They say that we should work our way up the corporate ladder to find success. But is that really the key to finding great success? The longer one works, the clearer the picture gets that one of the greatest myths known to mankind is that the harder one works, the greater their chances of success. Why does this myth continue to exist, even to this day?
Over the weekend I was watching a couple of documentaries. In one of them, the filmmaker captured the destitute life of young children living in Zimbabwe. It was sad. All the children that were captured lived in abject poverty. It is the kind of poverty that you read about. In one of the scenes, one young girl was so terribly hungry that she began to cry. She claimed that she was so hungry that she had pain all over her body. Her mind was heavy and she was too weak to even breathe. She had to, however, find the strength to clean his mother and infant baby brother. That’s not the end though.
The filmmaker then captured a young boy who lived with his grandmother. At least he lived in a hut, unlike the girl who lived under plastic sheets with her mother and baby brother. But even so, the poor boy had to work hard just to survive. He pans for gold (which is illegal) in order to raise money for living expenses. There was a scene where his grandmother went to school with him to ask that he be allowed to study even without paying school fees. The administrator made a comprise that he would allow him if she was able to pay 50 cents before the following Monday. The regular fee per term is $2. Fifty cents, which is about R8, was difficult for the grandmother and so, the boy was expelled.
What is extremely sad is that these kids work hard. They work harder than most people who are employed. They work hard because their very survival depends on what they find on a daily basis. Thus, making me question the notion of hard work.
By definition, the way that those children work hard, they should be successful. There was another pair of children who, with their father, were working as hard. As hard as these individuals work, they find it difficult to even make a single dollar a day.
Why’s that the case? Why are there people in the world who wake up hungry, work in intense, tough conditions with the same hunger, sleep with the same hunger still, and yet never find success? Yet there are people who will go to their businesses for an hour a day, Monday to Friday, and live in opulence? What did they do to enable them to succeed?
In the book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, there’s a chapter where the author, Dale Carnegie, asks one successful guy how he found success. The guy’s first answer is that one should work hard and be patient. You know, the typical stuff. However, Dale Carnegie responds by saying that people work hard and that most people are patient and yet they don’t find success. He concluded that working hard and being patient alone cannot guarantee success.
“What is the missing ingredient in the formula for success?” he asked the successful politician.
The successful guy, for him, attributed his success to networks. The fact that he had a vast collection of people he could contact at any given point in time, for him, is what enabled him to succeed. There are other successful people who share their secrets and their formulas for success. One thing that I have come to notice is, very few of them attribute their success to working hard.
In this instance, a distinction between working hard and having a good work ethic should be made. One can work hard. In the context of the modern work environment, I believe this is what working hard and having a good work ethic means. A good work ethic is showing up when you have to show up. Now we need to get deeper into this concept. If the job states that you must arrive at 8 am and leave at 4 pm, and you do exactly that then that’s not a good work ethic. That is what you paid to do. That’s what’s required of you. You cannot expect to get a promotion or a raise performing exactly what’s required of you. It’s ignorant naivety to think so.
Let’s take the same situation. The job requires you to arrive at 8 am and leave at 4 pm. But you arrive at 7 am and leave at 5 pm. Instead of taking the full 45 min lunch break, you take less than 15 mins in order to get back to the job. And in the 8 to 9 hours you’ve obliged yourself to your job, you give a good 80% to 90% of the time to the job and not waste it on office gossip and politics or on social media and complaining about the job you signed up for. To me, this is a good work ethic. For me, this work ethic enables you to perform better than your co-workers and this work ethic, depending on your job, will lead to promotions and pay raises.
However, it is easy to fall into the trap of “working hard” even with these fundamentals of a good work ethic. You can be the person who has a good work ethic but you can also be the person working hard to maintain that good work ethic. Like the children experiencing the great poverty that life has cursed them with, you will find yourself working hard just to survive the day-to-day experiences of your life. Working hard is rooted in survival, it is rooted in just surviving. If the mind is focused on merely surviving, it will be difficult for the mind to find a way to begin thriving.
And that’s how the wealthy view their work. They see their work as opportunities to thrive and live beyond survival. Thus, it is common to hear successful people not attribute their success only to working hard (in actuality having a good work ethic), but instead on facts such as networking or solid emotional support in the form of family.
Successful people have month-long vacations in January. Successful people wake on a Tuesday and book a plane to Cairo or Monto Carlo. Successful people wake up on a Saturday to partake in their favourite hobbies or spend time with family. These are rewards that the successful enjoy because of a good work ethic, not because they worked hard.
This is why I respect politicians. Politics is a game of power. Successful politicians are the ones who know the laws of power and how they can use them to their own benefit. To be a successful politician, one needs to be smart with their tongue. One needs to master their public image and portray it in a way that’s magnetic. There are people who have learned these political techniques and use them in ordinary work environments. And unsurprisingly, these people are the ones who are granted favours. They are the ones entrusted with responsibilities that will set them up for promotions and raises. They are the ones who produce the absolute bare minimum but are able to reap the absolute maximum rewards at their workplace. Combining these fundamental laws of power with a good work ethic, in my opinion, is what enables people to succeed.
