We all work hard but don’t seem to make much progress. In a lot of organizations, people seem to be praised high for working long and hard, but they never seem to get promoted or get noticed. Why is this. It is because the definition of “hard work” changed. A lot of people still believe in the industrial age definition that hard work is using your “body” to work hard , but if we look at our current situation, the majority of us do work sitting at a desk in front of a computer.
Many people are not aware that we have transitioned to an information age from an industrial age. According to most economic historians, the Industrial age ended about 20Yrs ago in 1989 when the Berlin wall came down and the internet came up.
In the industrial age, working hard meant, using our body and working long hours i.e physical labor . That is how machines worked and humans had to work similar to machines and humans were rewarded for this.
Now though, the majority of us are not working with machines, we are working with computers using our mind more instead of our body. Now hard work means emotional labor.. exerting our mind. Sure, we still work on long hours and weekends, but this is still not working hard as hard work is still translating into long hours. As Seth Godin says ” Hard work meant more work in the past. But the past doesn’t lead to the future.The future is not about time at all. The future is about work that’s really and truly hard, not 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 job security, our financial profit, and our future joy lie.”
A lot of successful people work the same hours or less than we work, but they are still successful. They get ahead because they do the new “hard work” As Seth Godin says
“Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that 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.”
So, the easiest way to do hard work is to love change,train ourselves to love challenges and question the status quo all by using and exerting our mind.
From now on, let us start training ourselves in baby steps to do the new “Hard work” i.e “exerting emotional labor”.
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Vijay Peduru is an entrepreneur in the bay area and is the co-founder of a bootstrapped startup. His interests are bootstrapping, leadership and spirituality.
A new entrepreneur almost always gets an idea and thinks it is the coolest and the greatest idea. He safeguards it and when someone asks him he would say we are in “stealth” mode. He dreams of how he would be on the covers of Fortune, Fast Company and Inc when his idea clicks and takes off. The truth is no one really knows whether the idea will click or not. About 50%of venture backed firms fail.
So, how does an entrepreneur increase his chances of Success. He needs to Accept Change as normal and Be willing to Evolve. Nobody can escape change… the way I see it – Either you will confront change OR change will confront you. You choose. The best way is to accept that change happens and take advantage of it rather than be bogged down by it. Humans and a lot of other species on this planet survived and thrived by evolving themselves as the surroundings changed. Similarly, the best companies can survive, if they can adapt with the surroundings and evolve.
We would not have heard about Google, Hotmail or Paypal if they stuck to their initial Plan (Plan A). The founders quickly evolved their companies. They tried a business model and if that didn’t work, they changed it immediately and tried another. For Paypal, Plan A to Plan F didn’t work. Plan G as we know today worked marvelously and the rest is history. Google grew and could introduce so many products because it encourages a culture of experimentation and Failure. All these and other successful companies evolved by looking for opportunities caused by change in the marketplace and encouraging change and experimentation within their business.
This can happen only if the team is willing to make mistakes, Learn from it and move on. Our school system has trained us not to make mistakes and view mistakes are failures. This view might prove useful for someone working in a large corporation which has lots of restrictions to change, but for an Entrepreneur, mistakes need to be learned from, quickly, and then move on from.
In the old days, when a missile is fired, it had a fixed destination.. “Ready, Aim , Fire” . Nowadays, thanks to modern technology, a missile , can be fired and then it’s course can be corrected midway. Tom Peters has a saying that goes – “Ready, Fire! Aim”. It is the same with a business. When we start the business , the business model is different and if it does not work, we correct course as we move.
Get ready to “Ready, Fire! Aim”…
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Vijay Peduru is an entrepreneur in the bay area and is the co-founder of a bootstrapped startup. His interests are bootstrapping, leadership and spirituality.
Whatever you do, in that, you either succeed or you…. LEARN.
One again, you might have noticed it above – the keyword is NOT fail but Learn!!
Think about it. However smart you are – it’s hard to get 100% of your decisions right.
If you agree, the next question – “What percentage of your decisions can you expect to get it right?”
Just to keep things simple, let us say you get 50% of your decisions right. This means that the other 50% of your decisions will be wrong. That is pure statistics. So every time you end up in a situation in the other 50% (the wrong category) you end up putting the “failure” label and lose time worrying about it giving you less time to capitalize on the “right” decisions and grow. You are creating a huge opportunity cost for yourself.
As the old saying goes, “It is not about falling down but bouncing back every time you fall down that matters.”
Since you can’t be immune to failure, you might always learn from it. If you don’t you lose twice – once from the failure and once from not being able to learn the lesson that failure is trying to teach you.
Whether you accept it or not, failure is an integral part of the game of life. You can’t change it. However, if you do accept it, you have a new source of power as you can bounce back quicker from your failures. This will instantly provide you with some “extra time” focus and further increase the chances of success in the near future.
You can listen to the audio here:
Note:
Illustration by Ming. Ming is the creator of the Fantasy Story webcomic. He is also a freelance illustrator, designer, painting instructor and occasional luxury car salesman. Ming is based in Penang, Malaysia. You can find him on twitter @Artmaker
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We all work hard but don’t seem to make much progress. In a lot of organizations, people seem to be praised high for working long and hard, but they never seem to get promoted or get noticed. Why is this. It is because the definition of “hard work” changed. A lot of people still believe in the industrial age definition that hard work is using your “body” to work hard , but if we look at our current situation, the majority of us do work sitting at a desk in front of a computer.
A new entrepreneur almost always gets an idea and thinks it is the coolest and the greatest idea. He safeguards it and when someone asks him he would say we are in “stealth” mode. He dreams of how he would be on the covers of Fortune, Fast Company and Inc when his idea clicks and takes off. The truth is no one really knows whether the idea will click or not. About 
The earlier posts in this series are as follows:
