Our monkey brains haven’t evolved beyond superiority over other males. Sadly, most of all the heartache in the world is because of this quirk that we evolved to help us survive. This is our fate for the foreseeable future. Until we can hack our genetic code. (I don’t see this happening in our lifetime). Freeze your DNA, maybe future man will revive us into the paradise we never made. Hopefully not revived as grunt soldiers in their future solar system wars
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· 1 year ago
Hard work pays off when spent on the right things.
Working for a fixed pay? You probably would get by doing the bare minimum
Certainly there’s context- though I think that is the point. The “hard work” line tends to get pushed as though you just need to work hard at what you are doing, which isn’t generally true. Hourly service jobs are often a good example but so are many “white collar” jobs. Most jobs have a practical limit to what people will pay or how skilled you need to be before being “better” has no measurable impact on profit- it’s great if a retail associate knows where everything in the store is and has world class service- but for the most part, that’s not going to justify a mass market retailer charging more or paying more because while people may like such things- most people shop certain segments on price not service. The dominance of online retail shows that the majority of people don’t even care if they get any service as long as they get what they want and it is the “best” price. Movements and individuals may push to “shop local,” but this isn’t a new thing. Across most industries since…
.. at least the mid 20th century the trend has been seen where “perks” and “intangibles” have been scaled back and profits have done better overall for it. This is important because it basically tells us that in most of these sorts of jobs we just need someone who can do the “bare minimum” and anything more than that is a bonus. So there isn’t a lot of incentive to try and acquire or retain the most skilled or “hard working” people in most of these tasks- you may be a better cashier than Reggie- but as far as profits go the value you return over Reggie is worth maybe a nickel an hour or literally nothing. If you quit, the world is full of Reggies and they won’t ask for the wages a skilled hard worker might think they command.
So you can become the best cashier in the world but that won’t necessarily get you anything. Could it get you promoted? Maybe. It could also do the opposite- if you have a delivery driver who is amazing, many managers won’t want to promote them. Why do I want an untested counter worker in trade for a top shelf driver? Keeping you as a driver is more beneficial to the business and if I want a counter person I can hire someone who has the qualifications to imply they’d be a good counter person. The fallacy is believing hard work equals talent or that those things are transferable. The skills that make the best cashier in the world or the best driver or the best data entry specialist or programmer… they don’t make you automatically the best manager in the world. That’s a bit like thinking that because a candle smells good it will taste good too. It MIGHT, but what makes a good candle doesn’t make a good meal even if both generally smell good and involve heat.
So for the worker, working harder at your job than you need to in order to achieve a basic to moderate result is often wasted effort. If you want to make more money or be promoted you more often need to work hard at acquiring and demonstrating a level of skill at the things that will make you stand out as someone who can handle that job and not someone who is really really good at whatever specific thing you currently do. There are exceptions of course- if you’re a pro football player then working hard at football and being the best at that will likely make you successful- but being the best footballer won’t matter much if you don’t have the skills or team to showcase your talents and get you endorsements and fans etc. so even then you probably can’t ONLY work hard at your athletic abilities.
So for sure, there is lots of context and many pocket cases for this- but overall at best “hard work pays” is an anachronism from a time where industrialization and consumer culture were very young and small business, cottage industry, and sustenance labor were the norms. At worst it is itself an example of exploitive morality- in modern industrial society the majority of people will see little or no benefit from simply “working hard” at their specific profession. Those doing jobs that rely more on thinking hard than working hard and those who make significantly more as owners or managers benefit more than the individual contributor when people go “above and beyond” in most cases. Your good work generates profit that most workers don’t actually share in over the bare minimum they’d make as long as the company was solvent. Most workers do not receive tangible bonuses in pay or even work conditions even when record profits are achieved. To the contrary as…
…general profitability has increased, workers tend to see worse conditions and pay across all industries and financiers and “strategic” employees like executives reap the rewards. A company like Amazon or Google or Facebook which has increased in value and profits astronomically over time don’t generally show corresponding increases to the compensation or benefits of the majority of workers even as share holders and executives achieve wealth nearly unprecedented in human history. If every Amazon warehouse worker went to work everyday and worked as hard as they possibly could- that would simply become the expected norm and there likely wouldn’t be any benefit to any random one of them even if the collective results were worth billions of dollars. Perhaps a “thank you for your hard work and now work harder so next quarter we can post even bigger profits!” Or perhaps the “top worker” at each location might win an iPad that year or something.
Tl:Dr and summing up- there are all sorts of exceptions and pocket cases for sure, but in general it’s probably more universally true in modern times that hard work itself for the sake of it doesn’t amount to much in the form of tangible personal gain or success. Targeted hard work of the correct type towards a specific goal can make a difference, but simply “trying your hardest” at your job is just as or more likely to make someone else money than it is to make you money. Such effort often can be better placed in areas not directly related to performance at your specific job to return better results, and in the end, most jobs have some limit where you just aren’t going to be able to make appreciably more money doing that specific job. So working hard at success isn’t the same as working hard at the tasks required of your job or even at your employer at all.
Working for a fixed pay? You probably would get by doing the bare minimum