There’s a high chance that you’ve gone through a job description or perhaps had a meeting with an employer which or who resounded a need for candidates who work hard. Why is this a common requirement, what do employers and organizations gain from having people who work hard, and hold on - before all of that - just how much work is hard work? 

We will attempt to answer this question by putting together the most relevant ideas we can find. Read on to see what we found. 

Hard Work is Expressing Spontaneity 

According to Quora user Caleb Beers, hard work has to do more with spontaneity than with anything else. 

“I would say that something is hard work — or even, a “real job” — insofar as it requires spontaneity to do. Of course, there are other things that can make your life easier. Intelligence obviously helps. A good work ethic and a type-A personality help. Knowing how to schedule your time helps. That all helps. But the elusive dimension is spontaneity. Intelligence helps you do stuff faster, and a good work ethic can be learned. But spontaneity, more than anything, seems to be the bottleneck. Once you’ve learned to “do the dishes”, so to speak, the qualitative limitation on what you’re capable of is how creative, how original, how inventive you can be. It’s also the most difficult thing to qualify and the aspect that takes the longest to develop, or become apparent, as the case may be.”

The thought-process here is that hard work features unique contributions. It is performing work in ways that challenge you to make a decision on-the-spot, manipulate a factor or number of factors, and also, maybe, take an uncharted course of action. 

Hard Work is Being Consistent

For hard work to be hard work, there must often be an element of consistency. It is so because things in nature typically deteriorate over time. An example is energy that diminishes as work progresses and enthusiasm that dies out over a period of time. 

Knowing how things go, it is correct to say that trying to do good, quality work over and over means working against the tide. 

Stan Tan on Quora made this post describing the habit of consistency in hard work: 

“When you're talented, you will achieve 10x more compared to Mr Hardwork. You put in an hour of work and get the job done but Mr Hardwork has to put in 10 hours of it to get the exact same job done. After you’re done, you turn on Netflix and play some video games for the next 9 hours. Talent wins.

Now here is where hard work wins over talent. When you're talented, you work less but you get the job done. But when you start working less, you start becoming lazy. 10 hours of work to you start becoming a total nightmare. Sooner or later 8 hours of work becomes a nightmare then 7 then 6 then 5.

It's like a cycle of death. Sooner or later, Mr Hardwork will start overtaking you. He becomes smarter in the process. Instead of working 10 hours to get that one hour job done, he now takes 5 hours. The difference is the habit and your thought process. The thought process of Mr Talented "I'm so smart and I don't have to work as hard compared to the other guys." While Mr Hardwork is "I have to work hard no matter what." Mr Hardwork will continue working because he believes in putting in the hours no matter what.”

From Stan’s description, we see that hard work is consistency. Much of this is built around a mindset which agrees to the idea of continuously inventing and expending energy to get work done. 

Hard Work is Expending Energy

Clearly, hard work is expressed through spontaneity. This spontaneity involves a high level of cognitive activity. In turn, high cognitive activity better directs a person’s action and work. But this comes at a price. The price is that lots of energy is expended doing this. 

The aspect of consistency in hard work separately leads us to realizing that working hard demands energy. Physical efforts cause us to burn off more energy compared to mental efforts. However, being consistent with both kinds of efforts means struggling to produce energy which naturally depletes with time. 

Working hard in a business environment as a founder, entrepreneur or team member typically relates to making efforts continuously over an extended period of time (the business lifespan). Nevertheless, there are instances where we have to make excessive efforts within a short period of time (for example to reach an impromptu goal or objective). 

In the first case above, we work hard by expending energy throughout the entire length of the job. Alternatively, for jobs that require excessive effort within a short period of time, we work hard by delivering such great amounts of effort within the available time. 

To Say How Much Work is Hard Work

Going back to our question: how much work is hard work? It seemed like a lot to answer at the very beginning but now you would agree that it boils down to those three things: spontaneity, consistency, and energy. If so, then hard work is simply work that supports creativity or some form of inventive thinking over and over and over again, expending energy in the process. 

How Does This Apply In a Business Environment?

Knowing exactly what hard work is, you might still wonder how it applies to a business environment. Here’s it:

Hard Work Gives Early Stage Businesses a Much-needed Momentum

The physical law of inertia explains an interesting fact that also applies to businesses. Yes, you heard that right. The law states that objects at rest will continue to remain at rest unless acted upon by an external force. In effect to this, a great deal of force is required to begin moving an object. However, once started, the force required to keep the object moving reduces incrementally. 

Just like objects under this physical law, businesses require a great deal of hard work before they can go off the ground. At this early stage, founders have to dedicate the highest amounts of their time, effort, and resources. They work to build a solid brand, gather a helpful team, reach out to new and prospective customers, and earn the trust of the general public. All of these efforts give the business a much-needed momentum to grow and expand. With time, the amount of work required to keep the business running gradually reduces. 

Hard Work Inspires High Spirits Which Further Drives Productivity:

Let’s be honest here. Not every team, organization or company is lucky enough to have members who are inspired by hard work. Fortunately, some people are different. These kinds of people see the performance of their hardworking founders or colleagues and get into high spirits. 

This is easy since hard work itself is productive. It gets the job done (by being consistent), it gets it done fast (by expending much energy), and it tries to get it done right (by expressing spontaneity). By imitating such performance, an entire team could be driven to become highly productive.

Conclusion 

The need to be hardworking exists at every phase of a startup but founders and entire teams value it particularly at the beginning. The reason for this is that at the early stages, businesses only make a little profit while requiring a great deal of work. This means that compensation for the job would be kept low, consequently, only naturally hardworking employees would function best. 

If you can relate to this whole talk about hard work and you feel like you are with a company or business where you are underpaid or even unappreciated, you do not need to release the throttle. With time, your company would grow and your compensation would increase and even if that doesn’t happen, hard work always pays and hard working people surely get recognized one way or another.

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