Just Do the Work

In praise of work

If you came up with a list of people who reeled off the most memorable quotes in the last fifty years, Tony Robbins would have to be somewhere very near the top. One of those many meaningful quotes he dropped was this one:

Not only does this quote lead us to think about the long-term results of our actions, which we humans are often terrible at doing, but you can further parse it down and still have the quote be true. Most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a day, but underestimate what they can accomplish in a week. They overestimate what they can accomplish in a week, but underestimate what they can accomplish in a month. They overestimate what they can accomplish in a month, but underestimate what they can accomplish in a year.

Why?

Focused effort over time makes great things happen. If you work hard enough, over a long enough period of time on a limited set of goals, you can make extraordinary progress on them. Go spend an hour per day working in your yard. It will probably look better every day, but still may not be where you want it after a week. After an hour every day for three months? You’ll be ready to compete for the cover of Better Homes and Gardens.  

It can happen this way at work, too.

Even in the short term, you can make yourself invaluable to your company if you see a crisis that you can handle with your work. That’s what popped into my head when I read this panicked, hopeless missive from some poor IT guy after the CrowdStrike global tech crash disabled every computer in his company:

What do you do?

Well, if I’m reading this right, he’s the only person who can fix this, he’s legally liable to fix it and there’s 48 hours' worth of work to do. That means where it goes from here shouldn’t really be rocket science:

In other words, get to work and distinguish yourself by doing the work you need to do when it matters. Life doesn't stop because it gets hard. Sometimes all of us have to do a lot of sh*t we don't want to do and there's nobody to do it but us. That's life. Whining about it or breaking down accomplishes nothing because when you're done, there's still work to do. Just suck it up.

I could give you multiple examples from my own life of that, but let’s stick with a recent one.

I had a back injury for more than two decades that even a chiropractor who worked on Olympic athletes could not get fixed, but I kept trying to find a way to fix it. Finally, miraculously, a chiropractor figured out one of my legs was longer than the other, gave me a small lift for that shoe, and three days later, my two decades of back pain were done.

Fast forward a few years and I was still bugged because, for all the weightlifting I had done, I hadn’t squatted since high school because of that back injury. So, I decided that my goal was to work my way up to a 300-pound squat, which seemed appropriately manly. However, I wasn’t flexible enough to properly squat. So, after a surgery when I wasn’t allowed to walk or lift but was allowed to stretch, I started going to Stretch Zone. Soon, I was much more flexible than the average man overall and I hired a trainer to help me with my squat.

One problem; my ankles still weren’t flexible enough to get into the proper position. So, despite the fact I had strong legs, I still couldn’t properly do a squat with the correct form with just a 45-pound bar on my back. There are great grandpas out there that can do better than that. Still, I kept working on my ankle flexibility, kept going to the trainer, and suddenly, I was able to squat. Even then, I found that weakness in my lower back and abs that I hadn’t been training because of the injury limited my performance. Yet and still, in the last year plus, I have essentially gone from zero to 235 pounds on a squat.

Is that fast? No. Were there unexpected challenges along the way? Yes. Am I to my goal yet? Not yet. But have I come a long way and am I now in sight of my goal? Do I now expect to hit it? Absolutely. It seems very doable at this point and I’m very confident I’m going to hit it either at the end of this year or in the first half of next year.

I could easily give you a half dozen stories like that off the top of my head about my own life.

What about you? How many times did you work your way out of a sticky situation? How many times did you give it your all, just keep working, and then accomplish more than you thought? How many times did you get consistent, persistent, and maybe even surprise yourself by doing something other people didn’t think you could do? Most people have done that multiple times in their lives, but because we human beings tend to be such short-term thinkers, we forget about that. “This time is different.” “I’m older now.” “I don’t know if I can still work like that.” Yet and still, like the quote goes…

How much you could do with a twice-per-week class, a once-per-week session, or even 10 minutes per day? Even if you miss a few sessions, 10 minutes per day adds up to more than 50 hours per year. There are so many things people want in life that are actually within their grasp, if they’d just consistently work for it.

In fact, this old quote is right:

We distract ourselves to keep from getting started. We tell ourselves we’re going to start on Monday. We commit to doing such a heroic amount of work that we get intimidated by it and don’t get started. But all of us can improve our lives with good, old-fashioned, day-in-and-day-out, consistent work. It doesn’t even have to be a lot. Start small, make some progress and go from there.

Ultimately, the spoils of life go to those that do. Be one of them. Be one of the workers. If you’re going to be on the planet anyway, why not put in the work to get what you want and be who you want to be? You won’t get there without work, so learn to love it. Loving work will make your life a thousand times better than loving pleasure or being lazy. Give it a chance. You will be surprised at how much a good work ethic improves your life if you apply it to the things that matter.

---