Hard Work Doesn't Have to be Hard

Transcript:

Dream bigger, but when is it big enough? Aren’t you exhausted working hard to chase that next big thing? I know I was.

We’re told that hard work is critical to success, but what if hard work is actually holding us back?

I was four years old when my parents moved us to the United States. My brother was less than a year old with nothing more than a couple of suitcases, my parents moved us to this country with nowhere to live. We relied heavily on family until we could afford a place of our own. Our first house was small with cracked windows. I shared a bunk bed with my older cousin, and I remember being in the basement helping my parents scoop out water whenever it rained.

My parents didn’t make a lot of money back then and rarely ever spent money on frivolous things – like new clothes or shoes.

We mostly wore hand-me-downs. Unfortunately, for my brother, he was the first boy in the family, so he mostly wore my clothes.

My parents, they worked hard, and I never knew it wasn’t enough until we moved into an upper middle-class neighborhood.

This was when I started to realize that the kids split into two groups, the haves and have nots.

In other words, the cool versus the uncool kids. I was (surprisingly – not really) and uncool have not who is often teased because I couldn’t afford clothes from the gap.

Wanting to fit in, I learned to work hard so that I could afford the nice things. I was determined to keep up with the Joneses.

In my thirties, I prioritized work over family. Longer hours at the office meant bigger titles and more money.

Until about seven years ago, I hit a wall.

Nothing I had accomplished felt like it was enough. Success still seemed so far away, but the problem was that I had nothing left to give.

I was already so tired from working so hard, frustrated with how hopeless it all seemed.

I complained to anyone who would listen and most of my friends, they empathized – except for one. She listened to me vent a little before. She said, but Jean, it looks like you have it all.

Her comment threw me off because I never saw myself as having it all. There was still so much more that I didn’t have.

So this got me thinking, how could my life look so different from the outside?

And if I was already a cool kid, why couldn’t I see my own success?

They say that Thomas Edison once said that there is no substitute for hard work.

Thomas Edison was wrong.

Hard work is not the key to success, but Americans glamorize hard work. It’s embedded into the American dream, and Harvard Business Review agrees that hard work is important, but to early career advancement.

Here’s the problem. For individuals who have worked hard and passed the initial stages of their career, they’ve earned a promotion, gotten a raise or two, and they continue working hard, hoping for more, but only to find themselves struggling to keep up with the Joneses.

So let me ask you this question – how much harder do we actually have to work to finally blow past the Joneses?

But perhaps the better question is, how much harder can we work?

Studies have shown that 65% of high earning individuals work at least 50 hours a week with 35% of these individuals working more than 60 hours a week. Seems pretty harmless until you take into account other studies that have shown that individuals who work more than 55 hours a week have increased chances of heart disease, stroke, and depression. Is this the success you’re working so hard for?

All right, so we know that hard work doesn’t work. Then what does?

You may have been told to work smarter, not harder, but what does it actually mean? What is the difference between working smart versus working hard?

Well, what some people seem to mean when they say work smarter, go something like this: you and Dave are both coworkers and you’re given the same assignment. Dave works hard to complete the assignment by the deadline. You work smart, you know the shortcuts, and you get the work done in less time than it takes Dave. But with the remaining time that you have, you decide that you’re going to throw in a PowerPoint and draft a white paper to summarize your findings, and you hand this all in by the deadline.

So you win, right? Well, not necessarily.

You still work the same number of hours as Dave, and if you’re the kind of person seeking success, you’re going to continue to work smarter for the same amount of time that Dave is working harder.

So your reward for working smarter, more work, and doesn’t this bring us right back to where we started in the first place?

Exhausted, working hard, chasing the next big thing.

So how do you achieve more if neither working smarter or harder gets you the success that you’re seeking?

I like to argue that it’s not hard at all. I’m offering a different kind of success.

I call it Fractional Success.

