Working Hard
Apr 10, 2025
Long ago, I had an opinion that I should be able to get what I want without working hard — whatever that meant to me at that time. Now that I look back at that opinion, I feel that although I wasn’t wrong, I wasn’t right either.
I have always struggled to find meaning in this world. One way I tried to cope with it was to define short term goals and achieve them. This kept me occupied for a while. But when I stopped deriving meaning from this pursuit, I was again moving towards a nihilistic future. This is when I found Alex Hormozi.
Hardwork is the Goal
Defining goals is not very simple, especially when the goal are vague and amorphous — winning at life, being successful, etc. So the key insight I got from Alex’s words was that we should (again, I am using should here, but none of this is a commandment) set behavior as goals. This is for mainly two reasons -
- It is derived from the future self you desire to become.
For example, say you want to become more charismatic. Charisma is a bucket term for many things - talking slowly, greeting everyone when you enter a room, using people’s names in the conversations often, etc. . The behavior can be to write summaries everyday. Just do it and the behavior will ensure that you become the person you desire.
- Easier to track a behavior.
Measuring long term goals is really hard. This maybe because your monkey brain is not good at calculating really long term benefits.
I am particularly choosing working hard as my goal because it helps me measure myself accurately. I tend to compare myself a lot and this goal would give an outlet for that comparison. Although I still somewhat care about the outcome of the work that I put in, I plan to reduce it.
This ties surprisingly well into the Karma philosophy from Bhagwat Geta, at least in the way I interpret it.
Defining work
This is essential since work has a lot of meanings to people. For me, I tend to define work as something that generates output. I solely try to measure the quantity work by the amount of output it gets. This works for me, since I have clearly defined goals and measurable metrics to track progress. I don’t count the hours or effort (what is is really?) required to achieve the goals.
All this is true for me since I am a knowledge worker. I provide value by using my mind and not physical labor. Due to this, we can use the traditional physics-based definition of work which is: distance x force.
Knowledge work has huge leverage