[AKN #80] No One Cares How Hard You Work, They Only Care About Results
LAUGH: A Great Response To Another Example Of Corporate Grandstanding, LOVE: Receive 6 Fun Facts In Your Inbox Every Sunday
Sup homies?
Big week for the USA this week.
Yep, Punxsutawney Phil — the world’s most famous psychic groundhog — saw his shadow.
For all of you international homies who are rightfully asking “what on Earth does that mean?”, allow me to mansplain.
Every February 2nd, if this little rodent sees his shadow, the prophecy says we will have 6 more weeks of winter.
Now, people question the accuracy of this method, but it’s the best we got.
Like Phil’s gotten it right 40% of the time over the past 10 years, which puts him WELL above the average set by all other weathermen.
It’s good to put Groundhog Day behind us because now we can unpause the important groundhog research we were doing.
You see, a groundhog is a groundhog on February 2nd, but on every other day of the year, it’s a woodchuck.
So in celebration of Groundhog Day, we pause the important research we’re doing on approximating the total amount of wood a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
Of course I’m kidding.
We actually do far more gruesome research on woodchucks which involves injecting them with woodchuck hepatitis virus (WHV) in order to study hepatitis B-induced liver cancer.
Because that’s the world we live in.
A late stage Capitalist world where if you aren’t being useful, we’re giving you hepatitis.
There’s no escaping this harsh reality.
You can’t even do drugs to escape reality anymore.
First of all, good luck even getting drugs because cops are cracking down.
Like last month, 4,000 fentanyl pills and meth were seized from a Phoenix used car dealership.
I’d compliment this fine piece of police work, but honestly the dealership ratted themselves out with their retrospectively suspicious tagline:
"You'll get addicted to our deals here at Braking Bad Auto Sales!"
Secondly, even if you procure drugs, good luck surviving! That shit’s never been more dangerous!
Like last week in Buenos Aires, cocaine which was cut with strong sedatives killed 20 people.
Jesus…talk about reaching the end of the line!
All you can really do to survive this cold, harsh world is arm yourself for battle.
And let me tell you, there are guns to be found.
Like look no further than this man and his grandson who reeled in 2 sniper rifles while magnet fishing near Miami.
They also caught 5 hand guns, but those didn't meet the Miami minimum size and weight to keep so they threw them back in.
Moral of the story is we should stop trying to escape reality and simply accept it by leaning into the suck.
We forge meaning in our lives not by escaping reality, but instead facing it every day with a blue collar work ethic.
So stand up and fight for yourself.
But also consider shutting the fuck up about how hard you work and just work instead.
Which brings me to today’s blog post.
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: No One Cares How Hard You Work, They Only Care About Results
I remember a college classmate who used to brag about how he would watch lectures at 3x speed, fall asleep reading the textbook, and spend endless hours at the library.
Unfortunately, he was more the rule than the exception. People LOVED to signal how hard they worked.
For some reason that had an impact on me. I would find myself with a baseline level of anxiety that I wasn’t “working hard enough.”
To alleviate this anxiety, I too began to fall prey to this odd little status game where we brag about how we pulled all nighters by drinking Amped Energy drinks at 3a to study for our macro economics midterms.
Naval Ravikant once said: “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”
And boy did this habit yield some stupid prizes!
Playing this game of talking about how much I studied didn’t directly translate to doing well in classes.
It instead translated to…becoming good at talking about working hard.
The problem about spending large amounts of time parading around your capacity to work hard is you become so obsessed with talking about working hard that you don’t realize that working hard is not the end, but a means to get to the end.
In school, the goal is understanding the subject deeply enough to score well on the test. Working hard is the way to get there, but you have to work hard on the right things.
If your goal is “understanding”, shear number of hours you put into learning something is not a great metric to track.
A better metric to track would be “how you scored on practice tests” or “whether or not you got the correct answer on the homework.”
But we choose to track “how hard we’re working” because that’s easier.
It’s a subjective measure which helps us tell a compelling story that we “did our best” whilst avoiding the objective reality that we “don’t understand something” and might be doing something wrong.
This is how we end up working 12 hours a day and still not getting the desired result.
Which brings me to work.
Working Hard Is Hardly Working
This school example bleeds over into how we approach work.
In work, the end product you are trying to produce is “value for your company.”
In most work environments, the message—both explicit and implicit—is that working longer and more continuously is the best route to get there.
Coworkers proudly discuss their commitment to the cause by working until midnight.
Slowly, you find yourself doing it too because as a mimetic creature, you copy those around you.
On the surface this feels great. You’re fitting in. People are giving you atta-boys.
But meanwhile, back in reality, you feel that this overworking is counter productive.
When you objectively assess the work you’re doing, you come to find you’re working 80 hours per week, but don’t really have 80 hours of work to show for it.
Worse yet, somehow your work product got worse from hour 30 to hour 80. You actually did yourself a disservice by pushing it so hard.
The reason this happens is because you’re mentally exhausted and you’re not giving your mind a chance to rest.
