The Myth of Hard Work

You are not paid based off how hard you work, but on how much value you create. Creating value isn’t a just a factor of grind, but consistency and love of craft.

I mean love literally. Everyone values, needs, and wants to see expressions of genuine love. This guy loves trains, and 2.3M people want to watch this love affair. The more of this stuff, the better.

People say, “I wish I loved anything as much as this guy loves trains”. They probably do, but have never cultivated paused long enough to recognize it. Attention is a scarce resource in the information age. As long as this is true, so will love be a scarce resource.

I blame the ‘grind-set’ mentality as one of the chief culprits.

Grinding doesn’t seem like love. Hard work is commendable sometimes. Most times, it is just sadness and fear cleverly disguised. It is mythologized and called noble to protect itself from criticism.

It is also addictive because it makes you feel like you are getting something done. In reality, you are probably just avoiding something scary, like taking a leap of faith on something you are actually interested in. I speak from recent experience, of course.

Hard work is ironically the most common form of procrastination, where the thing you are procrastinating on is your own happiness.

Nor, in most cases, is hard work as dignifying as people make it out to be. It is largely a process of chasing many shiny objects at once, like a child. You end up getting none of them and crying inside. Some members of the grind cult wear sacrifice and misery like badges of honor, but these are the badges of woe.

Sometimes hard work is commendable. Most times it leads to doom and regret.

And regret is a special type of hell. I imagine that, in our dying moments, we will not regret forgoing a life of grind in exchange for the plentiful bounty that lives outside of anything to do with money and the like. I have this growing intuition that it is in fact outside those bounds where the most wealth lives.

LH