If it’s hurting, it’s working

If it’s not painfully difficult, you’re doing it wrong.

Protestant work ethic prioritizes nose to the grindstone industriousness over everything.

Laziness is blasphemy. Sloth is a deadly sin. The threat of eternal damnation for the sluggish looms heavy! The only path to pleasing god and getting into heaven is to break our backs all day, every day, until we die.

Then and only then, we’ll ascend to the clouds and get admitted into the great after party in the sky, where we can finally lie around and enjoy things.

Before we heed this philosophy that our country has come to love so much, we should remember a few things about history.

Puritans may have escaped persecution to start early colonies in our country, but they were also genocidal assholes. They ridiculed and marginalized and violently persecuted people who didn’t agree with their beliefs. Should we really be taking career advice from these sexually repressed, joyless twits?

Here’s the economic and spiritual reality.

Laziness isn’t real. It’s just a word we use to make people feel guilty about taking care of themselves.

The philosophy that if it’s hurting, it’s working; and if it’s not painfully difficult, you’re it wrong, is toxic.

Wealth is not a proxy for the lord’s favor. God doesn’t care how many hours we put in at the office.

Hell, even the lord took one day off every week. And that guy was omnipotent.

Maybe that hectoring inner voice that thinks it’s fighting laziness by telling you to kill yourself is just intergenerational guilt.

Harvard, which interestingly enough was a college founded by the puritans, published a great article about the changing tides of work ethic. Pallotta says:

Worry isn’t work. Being stressed out isn’t work. Anxiety isn’t work. Entertaining a sense of impending doom isn’t work. Incessant internal verbal punishment isn’t work. Indulging the great unknown fear in your own mind isn’t work. Hating yourself isn’t work either. Work is the manifestation of value, and anyone who tells you that a person whose mind is fifty percent occupied with anxiety is more likely to manifest value is a person who isn’t manifesting much. We stopped burning witches at the stake four hundred years ago. It’s time we stopped doing it to ourselves.

Are you correlating your sense of achievement and purpose with your results, or how hard you’re being on yourself?

In my experience as a recovering workaholic, the latter is a futile game with no winners. Because if all you do is work, how will you ever be present enough to see the next breakthrough?

There has to be at least some slack in the system.

It’s funny, I’ve worked at companies where the executives were always saying how they wanted our team to come up with innovative ideas for our clients and each other.

And my coworkers and I were always like, um, when, exactly, were you expecting us to do that work? On our nights and weekends when we’re exhausted and cranky and just want to go to bed? ‘

If we really want to innovate, and build a more satisfied and intrinsically oriented work force along the way, working harder and longer isn’t going to get us there. Nor is thinking that being hard on ourselves is some noble expression of responsibility.

Laziness is an invention. It’s moral conspiracy theory we’ve bought into like the tooth fairy or the boogey man.

If work is hurting, then it’s not working.

If work is painfully difficult, then we’re doing something wrong.

If your mind is fifty percent occupied with anxiety from overworking, how much value could you possibly contribute?