Most people don’t want to work THAT hard
“Most people don’t want to work THAT hard.” I stared at the LinkedIn post, re-reading it once more. Another toxic hustle culture post promoting the status quo, I thought to myself. It’s not about the desire to work hard, it’s about WORK itself. “Most people,” I worked to reformulate the statement, “most people work hard at work that is MEANINGFUL.”
Maybe it was the last two decades of hustling myself, to do more, make more, push more as meaningful work became more and more elusive. Or maybe it was the extreme burnout I found myself in after the denial I was in wasn’t enough to keep going. But that statement “Most people don’t want to work THAT hard,” chafed me enough to write this rebuttal:
The thousands of humans whom I have had the pleasure of working with, teaching, befriending, learning from, sharing meals with, and building alongside during my adult years have shown me that people do work hard, are smart, resourceful, kind, and motivated. Give them a real problem to sink their teeth into, and the space and focus to do it, and they can move mountains. Quickly. However, if you poison their work by splitting their focus into too many directions, quadrupling their administrative overhead, all the while telling them they aren’t good enough and need to push longer and harder to get more done, you crush their ability to provide anything of quality that will create real impact. You relegate them to performative busywork and strip away meaning. And when people work “hard” at performative non-meaningful work, they will either burn out, or work fewer hours to try and spend time on something which does provide meaning.
So all you rise and grind LinkedIn leaders out there, remember one thing. It’s YOU who are responsible for structuring your organization and goals to create optimal working conditions for the hard work.
If you want help lowering the administrative overhead of onboarding new employees so more focus can be on the work at hand, reach out to me at mariah@allboarder.com so I can show you what we are building.
