In a recent article, I shared my enthusiasm for some of the confidence and hacking-the-system approaches covered in . In the reader comments that followed, there was lots of agreement but also some Tim-bashing, suggesting that he advocates taking unethical shortcuts and shunning real work. They had a good point, and it has reminded me to write this article today, on a topic I have long wanted to cover: Working Really Hard.
Sometimes on this blog, you’ll hear me celebrating the idea of leisure. In the , I talked about hanging out at home on a sunny Thursday morning while everyone else is at work, sweeping a few leaves off of the driveway in my pajamas. Other times I’ll talk about kicking
back with a deluxe home-brewed beer or catching giant fish and snowboarding in exotic locations.
It would be easy for an impressionable youth to see these decadent displays and latch onto them as the end goal. “How can I take a shortcut to get what Mr. Money Mustache has?”, they would say. “I want that end result, and I’m willing to do any sneaky hacks I need to, to get it”.
So today I’m going to have to shatter the illusion I have built up about my easy life. But don’t worry, it’s not a bad thing. It’s actually a piece of even better news:
You too can have the lifestyle of your dreams. And to get it, you will need to do an absolute shitload of insanely intense, ball-busting work. And here’s the best part: the insane work will bring you just as much happiness as the leisure time!
So you get to achieve whatever you want, and you get to work really hard for it. Isn’t that great news?
Despite the fact that I sometimes talk about not working, I have actually grown to really love hard work. But it was only in the last few years that I realized this.
Ever since I hit first grade and was fortunate enough to be placed in the top reading group, I have been hooked into hard work. Not realizing there was any other option in school than to get all “A”s on the report card, I naturally did whatever amount of stupid busywork and coloring, repetitive addition and subtraction, and putting up with irrational rules, to get the perfect grades. Growing up through high school, I attended all the classes and did the necessary ass-busting to get the grades that would grant me university admission and eventually graduation. At the time, I thought I was enduring a wasteful hardship, but really there was something else going on in the background.
On the side of all this school work, I signed myself up for a second line of work in the pursuit of cash. With frugal parents that didn’t believe in giving their kids a free ride, I was forced to work for any money I wanted for myself. Starting at age 10, I cut the grass and washed cars. At age 12, I started working on their old victorian house, stripping old paint from the massive front porch* and doing other projects which culminated into building my own bedroom in the attic at age fifteen. I later advanced to a cushy minimum-wage job pumping about 4,000 gallons of gas into rusty old Chevrolet Caprices every day, then moved up to a less busy gas station, then a hardware store, then a convenience store.
Then engineering jobs between school terms (even over the Christmas holidays once), then full-time engineering work including many weekends and evenings, then even the construction and blog-typing work I’m doing to this day.
There have been many times during this history of work, where I have thought that I had it pretty hard. When I had to spend entire days on the university campus in the dead of
a freezing winter, trudging through the snow with inadequate food and non-waterproof boots from the 8:30AM calculus class, to the 9:30AM chemistry class, on and on right through to the 8:00PM physics mid-term exam, all while being surrounded by a class of Engineering
students with far too many nerdy and quiet dudes who never made jokes, and far too few beautiful girls, that was pretty tough.
Whenever I’m upside down with my head and one scratched and filthy arm stuffed into a floor cavity, holding a grinder which is spinning a masonry blade cutting off old nails and plaster so I can remove a wall or a ceiling, and the whole scene is a dark din of Vietnam-style dust, sparks, and shouted expletives, I sometimes think that work can get a little unpleasant as well.
But as I’ve gotten older and made the connection between the hard work, and the results, and the constant learning and deep base of happiness it seems to provide in ever-increasing quantities, I have come to realize something I wish I could go back and tell myself at age fifteen:
Every single second of hard work you perform in your life, will come back and benefit you many times over for the rest of your life – in often unexpected ways.
In other words, no hard work is ever wasted. It sounds ridiculous, but I find it to be ridiculous how often this proves to be true.
One time I hit a serious roadblock when building my first house. Because of the architect missing some obscure rules about fire codes and roof venting, my house was not going to pass the “framing” stage of the building inspection. There was a workaround, which involved paying an extra $5000 to have an insulation company install a special kind of spray-in insulation. My business partner “Dean” (who we all met in the
article), wanted to take the shortcut and just hire the company. The other option was for me personally to spend the entire weekend meticulously cutting and gluing up strips of rigid foam-board insulation to every square inch of a high vaulted ceiling.
“Fuck the $5000 expense”, I said, “that’s not in the budget. We can crank out the fix this weekend, and only spend $300 in foam board instead of five grand for the spray”.
Dean opted out of this task, since he always liked to take weekends off to relax. But luckily I had another hardworking friend who helped me out and we got the work done, and saved the $4700.
The work sucked at the time. It was dark and cold working in that house shell in late November, I missed my wife, and I got coated in filthy powder from the insulation. I questioned my own wisdom for taking on the extra task. It was only money after all.
