Why isn't my hard work getting me anywhere?
Hard work in school vs 'real life'
“Does my hard work still matter, and how important is it?”
Even if working hard got you to your current position, asking this question may shed light on your new role.
In a previous post, we examined the fact that when you enter a new role, the ‘rules’ for success may change.
My understanding of hard work has required a similar re-evaluation.
Working to figure out WHAT to work on
In the corporate world, you often have to invest effort to make sure you’re workign on the right things.
In school, it was usually enough to put your nose to the grindstone and work at the assigned task. You must execute.
Not so in the corporate world.
Instead, you must often figure out what to work on. You must plan AND execute.
The fact that you have to both plan and execute means that if your plan is poor, exhausting yourself on execution may not ultimately serve your goals.
In other words, if you do a poor job planning what to work on, your hard work might not make any difference.
What about goals in school means that execution (not planning) is enough?
When you are in school, the formula, “If you work hard, you’ll succeed” is fairly accurate. There are several conditions which made it fairly certain that if students worked hard, they’d succeed.
These conditions include:
• Defined goals that do not change
• Metrics upon which to evaluate progress toward those goals
• One ultimate, authoritative evaluator of your work
• A clear, charted path regarding how to reach the goal
Defined goals are something like, “Get an A in this class,”; metrics include the grades themselves and the grades on tests leading up to the final grade; and the ultimate, authoritative evaluator of your work is often a teacher or professor.
The clear, charted path regarding how to reach the ultimate goal – “Get an A” is broken down into lots of mini-goals, which usually includes understanding material taught in each class.
Although working to understand material taught in school can certainly require an awful lot of work (I know it did for me), students more-or-less have the guarantee that as they work to master each concept, they will progress toward the ultimate goal1 (at least, the “ultimate goal” in this school context).2
Why doesn’t hard work in the corporate world guarantee success?
Simply put, maybe you’re working on the wrong things.
But you can’t always know that in advance.
In the work world, unlike school, you may face some of the following issues:
• Vague goals, or goals that do change
• Fewer or lack of metrics
• Multiple authorities
• No clear path to reach the goal
The above conditions occur not because anyone is trying to make your life difficult. In fact, the bosses to whom you directly report may not be thinking of you at all! If goals or metrics are unclear, that may be because they simply haven’t been developed – not because anyone is trying to hide them from you.
Goals may be vague, or they may change, because the nature of business is more vague than is school.
Similarly, business or corporate goals are more multidimensional than school goals, so there may be fewer metrics.
There may be more stakeholders making business decisions – not just one professor or teacher deciding your grade. In many firms you may work for multiple bosses before they meet to decide whether you’re promoted or not.
In many cases, there’s no clear path to reach the goal because perhaps the goal hasn’t been reached before. This is especially true if you’re at a startup or new arm of a business.
In fact, a great way to add value in the work place can be figuring out how to create a clear path to reach the goal. (How to help your company figure out a clear path to reaching its goals is a worthy topic, but deserves an entire discussion of its own.)
One solution: Work hard, but also re-assess frequently
However, in addition to working hard, you may need to continually re-assess things including:
• Am I working on the right things?
o What are some indicators that I am working on the right things?
Results in the workplace, approval of the bosses who matter, etc
o If I’m working on what I think are the right things and not getting results, why might that be? Is there anything I need to change?
• If I’m not working on the right things, what could I work on instead?
o What do my bosses think is important?
o What does the organization need / think is important?
Caveat: hard work may have “lumpy” payoffs
The hard fact is that in many areas of business — including sales, marketing, research, and development, — a great deal of work will yield no visible payoff. Your hard work may have “lumpy” payoffs. In other words, some of your hard work may be initially wasted on things that don’t matter.
Here’s an analogy. Suppose you know you lost your keys in a grassy field, but you don’t know where. To find them, you have to search the field carefully. Unless you have the good luck to find them immediately, you will spend a lot of time and effort looking in places where the keys are not. In one sense, this is “wasted” effort. But you can’t know that it’s “wasted” until you look and see that they’re not there. Because there’s no way to find the keys without looking in places where they’re not, the effort isn’t really wasted. But the effort, until you find the keys, will seemingly produce no result. (Actually, it produces the result that you learn many places where the keys are not. Much of real-world work is like this.)
But if you’re trying to solve problems with no well-defined solutions, you are naturally going to go down wrong paths.
And this is just part of the journey. When you know to expect it, you may be less put-off when it occurs.
I suspect that hard work with no immediate payoff, or hard work that feels wasted, may be especially common for people in their 20s who are trying to figure out what they’re good at, what they like to do, and what work environments they thrive in.
Does “hard work with no immediate payoff” resonate with you? If so, please leave a comment! We’re in this together.
Summary
Hard work is important in the real world, but it’s also important to figure out what to work hard on. Because the conditions in “real world” environments can differ greatly from conditions in school, figuring out what to work on can be more difficult. Hard work yields results in less linear fashions than in the real world.
But, that doesn’t mean that hard work isn’t valuable. It just means that you must learn to plan and re-assess as well as execute.
This is not to minimize the effort that understanding new material takes, nor is it meant to ignore the fact that understanding HOW to learn material can be different, and uniquely challenging, for each student. For example, some students don’t learn via the method that the teacher uses, so these students have to figure out how to better learn for themselves. Many students have to find the study methods that work for them. This does require a significant portion of “charting your own course” in an academic context.
I certainly do not mean to imply that getting an A in the class should be, or is, anyone’s actual ultimate life goal. I’m talking about the ultimate goal in this narrowly-defined space.
I relate to this so much. In school, it always felt like you just needed to be good at every subject, finish all the assignments, study hard, and that was kind of it. I actually struggled with this a lot because I was a pretty big nerd, and that mindset stuck with me. I’d get overwhelmed by the constant feeling that I had to do everything. I’m still fighting it sometimes, but my prioritization skills have improved a lot over the years. Too bad schools don’t really teach how important it is to choose your battles and focus your energy where it matters most. Actually, realizing how many skills we don’t learn in school was a big reason why I started building my first startup, DO-IT App, to help young people develop the skills they’ll actually need for real life.
i needed this tbh