The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Work

Centuries ago, “guys had duels and they’d have a dueling scar, which is almost a kind of badge of honour. You fought and you survived”, says Christina Maslach, professor emerita of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. “That’s where you brag about, ‘Yeah, I don’t sleep’. It’s that kind of thing.”

Whether you want to talk about social media posts about “always grinding”, the never-ending side-hustle, etc. even in the midst of a global pandemic and the acknowledgement of the mental health issues tied to overwork, we still brag about how much we overwork. In the workplace, we talk a good game about employee wellness, and work-life balance, but who wins all the accolades at the end of each project, or quarter? The folks who put in the “extra effort”. (aka “hours”)

It’s as if we never really left that early Protestant environment, and it’s the same reason why so many people who have been successful have such a hard time accepting that things have changed. We still hang on to the belief that says good people work hard, and that hard work leads to success. Bad people don’t work hard, and this is why they don’t have success.

This idea has, in essence, become the core identity of successful people. And, as Seth Godin recently explained, changing someone’s identity, is a whole other level of difficult.

If our ideas are equated to our identity, then talking about ideas is very much the act of talking about yourself.

 

And thus the tension is created. Our culture and our economy are built on ideas. Many of our society’s ideas get better over time (you don’t go to the barber for bloodletting any longer–it’s what probably killed George Washington) and yet some of them get stuck. Often, we need a generation to step away before an entrenched idea begins to fade, because the people who have been embracing that toxic or outlived idea see it as part of their identity.

 

As the media realizes that they can improve profits by narrowcasting ideas to people who embrace them as part of who they are, it gets increasingly difficult to have a constructive conversation about many ideas–because while people are able and sometimes eager to change some of their less personal ideas, we rarely seek to change our identity.

So, for generations we have grown up with the idea that people who work hard are successful. Those of us who have had even some modicum of success are very likely to credit that to our hard work. This is why the idea of privilege is so difficult. We see it as taking away some, or all, of the credit that we give ourselves for hard work, and working hard leading to our success is how we identify ourselves. That doesn’t leave room for things like luck, randomness, and privilege. But, they exist.

The story we tell ourselves about the super successful is that they worked hard to go from nothing to successful, and while I don’t want to take away from the intelligence and skills they have and the hard work they do put in, let’s face it, they were also in the right place at the right time, with the right resources.

We celebrate the Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg’s of the world for dropping out of college to build a business from “nothing” as if attending Harvard in the first place was nothing. As if they didn’t already have the education, resources and connections that would help them be successful in ways that most of us will never have.

Since we all grew up believing that good people work hard and are successful, we look at these uber-successful folks and assume they have made it, and that if any of us simply works hard enough, we can also have an idea and turn it into a billion dollar business. That’s what we see, what we believe, and what we act on. So when someone suggests that something other than hard work is at play, we get offended, even when it makes sense.