Is it True That Working Hard Will No Longer Lead to a Better Life?

This tweet caught my eye not just because of the sentiment expressed, but because so many people in the comments seemed to agree with it:

I am not a big gamer, but a girlfriend of mine convinced me to try “Overwatch.” Overwatch (it’s now Overwatch 2) was a team-based game with more than 20 characters that were different enough that you actually had to practice each one to get good at them.

At first, it was just something fun to play with my girlfriend and some friends. Then, it became a fun thing to do as a break. At a certain point, I found myself actually CARING how good I was at the game, which is a problem, because I am not a big gamer, I don’t have top tier hand/eye coordination and I’m not a teenager who can spend 12 hours a day playing Overwatch in the summer.

So, I found myself watching videos to learn how to play. Then, I’d try different techniques and characters in the game. Eventually, I realized my weak spot was my aim, so I would spend long periods on aim-based mini-games that were basically just boring, repetitive, online shooting galleries. Next, I would play in a game to practice what I learned and try characters I hadn’t played before to improve my skills.

Eventually, I started to try competitive game play, although I still wasn’t all that highly ranked and… I realized this was turning into a 2^nd job. Whatever happened to just having a good time with friends in a fun game? At that point, I quit, and I haven’t been back.

The thing is this is an approximate synopsis of what life is like in an awful lot of areas.

It starts with, “I’m excited to shoot hoops with my friends,” and if you end up going long enough and getting good enough, you’re spending a few hours working on improving your crossover dribble and your finger position on jumpers.

On the first day of your new job, you’re figuring out where the breakroom is and keeping an eye out for the cutest single girls at work. Five years in, you’re finishing up a continuing education class and putting in sixty-hour weeks, hoping to get promoted from assistant manager to manager.

One day, you’re having a fun time with your mom learning how to bake a cake, and 20 years later, Gordon Ramsay is telling you the bacon you just cooked looks like Gandhi’s flip-flop:

Note that the hard work involved here in all of these things does not GUARANTEE success. I never became an awesome Overwatch player. No matter how much you practice, you may not make the NBA, work your way to the top of the corporation, or become a world-class chef.

This is reality.

So, does it mean hard work doesn’t pay off?

Not at all.

What it means is that hard work is almost always just a prerequisite for success, not a guarantee of success.

Hard work is the ticket that allows you to get in the door, but that doesn’t mean you have it made because once you get to a certain level, EVERYBODY is working hard.

I’m bastardizing this quote a little bit because the way I always heard it is not apparently how it was originally said by Arthur Williams, but,

“You beat 50% of people just by showing up, another 40% by working hard, and the last 10% is a dogfight in the free enterprise system.”

The problem so many people in our modern world are facing is that they have “Instagram rich expectations,” but they’ve had such soft and easy lives that they have “trust fund kid work ethics.” So many of us are turning into the “Stop giving me your toughest battles” memes:

What so many people mean by “working hard” is putting in a 40-hour week in an air-conditioned office, cramming for a test, or putting your family’s dishes in a dishwasher and their dirty clothes in a washing machine. Those things are the basics, not working hard. The reason they feel they are “working hard” is because people in modern America are playing life on “easy mode.” Compared to what most human beings have been through and even past generations of Americans, the effort level needed to navigate our lives is extremely low.

There are a lot of examples of this I could give you, but let’s use my brother’s hunting. My brother likes to hunt, and he’s pretty good at it. I’ve got deer meat in my freezer right now from animals he killed. Yet, compare what he’s doing to what people were doing 100 years ago.

He’s using a gun, and he’s a good shot because he can afford to practice. After he kills the deer, he pays someone to dress it for him. He does eat his kills, but his family isn’t relying on that deer to get fed. He isn’t going hungry if he misses.

Whatever happens during that day’s hunt, he’ll have dinner in a restaurant, go home to an air-conditioned camper, and sleep in a comfortable bed before he gets up and does it again. He’s not doing it because his family will starve if he doesn’t; he’s doing it because it’s fun for him. When he’s had his fill and it’s not fun anymore, he packs it in and goes home, then comes back whenever he’s ready to hunt again.

Similarly, do you think farming is easy work? If so, you’re out of mind. That goes double for farming before we had advanced pesticides, seeds, and machinery to help us. Yet that’s what most humans did for the last several thousand years.

You think it’s tough to sit in a cool office, make some phone calls, and dabble on your computer for 40 hours a week? In the late 1800s, 60–100-hour workweeks were standard, and they were doing things like mining coal and hand-stitching quilts.

You feel like your “hard work,” such as it is, isn’t being rewarded because you can’t afford a new PlayStation and a Gucci bag for your girlfriend? Well, read this excerpt provided by Grok about America just 75 years ago and tell me how you’re not getting a “better life” out of your work:

In the 1950s, a significant percentage of Americans lived in homes with dirt floors, particularly in rural and farm areas where poverty was widespread. According to the 1950 U.S. Census, 10% of all housing units were classified as dilapidated, a category that explicitly included homes with inadequate original construction, such as dirt floors (along with other issues like makeshift walls or lack of foundation). This percentage was higher in rural-farm areas (17% dilapidated) and even higher among nonwhite rural households (46% dilapidated). The 1950 census definition of dilapidated housing described structures that did not provide adequate shelter, with dirt floors listed as a key example of substandard quality that endangered health and safety.

I know, I know, some of you are going, “What next? Are you going to tell me to clean my plate because people in Africa are starving?”

No, I’m not, but I am going to tell you that one of the most important things you can do if you want to have a good life is get used to being uncomfortable and working hard. If you can’t out-work most people around you, especially in modern America, you are soft, lazy, and are probably never going to be very good at anything. The point of saying that isn’t to put you down, it’s to help you understand what it’s going to take to have a life you enjoy living.

You are not going to have a successful career in anything if you don’t work hard. You are not going to be fit and healthy if you don’t work hard. You are not going to be able to maintain successful relationships with people you care about if you don’t work hard. You are always going to be on the outside, looking in and wishing you could have the things that people who’ve worked hard have managed to accumulate. So, why not work hard and get those things for yourself?

If it seems intimidating, start small and build up. If you’re worried that all your hard work won’t pay off and you’ll never reach your dream, just remember that the higher you go, the more options you’ll have.

For example, the gym I go to is run by a guy who used to be a professional bodybuilder. Did he win the Mr. Olympia? No, but he does at least own a gym. He’s still lean and yoked. Although I don’t know him enough to say this for sure, he at least APPEARS TO BE an upbeat, competent, and generally happy guy. Was his hard work “wasted?” It doesn’t sound like it, does it? A lot of things are like that.

Hard work opens up new thoughts, new possibilities, and it gives you OPTIONS. Not just lazy people’s options, which tend to be, “Should I get the water or power cut off?” or “Do I want to watch reruns or play a boring video game tonight?” But options that you WANT. Options that enable you to feel good about yourself and your life.

Whoever you are, get used to getting after it and watch how it changes your life for the better long-term.

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