The Flaccid Truth About Hard Work

Original Post: September 5, 2016

The traditional premise of “Labor Day” is seriously flawed…

We all know the old mindset—hard work equals success.  It’s wrong.  It’s always been wrong.  And it’s been one of the most lethal poisons to the American worker (or any worker, for that matter), for generations.  Hard work doesn’t create success, smart work does.  

Hard work has received far too much credit for being the foundation of everything from low unemployment to a strong GNP to getting good grades to becoming a pro athlete.  And while hard work has always played a part in that, without approaching things intelligently—without having productivity as the end goal—none of the aforementioned would ever occur.  

Put another way, hard work is employing 1,000 laborers with shovels and wheelbarrows to dig a canal in 12 months; smart work is hiring 2 workers, an excavator and dump truck, and having it complete in 6.  The greater productivity of the second course of action not only gets the job done faster, but starts generating a return on investment in half the time.  Productivity is powerful.

Time is a precious resource that hard work consumes…and productivity liberates.

This isn’t to completely discount hard work, obviously.  It’s more of a challenge to look at things differently.  When you’re preparing a business review for your clients, for example…are you spending hours (maybe days?) of your time pulling data and running reports that may not even be accurate by the time you present it to them?  What other things could you be doing with all that time?  Closing more deals?  Growing your network?  Spending more time with you family? 

At Atlas, we built our platform—our entire business—off the recognized need to make organizations more productive.  Whether it’s the “minutes” we shave off of each service call at one enterprise (culminating in hundreds of hours of reclaimed time per year), or the hours we’ve cut out of another’s quarterly business review preparation time (resulting in weeks of extra sales time annually), or the days we’ve eliminated out of yet another’s lifecycle refresh activity (adding hundreds of thousands of dollars directly back to the bottom line), Atlas is built to make you more productive.  

Drop us a line or stop by and check us out.  And do it on Labor Day if you can—then go out and celebrate a new commitment to productivity, not just hard work.  It will make America great again.