022 | Why Working Harder Stopped Working: A Primer
Five ideas that matter more than raw effort.
Throughout my adult life, I’ve often been commended on my work ethic.
This attribute has caught the attention of employers, professors, and colleagues- and has probably thrown me more opportunities than I’m aware of. Developing a solid, reliable work ethic is a meta-skill that inevitably injects more heart and purpose (and sweat) into everything I do.
But like anything else, we arrive at a point where even optimizing your own virtues only takes you so far until it subtly becomes a hindrance. If you’re the insecure overachiever type like me, you often forget that the effort was never the point- it was only the means towards building something beyond effort… something that feels greater than yourself. Something that will represent you, grow you, and maybe even outlive you.
Effort is easily measurable from the outside. You can be the person that sits in the front row of the lecture hall, completes the most volume at the gym, earns the status as the one who turns off the lights and locks the office door at the end of a long day. Your own success gets conflated with the outward perception that you’re putting in the work to make it happen.
Effort and success used to move in tandem. Now the two are decoupled- more so everyday.
Gone are the days where more effort inevitably creates better outcomes. This is nothing more than a remnant from our industrial past, where factory workers were trained to specialize in a single task, earn pay for the hours worked, and get rewarded for the outward performance of effort.
The world has changed overnight, and the principles of yesteryear are slowly proving themselves outdated. It’s important as ever to question our own programming so we can achieve a higher level of success - on our own terms - before we burn out and build resentment toward our own dreams.
The arguments I introduce below serve as trailheads to future topics to explore, internalize, and implement. I’ll expand on each of these in future posts.
“Hours Worked” is no longer the measuring stick.
We live in a world that pays for proven outcomes, not just effort. While hours worked is a common way to compensate employees and make a salary, it’s a poor indicator of your true output. Increasing output by working longer hours makes sense if you’re a bricklayer or a street performer, but even in those cases, there are better ways to optimize what you’re putting into the world before you start burning the candle at both ends.
Both the craftsman and the artist can optimize their value by building the skills they already use to differentiate themselves from the pack. The bricklayer can learn how to teach less-experienced builders, or learn new methods of bricklaying to take on complex projects others can’t. The street performer might play the violin, but they could learn to play new songs or instruments to become a unique act. Skill development is simply one of many forms of leverage- a bit of effort upfront will pay dividends on the backend, forever.
The irreplaceable generalists own the future.
It’s all-too common to make small talk with someone new and get hit with: “so what do you do?” In America, this translates to: “how do you create value for society in a way that makes you a living?”
Responding in a single word, “I’m a bricklayer, I’m a performer”, immediately puts us in a box… along with every other bricklayer or performer out there. We market ourselves as interchangeable with any other person that might say the same. Specialization was once a great attribute, but the world of the internet has made specialists easy to come by. However good you are at one thing, there’s always someone else out there who’s a little (or a lot) better. Even being in the top .01% at any activity makes you one of 800,000 people. And they each have a LinkedIn profile too.
The only way out is to become a generalist. There may be thousands of amazing teachers and thousands of great bricklayers, sure. But a great bricklayer with an acute ability to teach other bricklayers? That’s rare. Throw in even one more skill and you become one-of-a-kind.
Specialization can be hired and trained. Generalization has to be lived. Your unique value lies at the intersection of all your interests, even the ones that are seemingly unrelated… until they’re not.
The overlap isn’t just a lab concoction of unrelated skills. It’s you. A unique perspective on the world no one has, that no one can take from you.
What will you do with it?
To create is to be human. Creativity requires rest.
We once paid scribes to duplicate text by hand. Then, we invented the printing press. Now, we have copy-paste.
Calculators and computers used to be job titles. Now it’s a piece of software that fits in your pocket.
The repetitive tasks are slowly being outsourced to machines, as they already have been for hundreds of years, freeing up humans to do new tasks. The difference with AI is how this replacement is happening at an unprecedented rate.
One experienced person using AI can replace 10 administrators or 10 copywriters. This trend will make yet another leap as humanoids start to replace physical labor. That might sound eccentric, but this phase of automation is already underway.
It’s possible we reach a point where humans don’t NEED to do anything at all, aside from fulfilling the unique interests of other humans. If everything that can be automated IS automated, only two types of jobs will remain:
Positions where the human element is the differentiator that creates a unique experience (think barista, teacher, bartender, tour guide).