But it wasn’t only money. Over the subsequent years, the information I was forced to learn about roof venting, foam board insulation, fire codes, building inspections, and a dozen other things from doing that work, have enabled me to solve countless other problems in home construction and energy-efficient design. Solving these other problems has brought in even more knowledge, and opened up a whole new section in my mental toolbox that I get to use for figuring things out in many areas of life.
And the shared experience of completing the shitty work together helped to build a longer-term friendship with the guy who helped me with the work. This guy is still out there succeeding, and probably even reading this alongside you since he is a practicing Mustachian. And when I look around at other friends who survived the Great Recession while keeping their businesses alive and their base of friends intact, it
is always the ones who were willing to sacrifice a weekend to, figuratively speaking, glue up their own damned foamboard to solve life’s little emergencies. Meanwhile, Dean ended up crashing himself into bankruptcy, mostly because of his aversion for hard work.
And that brings me to my next point: Shortcutters like my old business partner were often excited by the idea of making money without doing work. I have always been more interested in the idea of doing work, and making money from it if possible. He always talked about how our business profit sharing should not be based on how many hours we contributed. I felt that it should be, since with hard work comes accomplishment. It led me to create this Mustachian Maxim:
In the long run, in the Game of Life,
we all get Paid by the Hour.
There are a few lucky exceptions, like the kid who gets a trust fund or inherits his family’s business, the early employees in a company that eventually goes public, or the guy who gets famous for doing something stupid on TV. But when you’re starting from scratch, you need to think of every hour of work you do as planting a seed that will bloom at some unpredictable time in your future life. Sometimes it looks like successful people never do any work. Most of the time, it is because they have respected hard work all of their lives.
Tim Ferriss often praises the idea of minimal working hours. But if you look at how he arrived at the Four Hour Workweek, it was through years of extremely hard work, research and testing, and 80-hour workweeks. During those 80 hour weeks, he thought he was just wasting his time and answering customer and supplier emails and phone calls. But really in the background he was learning very quickly about how businesses and people work, and being forced to devise a system to take himself out of the loop. Without the 80 hour workweeks, he never would have been pushed to innovate, and we never would have heard of him.
Bringing all this back to the Mustachian way of life, this is why I am always advising you to work hard in your day job, but then also come home and take care of your own kids, clean your own house, cut your own grass, and spend the remaining time reading books or websites – to research things that are of interest to you. With no passive television watching allowed.
By doing all of these things, you’re actually working and learning all the time, without realizing it. Your mind is making unexpected connections between things you did during the day, things your kids said, things you read at night, and they are forming into new ways to make yourself happy, or to start your own business and earn more money, or to save money on some aspect of living, or get life in general figured out.
Hard work can be painful, but it should always be viewed as a good kind of pain, just as you celebrate a good burn in your biceps and forearms when doing a record-breaking set of concentration curls.
When you find really enjoyable work, you can get many of the same benefits without as much pain. But both kinds are to be welcomed. It is the source of growth in your life.
So get back to work!
*which, looking back, I now realize was surely lead-based paint. Nowadays we don’t let our kids play with that stuff and we make painters wear plastic space suits and ventilators just to handle it. Ahh the naive ways of the 1980s.
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In the Midwest, where I am from, many of the men and women there tend to start getting bigger and bigger, and wider and wider, when they hit their 30s.
I am not saying they all do, of course, but there is a definite trend there that I believe is much, much more “pronounced” than in other areas of the country.
On the block where I grew up, a group of these women got together and decided to do something about it by exercising.
For hours each day, in a group of five or more, they would walk around the neighborhood in plus sized sweatpants with water bottles.
Rain or shine, I would see them out there meandering around the neighborhood.
It must have been a lot of work.
winters, I would see them sitting on indoor bicycles at the gym peddling away while watching soap operas.
However, when I saw these same women at neighborhood picnics they would eat all sorts of sweets, carbohydrates and other unhealthy items.
It does not take a rocket scientist to know that exercise does not change anything if you do not change your diet.
If anything, a lot of exercise might even make you eat more and gain more weight.
For years I watched these women walk around the neighborhood without losing any weight.
They worked and they worked and nothing ever happened.
To me these women are a very good metaphor for what most of us do in one way or another with our careers: We may work a lot but we do not get anywhere.
We do not get anywhere because we are not willing to do the “hard work” to get ahead.
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In the case of weight loss, the really “hard work” is resisting the temptation to eat when you are hungry, changing your eating habits, eating less, eating less satisfying foods.
That is easier said than done–but this is where success or failure comes from in terms of losing the weight.
It is not the amount of work you that matters … it is how hard you work that matters.
Resisting the temptation to eat when you are hungry is much more difficult than walking around the neighborhood at 2 miles an hour while gossiping with your other friends.
The skill and ability to fight the urge to eat is difficult and hard work.
It is in hard work, though, that we get our real results.
When I was in college, our fraternity used to have parties with 500+ kids every Friday night.
They were a “for profit” enterprise and we invited the whole school, served cheap beer and used the funds from the party to subsidize the expenses of running the house.
Since there were so many people at the parties, we used to hire a retired Chicago policeman to stand by the door in case there were any problems, fights and so forth.
He would show up around 9:00 pm and stand in the doorway until about 1:00 am and then leave.