Working hard is the absence of the laws of power in your work ethic. Working hard is arriving at 7 am, leaving at 5 pm but hoping and wishing to get a promotion. Working hard is sacrificing your health by missing lunch every day in the hopes that the organisation you work for will recognise your dedication and sacrifice. The workplace is not obligated to acknowledge your dedication and sacrifice. Quite in fact, if there were no labour laws in the constitution, such an employee would be the perfect employee. Because such an employee lives for the organisation.
I am one who believes that one should respect their job. My stance on employment, however, will never change. Even in my job interview, I said the same thing that I firmly believe in the power of entrepreneurship to bring one financial freedom. That a job will never be able to do this. However, fact that a job will feed you, clothe you, and provide you with a roof over your head, it is imperative that one respects the job. Respect the job but do not sacrifice your life for it.
One respects the job by arriving on time and leaving on time. One respects the job by fulfilling their duties and not complaining about them. One respects the job by recognising authority and treating that authority with the respect they deserve. This is respecting a job for the job is able to make you survive.
The ability to thrive will then fall on you to take the extreme step and begin developing a good work ethic. Instead of arriving at 8 am, start arriving at 7 am. Use that extra hour to set goals for the day. The extra hour also has the mental benefit that it gives you the illusion that you are ahead of everyone else at the workplace. Instead of just having a formal boss-employee relationship with your superiors, began morphing that relationship into a mentor-mentee relationship. They are a level above you therefore, there is something that you can learn from them to take you to their level as well. Instead of wasting time on endless workplace gossip, invest your time being proficient and efficient in your work in order to perform at peak performance. This peak performance efficiency will free you some time to pursue your own personal goals. Slowly, you get to realise how you no longer have to work hard to survive but instead, you began to work hard to thrive.
These are things that one has learned and is still learning in the world of work. These are things one notices at the workplace. You notice how the laziest employee will be the one earning the most. Yet, you share the same job title and job description with the employee. You notice how the higher the organisational hierarchy one goes, the fewer hours the top bosses work. They earn potentially ten times more than the lowest level employee and work potentially ten times less than that employee.
Working hard, alone is not enough for success. If indeed that was the case, the starving children in these many African countries would be true millionaires. The world is not set up for the “hard-working individual”. It is naivety at best to assume that working hard alone will grant one success.
Thinking of the words of Howard Schultz, he said that there are people who want to take the food off your table and that you must do everything in your power to protect your food. So, the question then becomes, how can we sit at the table and enjoy the food? If not your food, my food? Is the table even big enough? If not, how can we extend it so that I can eat as well? Working hard alone will not give the means to get a chair to sit at the table. What working hard will actually do is ensure that the crumbs that fell on the floor are vacuumed quicker than the speed of lightning.
On this journey of success, one learns a lot. And currently, one is coming to fully understand that working hard, aimlessly, will not grant one the success that is desired. Working hard is like digging for gold with a shovel. Working hard will trap you into thinking that the more hours you put in, the sooner you’ll find your gold. Having a good work ethic, however, is understanding that time is limited. And within that limited time, one needs to find effective and efficient ways to get the job done. A good work ethic will let the mind find ways to use their time intelligently in order to get the gold. A good work ethic enables you to find machinery that will dig the gold rather than you dig the gold yourself.
Working hard infused with the fundamental laws of human nature is what constitutes a good work ethic. Without working hard but having an understanding of the laws of human nature will make you incompetent. The curse for most politicians. They have mastered the human psyche and have the ability to influence a multitude of people. But in lacking the essence of working hard for their cause, they fall back on deals and fail to deliver on their key performance indicators.
Working hard but without the fundamental laws of human nature will make you the perfect employee. The perfect employee is the kind of employee that a corporation can use to the most extreme of levels and they know that this employee will not object. Perhaps that is why most logistics companies opt for foreign internationals who have been moulded by the traumas of poverty. Individuals who have hardened their skins to the most extreme conditions just in the name of earning a humble meal before they sleep. Such an employee will be pleased with the bread and milk after putting in a 16 to 18 hour shift.
Successful people are the ones who have married the two together. Michael Jordan is arguably the greatest basketball player of all time. He put in more hours than anyone in his team to become the best there is. However, as Steve Kerr said, there were individuals on the Chicago Bulls who too put in the same hours as Michael Jordan but did not have the same star power. This star power was the ability of Michael Jordan to win the hearts of executives of the NBA and other corporations that made him the billionaire that he is today.
Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Jeff Bezos, and the likes are the perfect examples of individuals who have the perfect work ethic. They have mastered the art of working hard and having a great understanding of human nature, attained their goals and lived their dreams.
After watching the documentary and recalling the years in which I worked harder than everyone but naïve to learning the laws of human nature, I am beginning to understand how it is possible for individuals like Kevin Hart to be able to find success. Kevin Hart, who was a shoe store assistant yet spent most of his time at comedy clubs with other more successful comedians and grabbed every opportunity until he found success, one understands why Kevin Hart is considered to be “hard-working”. Hard working in the essence that he is putting in the hours and partnered with key individuals in the comedy scene to translate his dreams into reality.
Working hard and having hard work alone will not guarantee success. If it did, there won’t be so many starving individuals in the world. Translated into the modern working place, working hard for a corporation that pays you the barely legal minimum, robs you a third of your life, and knows you by a number will not give you the financial freedom to live life to the full. Developing a good work ethic, working hard but understanding the laws that govern human motive and nature, will enable the doors to your success to start opening.
Understanding this is my new journey on my road to success.
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