How Hard Do You Work?

I am reading books by Seth Godin.

Started with All Marketers Are Liars and am currently midway through Small Is the New Big.

It's a collection of A-Z essays on SG's thoughts on everything from AAA Autos to Zebra Cake. :-)

The one I want to share is A Brief History of Hard Work, Adjusted For Risk.

SG's question to us: how hard do we actually work? What exactly does it mean to work hard?

Working hard doesn't mean sitting at a desk for long hours or being always connected with your BlackBerry.

That's working long.

SG says:

"Our future in the workplace is not about time at all. The future is about work that's really and truly hard, not just time-consuming. It's about the kind of work that requires us to push ourselves, not just punch the clock. Hard work is where our future job security, our financial profit, and our future joy lie.

It's hard work to make difficult emotional decisions, such as quitting a job and setting out on your own.

It's hard work to invent a new system, service, or process that's remarkable.

It's hard work to tell your boss he's being intellectually and emotionally lazy.

It's hard work to tell senior management to abandon something that it has been doing for a long time in favour of a new and apparently risky alternative.

It's hard work to make good decisions with less than all of the data.

It's much easier to stand by and watch the company fade into oblivion.

Today, working hard is about taking apparent risk...something that the competition (and your co-workers) believe is unsafe but that you realize is in fact far more conservative than sticking with the status quo.

...many of us are choosing to take the easy way out. We're going to work for the Man, letting him do all the hard work while we put in the long hours.

Some people...are realizing that this temporary recession is the best opportunity they've ever had. They're working harder than ever - mentally - and taking all sorts of emotional and personal risks that are bound to pay off.

Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things you'd rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection.

Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier and after you've done that, to do it again the next day.

The riskier your co-worker's hard work appears to be, the safer it really is.

It's the people having difficult conversations, inventing remarkable products, and pushing the envelope (and perhaps, still going home at 5 pm) who are building a recession-proof future for themselves.

So tomorrow, when you go to work, really sweat. Your time is worth the effort."

PS. My good friend and ex-colleague OTL is exactly the kind of hard worker SG had in mind. A visionary, always tinkering with new ideas and new ways of doing things, always challenging the status quo and asking "Why?" and "Why not?"
OTL, you'll have job security for life. :)

PPS. If you've enjoyed this post, get more SG pearls at www.SethGodin.com.

Don't sweat the small stuff. Sweat the ones that matter. :-)