The Hard Work Dichotomy
Training human resilience is a delicate balance between finding a person’s limits consistently, while also staying within healthy mental and physical boundaries. This can feel like a walk on a tightrope, because we all know that to improve we must stretch outside of our comfort zones, but what is enough and how much is too much?
Mentally transport yourself to the hallways of every American educational institution you’ve ever been in, and the attempts made to motivate it’s young prisoners with a cringey barrage of cliche "hard work” posters that now also unfortunately saturate all corners of cyber-space.
“Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.”
“Do or do not. There is no try.”
Or my personal favorite,
“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss you’ll land among the stars.”
This is not necessarily bad advice, however at large it is actually quite unhelpful. What needs to be emphasized, taught, and inspired is how to work hard and how to be a master learner.
Is there a Perfect Level of HARD WORK?
Admittedly, yes, you already know you have to work harder than the average person to achieve above average things, not exactly rocket science.
Neither you nor I know of any Chief Netflix Binge Watchers who are also Chief Executive Officers. Again, we’ve been conditioned to understand this our entire lives (remember the posters?).
So, if we all understand that hard work gets us the things we want in life, and we are all capable of working hard, then why do so many of us still struggle to do so? Contrarily, why do so many of us struggle to not over work?
It’s very easy to identify when someone is lazy, but the different ranges of what “hard work” looks like makes it ambiguous to define, and the outliers that exist can sometimes trick us; for example, there are a lot of lazy, successful people. There are also a lot of people who work really hard for very little return on their efforts. Either of those situations can make us feel like we lost the genetic lottery.
Click for some reel talk (get it?)
Then there is our personal favorite in American hustle culture, and it is those who work so hard, who are constantly redlining, stressed, and on the brink of a mental breakdown. These folks can often be found with blood shot eyes and a 20 ounce Starbucks coffee in their hand shouting “I’ll sleep when I’m dead!” and heading back to the office with one eye involuntarily twitching, because if you’re not exhausted, you’re not trying hard enough.
In my 20+ years in athletics I have seen this represented in various teammates and players I’ve coached:
The lazy player who never works out, eats fast food, but looks absolutely yoked.
The less talented or less athletic player who is often injured because they are constantly pushing themselves to the edge just to keep up.
The entitled player who thinks they can do the bare minimum and be the best player on the court/field/ice.
The obsessed superstar that can also be found with the 20 ounce Starbucks in their hand and their gym bag in the other.
Social Media Disilluisonment
If there is one thing social media is elite at, it’s making things look better than they actually are… to a toxic degree. The saddest part is, we don’t even realize that it’s poisoning our perceptions of reality, especially Generation Alpha (born between 2010 and now) and Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012).
When consuming social media, ruthlessly rude little self-deprecating demons can really go wild if you let them. We start to compare our own status to people who we desire to be like, yet who are only showing 2% of their own reality.
I wish I could be as carefree as @yolo1lifehappyhippy.
I should be working as hard as @hustleandgrind365.
The fame, wealth and success of @10xlife is something I will probably never have.
You get the idea.
If we aren’t careful, we can fall into this trap so easily. That’s why so many people end up deleting social media all together, I mean, I’ve done it.
Social media is a great way to repeatedly feed ourselves the wrong message and remain perpetually unsatisfied with the work we are doing. Is it enough? Shouldn’t I be doing more? @hustleandgrind365 is!
“It’s easy to convince yourself that things need to be hard, that if you’re not red lining, you’re not trying hard enough. This leads us to look for paths of most resistance, often creating unnecessary hardship in the process. But what happens if we frame things in terms of elegance instead of strain, sometimes we find incredible results with ease instead of stress, sometimes we solve the problem by completely reframing it.”
Alternatively, social media can be a powerful tool for accessing positive and productive information if we use it properly by following accounts that we recognize as healthy sources of information for our own unique needs.
My favorite accounts: @brendonburchard | @tacticnutrition | @drewhanlen
I’d be remise not to mention my own @makeyourselfak
the Wisdom to Know the Difference
Though I am not a religious person, there is a powerful prayer you most likely have heard before. I love this, and used to recite it before every basketball game, it goes:
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
If you don’t jive with the word “God”, simply take it out or replace it with whatever higher power you believe in. This simple statement gives us a powerful mantra on navigating life and it’s many obstacles.
Mindset ReCalibration
Now the difficult part, don’t click to another tab or app, especially instagram. For your own self-respect, actually answer this question, and if you’re feeling real saucy, do it again in a week.
If I were living the greatest version of my life that I could possibly imagine, what would it look like?
Oof, deep huh? Grab a piece of paper and write as much or as little on this answer as you’d like.
Now, answer this one:
What are the biggest differences between that version of myself, and the version I’m currently living? What do I need to have serenity with, and what can I impart courage to change?
Remember, keep those rude little self-deprecating demons locked away while doing this exercise. In reality, there will always be a gap between those two versions, but knowing what your most “exceptional” life looks like compared to what your current life is allows you to refocus, reset, and attack some habits that you know need changing.
CONSISTENCY OVER INTENSITY
So friend, welcome to where the real dichotomy presents itself. As humans, our brains are programmed to want to be comfortable, it’s called homeostasis. On the same note, because we are human and have the ability to think about our thoughts (HA! in your face other mammals), we know that comfort is not the key to getting what we want. Period. Mic Drop. Underline and highlight that.
If we are comfortable, we simply are not growing, we are either staying the same or getting worse.
The most important, defining quality of working hard is not intensity, it’s consistency.
You know why? Because when you’re pursuing worthwhile things, it will never get easier. There will always be another stair to climb, another problem, another obstacle. And now the true dichotomy, if you work too damn hard, you end up where the lazy live, in burnt-out-ville on the couch.
So, instead of going balls to the wall, or wishing and waiting for things to be easier, learn how to handle hard better. And guess what, handling hard better boils down to your ability to be consistent. To be reliable. To respect yourself and the journey you’re on.
LET’S WRAP THINGS UP WITH SOME EXAMPLES
Consistency looks like: getting out of bed at the same time every day Monday - Sunday, and going to bed at the same time even when you don’t want to, but because you know you need a certain number of hours of sleep to function like a boss.
Intensity looks like: getting 4 hours of sleep on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, being exhausted Thursday and sleeping in, and then making a half ass effort Friday, and using the weekend to be a total sloth because “you deserve it” after the long week you’ve had.
Consistency looks like: writing out daily target goals to optimize your time and productivity.
Intensity looks like: trying to do all the things, all at once, all the time, and then ironically, getting very little actually done, or done well.
Consistency looks like: showing up to practice 30 minutes early daily to get in the world’s most efficient warm up, and then it pay huge dividends months later because that 30 minutes x 5 days a week x 12 weeks = 1800 minutes or 30 hours of quality work.
Intensity looks like: showing up for extra workouts randomly once or twice a week (60 minutes x 1.5 times per week x 12 weeks) = 1080 minutes or 18 hours of work. That’s almost half. And let’s not count the time lost between driving to and from the gym and all that extra laundry.
Consistency looks like: meal prepping on Sunday and Wednesday so you can eat budget friendly clean food all through the week.
Intensity looks like: making one extravagant, delicious, healthy meal for one night, and then deciding that you can never keep that up because between all the effort to decide what to do, go to the grocery store, cook, and then clean up, that eating healthy is too hard.
Don’t get me wrong, there are times where intensity is totally appropriate, but when it comes to wrapping your mind around what it means to have a strong work ethic, intensity shouldn’t be the main part of the picture, consistency should.
Be consistent. Do the work.