During my first pregnancy, I could devour an entire medium pizza all by myself. I didn’t do it often, but when I did, I felt full and happy afterwards, it satisfied both craving and hunger and … bonus points, it totally grossed out my husband too.

Then during maternity leave, when I tried to do it again, looking for that same feeling of satisfaction, I couldn’t finish the whole pie. I couldn’t even finish half of it. Instead, I felt sick.

They say that the key to success is to stay hungry, but what they don’t say is that success is not static.

You don’t always need to eat the whole pie to feel full.

Sometimes one or two slices with just the right toppings may be all you need. Anything more may make you sick.

Fractional success is like that pizza.

You don’t have to do everything or be everything in order to be successful. You get to choose.

But how do you choose?

When my friend said to me that it looked like I had it all, her comment threw me off, and it took me a while to realize that it was because I was feeling out of alignment with the success that I had already achieved. I was trying to eat that whole pizza again. I was trying to be the best in all areas of my life without figuring out what mattered the most to me.

Just like people eat mindlessly, I was trying to work hard mindlessly.

I was working hard for the sake of working hard because that’s what was expected and because I was so concerned with what everyone else thought, I was expressing success but not experiencing it.

So how do you apply Fractional Success so that you can achieve more with less?

First, slice your life into five to 10 different categories. For example, you may have children, parents, spouse, employee, and friends. Other people may also have activists, athlete, volunteer, homemaker, churchgoer.

Then you’re going to place your hands right here in the center of your heart space and ask yourself this question of the categories that you have, “Which is most important to me right now?” and circle the category that comes first to mind, no judgment.

Then over the next couple of days, keep a running list on your phone of everything that you do, even the little tidying up, and when you have a good list to work with, start to take the items in your list and separate them into one of two categories, your plus and minus for all the things that you do that are contributing to the category that you have chosen as most important, this goes in your plus.

All else will go into your minus. These are what we call distractions that are keeping you from accomplishing the thing that you have identified as most important to you at this time.

Then you’re going to take consistent intentional action each day to do the things in your plus list, but most importantly, you’re going to release the stress and guilt that you may feel about not getting to your minus list. They’re just not important at this time.

Here’s an example. About a month ago, my husband was ill and my categories look like this. TEDx work, being there for my parents and friends, taking care of my children, and of course taking care of my husband. Placing my hands on my heart space, I knew immediately that the most important thing to me at this time or at that time was to make sure that my kids’ lives continued as normal as possible.

So, my plus list was focused on taking them to camp and picking them up, making sure they didn’t starve to death and that they had social interaction.

In my minus list went work and laundry. This happened to be one of those family first moments.

Then as my husband recovered, I reassessed. My categories didn’t change, but my plus and minus list did.

In my plus list, I was focused on catching up with work and making sure that I come prepared tonight. Laundry stayed in my minus list.

Now I know what you guys may be thinking that Jean, you got to do laundry at some point, right? Yes, but not when other categories needed more.

And don’t worry, as I am on my last stretch of clean undergarments, I have a very exciting date with my washer and dryer this weekend.

But here’s the most important thing – as I am doing my laundry, my energy is focused on my laundry. When my kids ask me to play, I won’t feel guilty about saying no because they don’t need me more than the laundry does at this time, just like I didn’t feel guilty about putting the laundry aside when my kids needed me more.

And here’s the thing, this is what a commitment to Fractional Success looks like.

You don’t have to be all of it all the time.

When you approach your life like this, hard work stops being hard.

The work itself doesn’t change. Laundry is laundry. But because your work is now aligned with what’s most important to you, your perspectives change.

You get to accomplish more with less.

I was finally able to stop expressing success and start experiencing it.

And for the best part, when I committed to Fractional Success, something unexpected happened. I began to make better memories. I no longer felt the need to Photoshop myself into my family’s mental pictures. I was actually in them, and most importantly, I had my own.

It’s easy to settle for hard work, but to truly experience success, you have to do the hard work of making things easy.

Thank you.