Instead, you’re blowing right through the signs of exhaustion because your drive to fit in with those around you is short circuiting your ability to see the truth.
Mental Rest Yields Insight
Author Michael J. Gelb asked thousands of people “where are you when you get your best ideas?”
The most common answers he gets include “in the shower,” “resting in bed,” “walking in nature” and “listening to music.”
But the most interesting finding in Gelb’s opinion is “almost no one claims to get their best ideas at work.”
So is this saying that working is pointless or that we will just naturally stumble upon genius breakthroughs if we walk or sleep more?
No. Not exactly.
What this is actually saying is that in order to get your best insights, you need to oscillate between periods of intense, concentrated focus and intense concentrated rest.
It is a pattern you see again and again played out by the best creatives and genius inventors of our time: yes they work hard, but they also chill hard.
Because as they say in The Power of Full Engagement:
The highest form of creativity depends on a rhythmic movement between engagement and disengagement, thinking and letting go, activity and rest. Both sides of the equation are necessary, but neither is sufficient by itself.
Produce More By Working Less
The greatest geniuses sometimes accomplish more when they work less.
— Leonardo Da Vinci, to his patron
“Don’t work hard, work smart” is the siren song of 21st Century personal development.
Everyone claiming there is some magical secret they can provide which will change your life.
“Use my framework and you will ascend to the highest level of lifestyle design.”
“Change your note taking system and finally achieve your dreams.”
But honestly, most of these things are the equivalent of 6 Minute Abs for Becoming Smart.
They promise you the world of high performance for minimal effort.
Now this may surprise you, but THAT DOESN’T WORK.
Your problem isn’t the way you store your fucking Evernote notebooks.
The problem is you don’t respect the way your brain works.
So my advice is to close the newest productivity article you are reading and simply focus on the fundamentals.
Work Hard, Rest Hard
When you are working, be very focused and directed for short bursts of time.
When you are not working, simply let go. Consciously stop yourself from time to time to allow your mind to rest and recover.
Maybe even point that focus on a hobby.
Do these same fundamentals day after day, week after week, and then marvel as you produce better results in less time.
Seriously. That’s the “secret”…so please for the love of God give your brain a rest and close the 40-minute YouTube video about time management you have queued up to watch.
LAUGH: A Great Response To Another Example Of Corporate Grandstanding
The Internet used to be this place where people would just have fun.
And we would all laugh when the parents responded by explaining that Pantene Pro V is a name passed down since their great great grandfather, Pantene Pro I.
Not much was taken seriously. Just good clean fun.
But now we’ve found ourselves in a bizarre cultural moment where everyone is serious.
I harp on this a lot.
But I can’t get over how we ended up in a place where Ben & Jerrys is commenting on the escalating situation in Russia.
But despite these nauseating displays of people “using their platform”, I love that the Internet provides us with the responses which made it great in the first place like:
Don’t change Internet.
Note: I don’t have an informed opinion on Russia’s potential invasion. I just thought the response was funny. But if you want me to put my serious pants on for a second, I think we should live in a world where the reporter in this clip is taken more seriously. This is good journalism which should’ve been met with a much better answer than “the evidence I have is that I said it was true.” Alright. Taking my pants off now.
LOVE: Receive 6 Fun Facts In Your Inbox Every Sunday
I’ve really been enjoying Billy Oppenheimer’s Six at 6 newsletter where he sends out an email with SIX fun facts every Sunday at 6 AM (CT).
I came across Billy by way of Ryan Holiday’s recommendation. (Ends up Billy does a lot of the research behind Ryan’s best selling books!)
Billy’s newsletter immediately struck me as a fascinating weekly read because it’s jam packed with fun facts, theories, or elegantly worded stories.
For a taste of what I’m talking about, here are two examples from his Six at 6 Newsletter which I found particularly fun:
After studying people who acted on a dissatisfaction in one career with a jump to another and became happier for doing so—painful transition periods and all—Herminia Ibarra found that we discover who we are and what we are meant to do in doing and then reflecting. “First act and then think,” she said. “We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models.” As David Epstein puts it in Range, “We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”
Billy asked Robert Greene why he had trouble recruiting research assistants for his books and Robert said:
Without exception, they weren’t interested in boredom. It’s a dividing line between people who are successful and people who are not. Mastery requires practice, it requires boredom and tedium, doing the same thing over and over and over. You have to be able to sit with boredom.
So if you are like me and you enjoy reading this type of thing on a weekly basis, I highly recommend signing up for it.
Also, not saying this should factor into your decision, but Billy and I chatted for a couple hours the other night and I can assure you he passes the vibe check.
Like he struck me as the type of person who’s newsletter is going to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio and not turn into a perpetual digital billboard selling you Athletic Greens.
I can just tell his content is going to be awesome to follow as he keeps going along. So think about it…he won’t waste your time with bad content nor is he a total lame-o so it sounds like a win-win for you to sign up for his newsletter.
CLOSING TIME
You don’t have to go home, but you can subscribe here:
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?
Mahalo,
K.Rapp