It is often said that only two things are certain in life: death and taxes. With apologies to Christopher Bullock, I would like to add one more item to this list: the mantra of hard work. After all, it seems that no matter where you go in the world nowadays, one piece of advice seems to be constant: work hard, and good things will happen to you. “You can do anything you set your mind to, as long as you are willing to work hard,” is another popular variation.
But how true are these statements, exactly? The fact of the matter is, there are many people in the world who work hard and pour their hearts and souls into achieving their dreams, yet fail to do so. For example, though there are thousands upon thousands of amateur athletes, only a select few go on to compete at the professional level. 1.1 percent of NCAA men’s basketball players end up playing in the NBA, for instance. And that 1.1 percent is composed of players who were good enough to be recruited by colleges. What does that say about the chances of the young kid playing on his driveway, the kid who isn’t quite tall enough or doesn’t handle the ball quite well enough, but still dreams of playing at the highest level?
This is not meant to be an indictment of encouraging people to chase their dreams. As cliche as it may sound, you do indeed miss 100 percent of the shots you do not take. However, it is worth considering why we persist in telling others that with a little hard work, they can achieve anything they wish. There are a few usual suspects: overgeneralizing based on inspirational stories seen in the news and blind optimism. Yet, it seems that the most important factor is the mythical quality that people seem to have ascribed to the concept of hard work.
One can easily see how much hard work is valued in today’s world by the response to its antithesis—laziness. One of the most popular criticisms of millennials is that they are lazy—even if there is not much data to back up that claim. PolitiFact devoted a whole piece to answering the crucially important question: who played more golf while they were president, George W. Bush or Barack Obama? Speaking of Obama, Duke’s own Coach K once called out the President for taking time out of his schedule to fill out a March Madness bracket, saying he should focus on the economy instead.
But one doesn’t have to look too far to see the concept of hard work in action. Ask someone how things are going in their life and you are likely to get a response of “busy.” Busy, it seems, has supplanted “okay” as the default neutral response to those kinds of questions. Yes, a lot of us seem to take great pride in how busy we are. However, it is worth asking: are we really that busy? How hard are we actually working?
Unfortunately, the answers to those questions are probably not as nice as people would like them to be. The truth is that most of us don’t work as hard as we could. Yes, you pulled an all-nighter finishing three homework assignments—but couldn’t you have avoided such a scenario if you had started them earlier? Or maybe if you hadn’t been watching so much Netflix? Things don’t seem to get much better for people who have entered the workforce. Stayed overtime at your office to finish a project? Great, but if you had spent less time reading funny jokes in emails your co-workers sent you, would that have even been necessary?
Yes, there are people who effectively manage their time and still have trouble meeting deadlines, but those people are few and far between. For the vast majority of people, these punishments are self-inflicted. Despite giving off an image of working hard, a lot of us embrace every chance we can get to not do so. For example, people spend a lot of time playing games in Google’s logo. They take advantage of “study breaks” to have an excuse to not do work. And they go on BuzzFeed to read about how lazy people are. Oh, the irony.
So, the question becomes, is all of this a bad thing? No. After all, being lazy has its benefits. People do need the occasional break; if it is possible for one to be too lazy, it is certainly possible for one to be too hard-working. In addition, many of history’s greatest inventions came about as the result of laziness. Was the cotton gin really necessary? After all, people at the time were perfectly capable of manually separating cotton fibers from their seeds. And people were certainly capable of covering long distances before the airplane was invented. Yet, I don’t see anyone accusing the creators of such inventions of promoting a culture of not working hard.
In the end, perhaps it is unfair to say that the concept of hard work is a myth. Hard work can take you places, but there are limits to how far it can take you. So, we should be telling people, “You can do most anything you set your mind to, as long as you are willing to work hard,” as that is a far more realistic statement. But let’s not be hypocrites when we say such things to others. Let’s be more honest about how hard we are actually working, rather than putting on a show, and let’s take the time to examine our work ethics and see how we can improve them. Only then can we find the happy medium between working hard and hardly working.
Ben Zhang is a Trinity senior. His column, “human foibles,” runs on alternate Thursdays.
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