> It’s not entirely clear to me why working hard has become a Bad Thing in certain parts of the US
Because it depends on who is getting richer from your hard work. If you work hard in a corpo and you have constant salary independent of your work results, your boss will have a ferrari sooner. If you work hard on your own project, you will reap the benefits.
Another comment point out: "For a very specific definition of “success.”". Some might read the article as "this is how you make a lot of money". I read it as how to be appreciated/valued/be indispensable. Neither is necessarily wrong, but you correct that if you goal is to be richer, monetarily, then the setting in which you apply these advise will make a large difference.
In a corporate setting, the advice on: Get good at sales, Be hard to compete with and Build a network, will get you much further than working hard. Working hard in large corporation will in many case only grind you down, if don't manage to make your work visible. It's not only in the US, other countries don't view working hard so favorably anymore, and I think it's due to it being tied more directly to stress, rather than success. Hard work alone will make a person stressed, but does not guarantee success, selling yourself and networking will be much more likely to result in success if applied alone.
Overall it is good advice, as a whole, perhaps more so if just want be happy in you profession, feel secure and have a sense of belonging.
>In a corporate setting, the advice on: Get good at sales, Be hard to compete with and Build a network, will get you much further than working hard. Working hard in large corporation will in many case only grind you down, if don't manage to make your work visible. It's not only in the US, other countries don't view working hard so favorably anymore, and I think it's due to it being tied more directly to stress, rather than success. Hard work alone will make a person stressed, but does not guarantee success, selling yourself and networking will be much more likely to result in success if applied alone.
>Overall it is good advice, as a whole, perhaps more so if just want be happy in you profession, feel secure and have a sense of belonging.
Something is missing in that formula because this is exactly why we have the toxic culture we have in a big corp today killing creativity, promotion first attitude, and all kinds of politics. It's pretty screwed up. People are not robots. I hate these pieces of advice that treat people as soldiers with no emotions. If you want to go A you have to do B. then it will work. Yeah right...
Not sure why you are getting downvotes, this is a sound take.
I'll springboard off it: what are some good ways to network? I'm 40 and have been ignoring these skills for too long, opting for the "hard work" path, and seeing the limits of that. Confs? Open source? Talks? Twitter (please no)?
Honestly I just like talking to people, so I automatically build a network.
The best why however seems to be helpful. Solving a minor issue for someone in accounting may seem like nothing, but it’s important to them and they will remember you.
networking to consciously grow your network is about as useful as growing your followers so... you have a lot of followers.
What can you offer? what do you want to share? what are your passions? What brings you great joy?
Define some of these and then look for people who share your values. "do things that don't scale" as in find a handful of people and reach out directly. small focused networks are superior to large dispersed networks
The political ruling class of the US sold out their people for short term gain (starting around the 60's or so). Working hard for a high trust, tight knight community is likely the ideal state for most people. The solution isn't retreating further and isolating yourself - the solution is figuring out how we can be a cohesive society again.
This is a challenge but I'm trying. I have a long and sordid history of overworking on things that did not give back anywhere near what I put in. I'm testing the thesis that it was because of power dynamics and ownership.
I'm a year and a half into a project that I've worked on fullest time with max grit that I own completely. If it succeeds even a little I plan to build 3-5 dome houses on our rural land for indie gamedevs and artists to work on their personal projects for a year without rent. We'll only ask for a tiny percentage of revenue sharing just to try and make the thing self sustaining. A little forest moon base for dreams.
I hope by not being parasitic and actually just helping people do the thing I have been struggling to death to do, it would move the needle a few atoms towards what you're describing.
My greatest fear is that the system is so efficient that some how helping others is impossible, and I'll figure out why only when I'm dry. It's hard to imagine, but I haven't seen much help from the waterworld captains while I've been cobbling together my raft of flotsam. Maybe it's because sailing is hard and storms are kind of scary no matter how big the boat. Few grow old enough to find the time.
Feel free to email me, especially if you're among that rare resplendent type.
I find these charts interesting but don't buy the tie to ending Breton Woods. Society was just as capable of extreme inequality under a gold standard. See the Gilded Age.
Globalization and the IT revolution also happened in the same time frame, and have contributed to inequality via much more obvious mechanisms.
Anything other than one person's video? Videos take a long time to watch, and longer still to ferret out and check out cited evidence for the claims (if there is any).
Also because there's more to life than work. In fact, for most work should just be an means to an end. This doesn't mean that you work should be boring or unimportant, quite the opposite in fact.
A corollary of "13. Be Internally Driven" would be that you should find work that is not just an instrument for supporting your life, but a goal that is meaningful in itself.
That is, you should live (at least partially) to work, and your work should be worth (part of your) life.
It's possible for certain addicts, like myself, to have an amazing quality of life living to work to live. Total alienation, just work like fuck. Workaholic, only with an actual substance acting as workahol.
So what I would do when I was both well-stocked as far as the medicine cabinet, and in addition getting paid a job where I ended up well ahead, was just work.
I'd show up to work like three times a week because the commute was long and very dangerous, biking on highways and such, til I found the terrible bike path I was meant to use. Still riding on roads a lot.
But when I got to work? Just plow through it. No shifts, none of that, no. Like yeah socialize at meals with the company, but just work. Just work. Pit stops, so like I needed dex as energy, really high octane fuel, because there was no other way to support those work trances. All the energy was in my skeletal muscle and brain. And I did a great job at everything on the first try.
Plus I had very productive behaviors as an employee, so I had a few things I was doing in parallel, solving them like puzzles, then when I got stumped I'd switch puzzle. Then when I had three questions together I'd tell my boss, so as not to be interrupting all the time, and figured them all out and got back to work. This happened on a like 2 hour basis. But mostly it was not based on hours, but on milestones. Like if it took fifteen hours to get to the next milestone, and I showed up at 10 AM, that just meant I'd be done at 2:30 AM (with lunch and pit stops, talking to people on the hallway).
And I ended up with more and more money! Then, what I did is I went to the City and partied. I was generally the life of the party among the men. I met so many beautiful women, hot women, cute women, mysterious women, flawed women (my favorite), of so many nationalities, like I was going to meet two Afghan women even. It was great. Very romantic.
It was much better than before, instead of work to live and live to work it was work at a loss for an ungrateful Chilean negrero, get nagged about the clock, negotiating a pay cut from under the local minimum wage to even less, constantly, deal with a doctor who also wanted to starve me of medication, and feed bad habits like smoking and coca-cola which were an inferior substitute to the medication on shortage.
Work to live and live to work, hey at least you live and if you like the work!
Funny thing about Ferraris: they actually are not very good cars. They look great, but they are uncomfortable, notoriously unreliable, and not as fast as a C8 Corvette which costs 1/3 the price and makes a great daily driver.
Because it depends on who is getting richer from your hard work. If you work hard in a corpo and you have constant salary independent of your work results, your boss will have a ferrari sooner. If you work hard on your own project, you will reap the benefits.