Does hard work pay off in the long run?
Yes and no. Here’s a very tricky scenario that a lot of people get trapped into.
You see, surely sitting on the couch and eating Doritos won’t take you very far in life. That’s pretty much guaranteed.
But also when it comes to hard work, it should be apparent that life doesn’t always reward those who put in the most hours.
I’ve seen so many people who work insane hours, day after day and still get the same kind of life. You don’t see their life moving on an upward trajectory.
Why?
Because they’re just putting in more hours of the same thing.
It’s like having an ice-cream machine and putting in more and more strawberry flavor. You get more strawberry ice-cream till you’re nauseous and then it becomes useless.
Hard work brings rewards until a certain point. After which there are diminishing returns, just like with your strawberry ice-cream.
There’s a more effective key to getting an amazing life. One that doesn’t have diminishing returns and always pays back.
More hard work doesn’t equal more pay-back. Sometimes you put in more hard work and just stay where you are. With this alternative, instead you always move forward, no matter what.
What is it?
Emotional labor.
You see, you may be currently working 100 hours a week at something without spending one single hour doing emotional labor.
That’s what a lot of people do. They keep repeating tasks and things that may be tedious, occasionally frustrating if you will, but that are ultimately within their comfort zone. They know their beast, and that’s precisely the problem.
Emotional labor instead is the kind of pain you go through when you stretch yourself into something you’re uncomfortable with.
Maybe it’s speaking to a stranger on the street. Maybe it’s calling a certain person high up in the company to ask for his mentorship. These things may require five minutes of your time.And yet, they may cause hours or days of emotional labor (before and after), as your ego and old ways try hard to resist them or suffers the consequences.
In the end, the biggest trick is that you may work 100 hours and move less towards your ideal life, than by taking those 5 minutes to approach a stranger.
A fundamental idea of all personal growth, is that you’re always ultimately working at the level of identity.
If you want to get rich, you need to be comfortable with the identity of rich personin the first place. Same if you want to be confident, live a location free lifestyle, or become someone with lots of friends. You need to buy into at the level of identity or you’ll subconsciously resist and sabotage that life when it comes.
In his classic book Pyscho-Cybernetics, Maltz found that his plastic surgery patients often had expectations that were not satisfied by the surgery: even when the external reality changed they kept seeing themselves as they were before, because their self-identity hadn’t changed!
All changes to your self-identity cause emotional labor, because your ego is resisting any change. You’re literally dismantling your self-identity to become someone else, so who wouldn’t resist that?
Of course, if your current identity is the shy boy, no wonder it’s emotionally painful to call that famous person and ask for a favor. It’s a massive threat for the survival of you as an identity-based construct, and it can feel pretty much like a life or death matter sometimes!
But as short as that takes, it’s precisely what helps you begin to shift that very identity. You’re finally changing the flavors in the ice-cream machine, so in the future you can start getting pistachio, hazelnut and much more.
That’s how you build an amazing life much faster. By going in the direction of the emotional labor rather than the hard work.
Hard work may be required here and then still, but the key point is that hard work isn’t the driver of any of your development. Emotional labor is.
Emotional labor may be triggered by different things or practices: doing things that scare you, challenging consolidated beliefs and exposing your own subconscious thoughts through writing exercises, meditation, spiritual retreats, putting yourself out of context, moving to a new country, learning entirely new skillsets and accepting the newbie status again and again, and the list goes on.
Sometimes the emotional labor for you may lie in an area that seems to be unrelated to what you want in life. Maybe you want to grow your business, but relationships is instead an area that you never seriously worked on in life.
Well, working on that one paradoxically will spur growth even in your business. Because everything is connected in life, especially at the level of your identity.
So anywhere you spot an opportunity to do some emotional labor, just take it. No matter where it is. Because that’s guaranteed to move you forward.
Start now. Pick a piece of paper. Start listing things you can do with your life, not in order of how many hours of work they’d require, but rather the intensity of emotions you believe they would trigger. Rank them.
If you want to move ahead faster, now you know where to work.
Also published on Medium.
