Is It Okay To Work Hard For Yourself?

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Sep 22

Written By Adam Fisher

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Takeaway Points:

Quitting isn’t bad - it’s an important skill to have. You can’t do everything, so you have to be okay with quitting things that you don’t enjoy or aren’t beneficial to you.
Laziness, too, isn’t inherently bad. It’s a natural part of life and the cycle of productivity. You can’t always be doing something and laziness helps us recuperate from the energy we expend.
Forcing yourself to work tirelessly at all things (your day job included) doesn’t necessarily bring more productivity, satisfaction, or money - so you need to assess if it’s really worth your time.
It is okay to work hard when you want to do it, especially on things that bring you happiness or make you feel proud of what you accomplished.

In the past I’ve written a lot about how I’ve worked too hard.

In general, I’m a proponent of what I would call “being frickin lazy”. I’ve written about it a lot before.

Being A Good Quitter

It’s important, for example, to get good at quitting things if you’re ever going to succeed. In order to succeed at my business, I had to quit a lot of things that I really enjoyed doing - playing World of Warcraft all the time, for example - because I simply didn’t have the time to continue playing it at the level I wanted to. Developing and building my business required a lot of nights spent writing blog posts when I kind of wanted to do something else. It meant a lot of time scrambling to put something together at the last minute because I was running late for the week.

This post, as I type it, is a prime example of that! I was supposed to have this done days ago, and here I am, late, putting words to a text editor.

Quitting is important. It’s about learning to focus and hone your attention, learning to be bad at the stuff that doesn’t matter to you so that you can focus all your energy on the things that do matter. If you go into life thinking that you’ll be the best at everything, and are constantly trying to juggle everything in the world, you’re going to fail.

Being Good At Being Lazy

Being lazy is also an important part of the natural cycle of effort. It’s not natural or even possible for people to be 100% on all the time. There are natural lulls and cycles to effort - natural phases where we alternate between being rested, strong, and energized, and being lethargic, tired, lazy.

Being lazy is an important complement to being active. After a long day at work, you need to rest and recharge. After a hard workout, you need time to rest and recover and enable your body to adapt before you train hard again. Everybody is lazy, and laziness is an important part of productivity.

Another important factor to consider, is that laziness comes and goes in time with yearly cycles as well. Some people are happier in the summer and sadder in the winter, and some people are the opposite. There are two months out of the year where, on a rolling basis, lots of clients go awol for a few weeks - July and December, for summer vacations and winter holidays. Those are normal parts of the human experience, and it’s normal to have your energy levels come and go as well.

The main thing, of course, is not to let that balance get out of wack. When you’re too good at being lazy, and you let it take over, then there’s no space left for productivity. When you stop caring about putting in the effort, then laziness is going to win out. So long as you remain dedicated to the productive effort, you’ll always return to it, no matter how much laziness you require to get back on track.

The Research Shows Us That Effort Isn’t What It’s Cracked Up To Be

While we have the common misconception that hard work means better results, that’s actually not much the case. I’ve written about this more extensively elsewhere, so I won’t repeat myself too much here - I’d highly recommend my post on the topic.

Suffice to say, a few major points:

People generally aren’t as productive, and don’t work as much, as they think
The people who tend to put in the most hours, or think that they’re the most productive, tend to be the people that waste the most time and are least efficient
In many domains, putting in hard work doesn’t actually account for much of your results, which are more due to other factors like genetic aptitude, external circumstances, and so on
At the end of the day, you can put in a lot of hard work, but the reality is that less difficult, more consistent work over a longer period of time always tends to win out in the end.

It’s also self-evidently true in a lot of jobs - if you work extra hard, you generally don’t get paid more, or if you do, you generally don’t get paid much more, not enough to justify the inefficiency of the added effort.

So, at the end of the day, is it ever worth it to work hard?

As much as I hate hard work as much as the next person, I’ve regularly found myself dragged back into it over the past ten years. And I always ask myself one question: WHY?

I was never this person as a kid! All I wanted to do was play video games and read fantasy novels. In high school, I had no ambitions besides the fact that I wanted to survive and find a girlfriend. In college, I had the ambition that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t really know how to do it. How did I turn into this person, who has to write periodically about the need to work less because I keep overdoing it and working too hard?

There’s something immensely compelling about it. I don’t really know what it is. Even in the beginning when I was starting out as a blogger, I really struggled to stay on top of posting once a month. Now, I can barely let a week go by without itching to find something else to write. Sometimes, I have to remind myself that I’ve already written four weeks worth of blog posts in advance, and need to stop writing more. But at the end - now almost a decade - of running this blog, all I can say is that somewhere along the way, I fell in love with it. And I like working hard when it comes to this blog.

To a certain extent, it’s a place where I can be myself. I can talk about all the little silly nerdy things that interest me, and other people can read it, and maybe get something out of it. I’m just glad to be of help to people. I never thought I would be into, well, non-fiction writing, but here I am.

I know that this blog would never have turned into the success that it has, without the hard work I’ve put into it. And that’s part of it - because, at the end of the day, it’s all mine, and I get to decide what silly stuff goes into it, I feel a connection to this work that I’ve never felt about any day job. Even when this has been my day job, I’ve felt a passion for it that goes beyond any other work.

To this end, it’s never really felt like work. Yes, of course, this blog is primarily monetized through the good will of my clients, who support this writing. Client work does feel like work. I certainly wouldn’t do that if I wasn’t getting paid for it, because it really is a lot of work. But when it comes to this blogging work, which makes that client work possible - I’ve just enjoyed it.

Which makes me wonder if there’s another nuance to the question - is it ok to work hard, if it’s work for yourself? I think, at the end of the day, it can be.

When I work for this blog, I’ve been building something - it’s not necessarily a creative endeavor in the traditional sense, but it has been to me. It’s something I can be proud of, at the end of the day, even if just a small corner of the internet reads and appreciates it. I can feel a connection to this work in a way that I’ve never felt otherwise.

When you work for a business, you generally don’t see more money in your bank account if you do things that positively benefit the business. You can try hard and hope to get a promotion down the line, but it’s not a sure thing, and the business is the one benefitting from your effort regardless. When I work for myself, each time the business makes more money, I get to see that benefit directly and immediately.

I think, sometimes, it can be meaningful and positive to put in a lot of hard work - when you’re learning a skill you value, when you’re pursuing a creative endeavor, when you’re building a new business - sometimes, there simply is a lot of work to do, and you need to put in the time.

Learning To Automate Your Time

There comes a point in the development of any business, where it becomes important to minimize the time you spend on further development. You need to hire people to do things for you, you need to streamline your processes, and so on. Once you’ve put in a lot of work, it becomes about learning to automate everything.

This year, for me, has been one of trying to automate as much as possible, to minimize my effort while still getting things done every week. To that end, I’ve hired people, I’ve improved my processes, I’ve streamlined and automated my new client process, and done so many more things to help get my business in line for the next stage in its development.

This is an important step that I put off for so long! I was, in many ways, addicted to being busy - and only when it got to a certain point did I realize how much it was detracting from the rest of my life. Even completely self aware, I kept falling back into the pattern of overwork.

Working hard for yourself can be ok - but it’s still important to be cautious.

I’m taking on a few more clients this month - if you’re interested in fitness coaching, don’t hesitate to reach out via the coaching application page. I’ve been putting together fancy new spreadsheets with plenty of added bells and whistles, and I need some folks to help me test it out.

About Adam Fisher

Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.

During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.

Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.

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