Fastcompany magazine suggests working long hours is not the same as working hard at all. Working hard has little to do with hours spent in the office.
Today, working hard is about taking apparent risk. Not a crazy risk like betting the entire company on an untested product. No, an apparent risk: something that the competition (and your coworkers) believe is unsafe but that you realize is far more conservative than sticking with the status quo.
Hard work is about facing difficult situations, going beyond your comfort zone, risking rejection. Which, to me, means it’s about personal development as much as about anything else. This requires that one has qualities, of course, but it seems that the qualities required aren’t the ones you’d normally expect.
None of the people who are racking up amazing success stories and creating cool stuff are doing it just by working more hours than you are. And I hate to say it, but they’re not smarter than you either. They’re succeeding by doing hard work.
As the economy plods along, many of us are choosing to take the easy way out. We’re going to work for the Man, letting him do the hard work while we work the long hours. We’re going back to the future, to a definition of work that embraces the grindstone.
This all makes sense. It’s those that work long hours in frustrating conditions (such as, being responsible to customers for the poor work of others without having any influence over the poor workers) who die earliest. The further up the tree you get the less ‘hard’ work you really do. I’m not sure the top dogs are going home earlier than the rest of us but they certainly aren’t facing the same pressures.