Positions where a human uses lived experience to create something new that couldn’t have been replicated by any other human (artist, author, founder, dancer, etc.)
Nearly all jobs in the future will require some level of creativity. It’ll show up in different ways, but it can’t be forced, optimized, or squeezed out on a schedule. Inspiration to create must come from elsewhere. A walk in the park, a good night’s sleep, or a refreshing conversation aren’t just the reward you earned for working hard; it’s the very input the creative mind uses as fuel.
The hustle bro treats rest as a weakness. They eliminate anything that doesn’t appear directly productive, then sit at their desk wondering why novel ideas never strike. You can’t grind your way to an idea you haven’t lived enough to create. Our best thoughts come to us when we stop chasing them.
Success partially depends on luck, but luck can be engineered.
You can’t always have luck on your side, but you sure as hell can expose yourself to it. The lucky ones are rarely the most talented or deserving; they’re the ones the world can actually find. The principle has been discussed ad nauseam but examples are harder to come by.
Most examples fall into three buckets: reps, visibility, and proximity.
More reps means more chances at-bat. Sending out more job applications, meeting more strangers, creating more services a client might want, these are all chances taken. Few of them will amount to anything, but the ones that do have unlimited potential. Take as many calculated shots as possible.
While putting in reps means finding others, visibility is creating avenues for others to find you. I’m at a point in my career where I’m building momentum, so I make myself pretty easy to find; I’m always searching for opportunity. My Instagram, Substack, LinkedIn, website, and email are all easy to find so I can cast a wide net for opportunities to find me back.
Proximity regards who you’re surrounded by, physically or digitally. The people you spend your time with have a huge influence over your trajectory. If you don’t want to be like them, it’s time to switch out the rooms you frequent.
Of course, your product is the multiplier for all of this. Everything else is easier when you are creating something that others find useful, entertaining, or interesting. If you’re not sure where to start, just create one thing you’re proud of, and ripple outward from there.
No amount of hard work fixes the wrong path.
The most important point of all. Effort without a clear direction is mostly a waste. Every hour pushing through on the wrong thing is an hour spent not building the right one. The cost is more than time and energy- it’s the alternative path you didn’t take.
You’re 2 years into a degree you’ve been second-guessing since the start. 10 years deep in a career you’ve been lukewarm about since you first interned there. 20 years into a marriage that dried out half a decade before either of you decided to call it out.
Why do we do this to ourselves?
One reason, we’ve built an identity around our path and our position in the world. Leaving it behind feels like a tiny death. The architect who can’t see themselves as anything but. The husband in a failed marriage but can’t bear the thought of becoming a single father.
But we are not what society labels us as. We are people with a messy, complicated past, and an undefined future. We can course-correct at any time, even if our detachment leaves permanent scars.
The other reason: the counterintuitive concept that effort becomes comfort. It’s actually easy to work toward the things we’ve always worked for. It gives us something to point at, and lets us hide from the bigger question: am I pointed in the direction I truly want to go? The hardest working people often bury their heads for years before looking up.
Conclusion
Working harder doesn’t always work, but if you were seeking a free pass to slack off, look elsewhere.
Hard work isn’t dead. It will always be something worth admiring, as long as the work feels meaningful enough to be something worth suffering for. The people who do succeed are still working hard, but hard work alone is no longer enough.
The path is not to simply work more, or to work less. It’s much more complex than that.
To be successful on your own terms, you need to work hard at the harder thing.
It’s harder to look up and realign your direction than it is to put your head down and keep chipping away at a path you thought you wanted. Your current path has the general script to follow, but your redirection doesn’t.
It’s harder to rest deliberately than it is to brute-force your way through. Pushing yourself is socially rewarded. Resting is viewed as laziness or wasted time, when it often sparks the inner work necessary to bring your best self to the table.
Every day, the world will reward you for how hard you appear to be working.
Your future self won’t remember or care.
Your future will only reward you for the difference you made, the life you lived, the person you became…
...and the best time to start is right now.
-KPG
That was an awesome read. And yeah, completely agree with you that working hard is not the only ingredient to success. But it still is a major one. Great ideas to think about though.
The part that stands out to me is the focus on solo workers needing better maps, not more noise. Working alone gives freedom, but it also removes a lot of natural feedback loops. Having decision tools becomes less optional when nobody else is there to challenge your assumptions.