnerable because we care. Working hard is perhaps how we avoid the vulnerability of doing meaningful work. Or, if we've found that meaning, working hard on it is basically heaven on earth. It's our psychological protection mechanisms that are perhaps underestimated.