The point is not the hard work

You have to go to the trouble to design and build the machine, but it pays off over time. (Image source)

An honors course is an opportunity to do extra work for the sake of proving that you’re a person who is willing to do extra work.

You can’t fake it and you can’t delegate it, both for the purposes of your own learning and for the credit due. There are no shortcuts. A top student must be thorough and conscientious. Efficiency is not a priority; the teacher doesn’t actually need 25 different papers on the same subject. Grasping an esoteric concept takes hours that don’t translate to productivity, per se—that’s not what it’s for. In academia, we’re not looking to accomplish things more quickly and easily. As in weight lifting, the point is the hard work and effort.

Though many people construct a parallel between the classroom and the workplace, the goals of paid work are totally different. In the workplace, there is no benefit to time and effort that doesn’t translate to results. The point is not the hard work—it is the outcome. Only the work that serves the outcome matters. If that work can be reduced or eliminated, it’s better for everyone.

In the workplace, we would never write 25 different papers on the same subject. We’d collaborate to produce only one, with each person contributing their best skills. We could even go a step further and question whether the paper needs to exist at all. What purpose does it serve? Could there be a more efficient or effective way to gather and share the same information? What is the information going to be used for? Does it even need to be shared in the first place? These questions, exasperating when asked by a recalcitrant student, can be useful and valuable when they arise among colleagues.

Of course, not all for-profit operations welcome suggestions for improved efficiency and effectiveness. After thirteen or more years spent in school, working hard for the sake of working hard, many of us are still stuck in that mode. We reward compliance and diligence instead of innovation. We hang onto low-level work that would be better to delegate, measuring ourselves by the volume of our output instead of the quality of our decisions. We believe that intense effort, even on pointless tasks, is a measure of how much we care.

Breaking free of this mindset is an ongoing process. We have to practice doing things that might make us feel a little guilty at first, like hiring someone else to do something we are capable of doing, or replying to a long email with a shorter one. We might implement a quick and imperfect fix to a problem instead of spending weeks or months developing the ideal solution. However, our feelings might shift from guilt to enthusiasm when we begin to see the difference that these adjustments make. Questioning assumptions and improving systems becomes a game in which everyone wins.

In my work as a consultant, I have observed that the biggest obstacle to improving the effectiveness of a business is the set of beliefs held by the team. If the team believes that it is virtuous to go above and beyond at all times, they’ll find that interesting ideas are stifled, people micromanage each other and themselves, and everything will take way too darn long. The way out is to bring these beliefs into the open, acknowledging how deep they go, and praising efforts that people make to challenge them.

Questioning the value of hard work may seem counterproductive, but it is necessary to build a business that is based on creating great results rather than the academic mentality of demonstrating great effort. We can still work hard, but we can channel it into an outcome that we feel proud of. We can see our labor make a difference not just for ourselves, but for others.