He would not talk much and would stand there in cold, heat and all sorts of weather just waiting until the party was over.
Despite being in his 60s, he was a large man and always carried a gun.
He looked menacing and served as a deterrent for people getting out of control and trashing out house.
At the end of the party, we would pay him $150 for his “security” services.
He was more expensive than other guards we could have hired because he carried a gun.
We thought it was “cool” to have a guy at the party with a gun and a good deterrent in case something went wrong.
I was the Treasurer of my fraternity my junior year of college and used to be in charge of paying him.
I thought that $150 seemed like a lot of money to pay him for standing around.
One day I told him that I thought he had a pretty good job standing there doing nothing for a few hours. That was the only time I ever saw him get mad:
“I’ll tell you something,” he said.
“When you are my age you will not be spending your Friday nights standing on the porch of a fraternity house.
I guarantee it.”
I have thought about this statement numerous times throughout the years.
He was right, of course, but I felt there was a lot more depth to what he was talking about than I was seeing.
The policeman was working hard and making a major effort—working all Friday night—and yet he was not really getting ahead.
However, there were not many other expectations for the policeman beyond standing there.
He was not expected to engage in long division.
He was not expected to sell anything.
He was not expected to perform surgery.
He was not held responsible for the results of a marketing campaign.
He was not charged with helping people understand their problems.
He was not responsible for merging two companies together.
He was not responsible for giving complex stock advice.
He was not given complex tasks to think about when he went home that evening.
He was just expected to stand there.
For the most part, he could think about what he wanted, when he wanted.
No one was controlling his mind.
Towards the end of his life—after a tragedy struck his business, my grandfather was a security guard and sat in a booth at the entrance to a factory every evening not doing much of anything.
He just sat there and there was no expectation that he engage in any type of complex thought, movement, or likewise.
He was just expected to sit there.
After having had a rewarding and exciting career, his life suddenly changed when he was expected to do nothing.
He died a short time after starting the job.
Just about everything that you can do that is going to provide substantial economic and societal rewards is going to be difficult, taxing and hard work.
It is going require that you remain focused and use your mind in ways that others do not.
It may require that you take risks.
It may require that you think so hard that you get tired.
It may require you organize people to help you.
It may require you move far away.
It is going to require you do work that others do not want to or cannot do.
When I was growing up, I always heard about how doctors and lawyers made a lot of money.
I never understood why.
Why do they do so well?
Because they do work that others do not want to do and the work they do is hard.
First, they have to go to school and stay focused for a decade or more.
They have to sit through classes and do well in them.
They have to take tests and study a lot.
They have to do all this instead of working and potentially enjoying the fruits of their labor right away.
Not only do they have to invest all of this effort in school, but they invest all of this effort and risk failing.
They may not get into a medical school or law school.
They may flunk out of medical school or law school.
They may not pass their medical boards or the Bar Exam.
All of this is tough.
And it is risky.
Second, they have to work very, very hard when they get out of school.
In the case of a doctor, they may have to stay up for 48+ hours several times a week and be responsible for peoples’ lives while they are working. In addition, they need to spend years working for low wages before they even can get a decent salary.
A lawyer may work 3,000+ hours a year for years inside of a law firm reading papers, filing things, being yelled at and more.
The work is difficult and it is not easy.
The work has a price.
And even after all of this the lawyer is not guaranteed a good job, salary and so forth.
The components that make doctors and lawyers highly paid are
Using their mind
Always being available
Committing to something for a long period
…and more.
This is far different from what the typical security guard is expected to do.
Most security guards are just expected to stand there. None of the hard work, commitment, sacrifice and so forth is at all necessary.
When the most successful people in the world go to work—whether it be Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs, or otherwise—they probably are not working longer hours than you or I are working.
However, the quality of their time and the way they use their minds during work is going to be drastically different than the way we use our minds and time.
They are going to be more focused.
They are going to be engaged in complex thoughts and pushing their minds instead of daydreaming.
They are going to confront difficult issues and concepts instead of avoiding them.
They are going to be honest with themselves about what they are doing right and wrong.
They may force themselves into a difficult routine even if it is not comfortable.
The people who succeed are willing to work harder.
It is like this with everything.
The quality of the work you do is about how hard you think, the
The most successful salespeople, for example, spend lots of time prospecting.
They follow up with past clients.
They send out birthday cards.
They go out to lots of dinners.
They make phone calls even when they do not want to.
They take pains to make sure they have the best appearance and dress.
They read and think about sales.
They push themselves in ways that people who are not successful do not.
In contrast, the person who is not successful may spend their time not being as “productive” and taxing their mind to the same degree.
This is the difference.
In your career, you need to do the “hard stuff” and make sure that you are doing what others will not.
This is the key to success and it is going to make all the difference.
You need to use your mind when others are not.
You need to take risks when others are not.
You need to be “on the ball” when others are not.
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on Jul 22,2016
One of the biggest mistakes people make in their job searches is going after jobs in sophisticated markets.
A sophisticated and saturated market is one that’s populated by a lot of people like you—with your qualifications, background, and so forth.
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