Re: The work ethic – hard work pays or not?

I have always been hard working but i do not believe it pays off at all. You have rhe satisfaction of a job well done. But we are all expendable and nobody remembers you for what you did for them. Those who get ahead know how to use others and have no scruples. Oh and lazy brown nosing works well too. It really is all about who you know and who you can manipulate. Not my way at all but that is the key to success.

Re: The work ethic – hard work pays or not?

Success and hard work do not correlate, digging a hole with a shovel is hard work, being successful at that would mean not having a heart attack.


Sitting at a desk juggling someone else's cash is not hard work but, can make someone successful in the traditional sense of the word.

Re: The work ethic – hard work pays or not?

Well said Julie
Some people do tend to jump in head first without knowing about other people's situations.
A little more tact wouldn't have gone amiss.

Re: The work ethic – hard work pays or not?

Not entirely true Aerolor,some trades/ occupations that usually
involved some degree of manual effort, were, in the past, paid on
a what was called, peice work rate, whereby you got payed for
the number of items or parts you poduced in a certain time.
In other cases, where the product you were producing involved
assembly of a number of parts, the job was assessed, and you
Were hen paid abonus if you succeeded in equalling or beat!ng
the assessment. thus, you could increase your income by quite
a bit, in this system hard work did pay!

Things seem to have changed considerably now, l suppose since
Thatcher destroyed the unions by destroying the industries
but that is another debate.
To sum up, in the right system
Hard work can pay, ln the present system no chance
On N M W you have no incentive to do more.
Give workers incentives workers give results.
I dont know how this would work for office type work which
is difficult to measure.
Might l say that if you did not meet targets regularly you got
FIRED, which proves that employers saw the merits of this
system

Best Regards, Donkeyman.

Re: The work ethic – hard work pays or not?

Tend to agree with others here.

Grafting hard is really not the route to success, just the route to a hard and exhausting life that will later lead to health problems.

Quartermain was really a plasterer and carried lots of plaster around but was sensationalised for a bit of brick carrying.

As with all such things it doesn't impress me one bit. I tend to find that the people with brawn are often quite dim witted and/or poorly educated and have to do what they do because they have few other abilities and haven't the patience or inclination to acquire other abilities. They are usually one trick ponies and that one trick itself isn't really that good or impressive in the scheme of life.

I wonder how Quartermain's health is today.

Overall I think the adage "work hard", in terms of raw grafting, is absolutely not a route to success. It's a route to a life of toil, endless repitition and usually with relatively little reward. You find that those type of people have such hard lives with long hours that any rewards they do earn are swiftly used up to cheer themselves up before they then get back on the wagon grafting again.

Case in point, Quartermain's brother who actually earned more than him doing roofing work. Ended up gambling £30,000 or more a year which saw him lose 2 marriages. He has since died of suspected pneumonia.

So for me, grunts and hard grafting isn't a great idea. The same is usually true of extended periods of overtime in any job. Usually just not worth it. All the extra hours simply lead to misery, lack of life downtime and enjoyment. People come home tired and stressed and just want to go to bed. When the overtime pay comes in, they just binge spend it on something frivolous to cheer themselves up. Meals out, movies, holidays etc.

In the end you can not replace life itself. You only have a finite amount of it. Every day you live in seervitude and slavery is a day lost. A day of idyllic freedom to live as nature intended that has been stolen from you by your employer or freely given yourself by vanity and/or ignorance.

Therefore the best strategy in life is NOT to work hard but rather to "work smart !"

A smart person can earn more in one day than a muscle bulging grunt can earn in a week or even month. Whilst Quartermain was hoiking hods of bricks around someone else would have been managing bank accounts or company accounts or programming computer systems earning multiples of what he did.

There's nothing at all noble about grafting instead of working smart, being clever, planning well, having a good strategy, anticipating, speculating, learning, adapting to change, continually bettering oneself and adjusting to the needs of markets.

Given a self obsessed muscle grunt and a feeble but smart cookie I would choose to employ the smart cookie every day of the week and twice on Sundays. The smart cookie will be more efficient, will adapt to change rather than rail against it and be more productive over time.

Ask a bricky or plasterer or sparky to work to a specific contract or style of working and they won't like it. They are comfortable in their little predictable world where they know how many walls they can paint an hour or how many bricks they can lay a minute.

When you read about all those Grand Design builds that go horribly wrong it's often because the grunts just do their grafting and can't think outside the box and just do what they think the job is. If they had the nouse to see the bigger picture they would figure out problems before they happened even if they weren't their specific problems.

That's why grafting jobs are generally paid much less than jobs that require thinking and planning and far far more ability and intellect.

So yeah, don't work hard, just work smart.

Get the most out of doing the least and doing it well.

Earn enough, retire as soon as possible and enjoy life in freedom.

It's pretty typical that "SuperHod" Quartermain was sensationalised for earning £100,000 or whatever it was. As if quantities of money amount to success! Laughable really.

I have a chuckle every morning as I sit in the idyllic country park near where I live in the warm sunshine sipping a fresh latte reading the morning news knowing that others are frantically and furiously working their socks off to buy that Porsche. Life freedom vs material possessions. No contest really but sadly some are oblivious to the difference in real value.

Work Smart, that's the real way to success imho.

Still I'm sure Quartermain is happy with his bath with gold tap fittings !!!

Re: The work ethic – hard work pays or not?

If you can work with a modicum of physical effort (for fitness), a modicum of mental challenge (for stimulation) and earn a better that average wage, your probably successful.

Re: The work ethic – hard work pays or not?

And if you can learn about apostrophe's you're probably even more successful !

(Hoisting myself by my own petard of course as I know my own posts will be riddled with mistakes ! )

Re: The work ethic – hard work pays or not?

In business, it is more important to learn about Catastrophes.

Re: The work ethic – hard work pays or not?

I've never undertaken hard work in my life in the conventional meaning of the word, but I've worked in a highly focused way and set my objectives to include being mortgage free and to retire in the year 2000 with a comfortable pension to live on that would provide for more if she outlived me.

In that I've been successful and more.

(What follows is not a wind-up. Really.)

I've always seen people that I have employed as resources.

Resources unique amongst the resources available when running a business but resources nonetheless.

My hard work has been to optimize what I could extract from all the resources that I had at my disposal but not abused by piling on work that would damage them, but just resources.

Have I achieved my bucket list?

Oh yes,. And much more besides.

Re: The work ethic – hard work pays or not?

I have worked hard all my life for low wages , my real 'pay' was the satisfaction of seeing a job well done