Hard Work with No Reward
I recently listened to a podcast interview with Alex Hormozi and Chris Williamson that discussed the value of consistent hard work with no reward. It was interesting and I wanted to elaborate on this concept.
Difficult goals require endless hours of hard work that nobody sees. A lot happens during these hours. We make mistakes. We fail. We want to quit. We lose motivation. We feel stupid or incompetent or unable to reach the goal. We lose our path towards the goal. We think we’ve reached the goal but we haven’t. We have setbacks and must start over. We wonder what we could have achieved if we pursued a different goal. Much of this is internal.
Then there are the external elements. Others do not believe we can accomplish the goal. They believe we should do something else. They do not understand why we care about this goal and they think that other things are more important. They mock the goal. They disagree with our approach towards the goal. They think the goal is impossible.
People drastically underestimate the importance of consistent hard work with no reward. Without some type of validation, constant hard work can be frustrating and discouraging. Persistent difficult work is daunting because it feels like a sunk cost. We fear that we will waste our time, fail, and be judged harshly by others. The pursuit of hard goals — and the persistent effort to reach them — results in lots of internal and external noise.
Quitting and giving up are the easy and intuitive options.
But the ability to grind very hard for long periods of time is one of the most important (and underrated) skills we can develop. In many cases, achieving a goal hinges on two things: working hard and not quitting. During the time we don’t quit, we improve incrementally, adapt to setbacks and failures, build mental resilience, and learn lessons that can be transposed to other areas of life. The picture is a race of attrition; we win if we continue the race and do not quit.
Hard with work no reward matters for other reasons. Many goals take years to materialize. Often, we can’t forecast when long-term goals will be achieved. Hard work with no reward is also valuable because we can build self-confidence, and we can gain new skills slowly and incrementally. If we track our accomplishments, we may attain small goals even if the larger objective seems out of reach. Whether we notice it or not, not quitting is an accomplishment that we achieve each day.
A thought experiment is useful.
Would we continue towards our goal if we knew that we would attain it on our 10th attempt after 9 failures?
What is we would attain our goal on our 100th attempt after 99 failures? Should we still pursue the goal?
If the answer to these questions is “yes”, the goal is sufficiently important and we should pursue it.
The problem is that we have no idea whether we will attain the goal after 1, 10, 20, 50, or 100 attempts.
If our mindset is that we will fail 99 times and achieve the goal on the 100th attempt, the 99 failures are understood as a necessary part of the process, rather than some type of evidence that we are failures or that we lack the ability to achieve the goal. Win or learn.
Given how we frame the challenge, if we achieve the goal after 25 attempts, we likely improved faster or exerted more effort than we believed was possible. We discover that we do not know our own limits. And we learn that the limits we face tend to be self-imposed rather than external.
Hard work with no reward shifts the focus from the outcome to the process. It is about building skills and resilience on the path towards an objective. The ability to handle failures and setbacks is one of our most important attributes that allows us to become better and stay in the race. Each day, the opportunity to work hard with no reward is a chance to improve ourselves, our capacities, and our mindset.
All views expressed are my own.
They do not represent — and are not endorsed by — any academic institution or research center.
References or mentions are not endorsements.
