In praise of not working hard
What if it's not true that 'everything that's worth doing involves hard work'?
Since as long as I can remember, I’ve equated working hard with being morally worthwhile. But recently I’ve realised that the times I’ve been happiest and also most successful have been during activities in which I haven’t been working my hardest, and it’s sent me into something of a spin.
We live in a culture that praises us for working hard. If you google “hard work quotes”, you’ll find hundreds and hundreds of such motivational mantras. Many of them, it has to be said, are provided by job recruitment agencies, who have a certain investment in inculcating a widespread aspiration towards working hard among the population. The indeed career guide website tells readers that “dreams do not come true just because you dream them. It's hard work that makes things happen” and “the only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.” But I’m no longer sure that either of these claims are true.
As a child, I was raised with an ethos of hard work. I had been taught to read before starting primary school and, while my classmates worked their way through the Village with Three Corners reading scheme, I sat alone in a corner with The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and, before the end of primary school, Jane Austen’s novels. My mother, who trained secondary school teachers, proclaimed herself to be opposed to the popular liberal belief that “all shall have prizes”, and, as a parent, she bestowed praise only where it was earned, not unconditionally. When, aged 8 or so, I brought home a mother’s day painting from school, my memory is that she responded: “Now, shall we sit down together and work out what’s wrong with it.”
My parents and teachers often spoke about how I needed to be “stretched”. So, when I reached a certain level of attainment, I don’t remember there ever being an option to simply coast for a while, enjoying the fruits of my hard work. Instead, I was encouraged to straight away start striving for the next rung. At my state comp secondary, I and a few friends were identified as sufficiently competent at maths to be able to take our GCSE exam a year early. We all passed, and the following year, while our classmates studied for their GCSEs, the school tutored us in A-level maths and we took that exam *two* years early. We all failed. In retrospect, it would have been far kinder and more sensible for the school to have allowed us to simply enjoy the extra time and space that had been created in our timetables by taking GSCE maths early, rather than rushing to fill the time with more hard work - especially because the hard work in question was pointless and even counter-productive. (A few years later, I would discover that university admissions tutors would home in on that ‘fail’ grade in my ridiculously premature A-level maths exam, not realising I’d taken the exam early, and quiz me about it with concern. It would have been better for both my teenage wellbeing and my educational career to have simply not bothered with the early A-level, but the idea of working less hard didn’t seem to have occurred to anyone, let alone to me.)
As a child, I was quite bright at certain subjects, and I picked up some skills fairly quickly, but I certainly wasn’t a prodigy, and 95% of my ability came from my compulsion to work very hard in order to feel worthwhile, not from any natural talent. In order to reach Grade 8 at piano and saxophone, I practised for four hours each day throughout my teenage years, flogging my fingers through scales and arpeggios and Czerny’s exercises. But I’m not innately musical: I do not have perfect pitch or much sense of beat, and I’ve never been able to improvise, nor recreate a piece of music by ear. Similarly, as an adult, I’ve gravitated towards ultra-long-distance trail-running. It’s a sport in which no particular athletic ability is required, beyond the basic coordination of repeatedly placing one foot in front of another, which is lucky, because I have little coordination and am not built for most sports, having short legs, tight hips, and a top-heavy physique. But, at amateur level, ultra-running almost entirely rests upon the inclination to work hard, to keep moving forward through day and night, regardless of fatigue; and that I can do.
My lack of natural ability in such areas has rarely bothered me, because I’ve always valued working hard much more than I’ve valued the concept of innate talent. And I don’t think that working hard at something you love but have no innate talent for - such as my piano playing or ultra-running - is necessarily a problem, so long as any expectations of world-leading success are sensibly curtailed.
Instead, the problems really begin when working hard becomes valued in and of itself, regardless of the outcome, regardless of the context, regardless of the original purpose. Feeling compelled not just to work, but to work hard, at activities in which we have no genuine interest, when there are other things we could be better off doing, and where the chief end is not the outcome but the hard work itself, is, I think, a sign of dysfunction: either in the individual person, or in the society that praises such behaviour.