Non-linearity
Many successful entrepreneurs pride themselves on working extensively. According to them, hard work is the key to success. This resonates well with the ear. Success is achieved by individuals who roll up their sleeves, work more than the average, and experience payoffs that surpass the average. The harder you work, the greater the payoff. It is a beautiful and straightforward relationship between effort and rewards, providing one with control over destiny and the power to impact it positively. It also offers a rational explanation for the purpose of hard work. At the end of the day, it's a matter of how much sweat, blood, and tears one is willing to invest.
As it turns out, hard work is a very modern concept. Nassim Nicholas Taleb stated, "Only in recent history has 'working hard' signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse, and, mostly, sprezzatura." When considering highly successful figures throughout history, hard work does not often come to mind, even though many ideas from great figures have been interpreted through a 21st-century lens where hard work is glorified. The quote "Luck is when preparation meets opportunities," probably misattributed to Seneca, has been interpreted as a way to control one's destiny through action. This appears to be contrary to what Seneca preaches in his body of work, which emphasizes the control of one's mind in spite of one's destiny. It's not about working hard to achieve what you want; it's more about living an enriching and fulfilling life regardless of the outcomes.
I don't deny that things won't be handed to you on a silver platter, and some form of work needs to be carried out with discipline. However, it becomes toxic when the only way to achieve desired outcomes is believed to be through working very hard. Despite our desires, this direct cause-effect relationship lacks empirical evidence in the real world. Consider the countless people who work tirelessly day in and day out without significant rewards. Today, the hard work "doctrine" is pervasive. Just Google the words, and hundreds of quotes will pop up. The phenomenon is amplified on social media, where random individuals, whether successful or less successful, post something related to hard work and success, and it is widely shared. People either genuinely believe it or, at the very least, want to believe it. But what does hard work really mean in business?
Typically, people who pride themselves on working very hard refer to the number of office hours. It's about the hours spent behind a computer. Or perhaps it's the level of attention something requires. What about writing and responding to emails throughout the day? Does that count as hard work? And what about thinking about things outside office hours, during commutes, or while driving? The best business ideas I've had occurred while driving or during workouts. Should I include them in the definition of hard work? And what about doing things that have no value for the company and yourself, but you still do them because that's what you are paid to do? This is not clear to me.
Maybe, as with manual labor and any physically related activity, the most obvious way to define hard work is to quantify the number of hours doing something and do the same for the payoffs. Therefore, the more hours you put in, the more rewarded you get, like an hourly paid consultant. This is a very straightforward relationship that one can easily understand, and this is what we call a linear relationship. It's a straight line of money earned drawn from zero and sloping upward as the number of hours increases. But wait a second, have you ever seen an entrepreneur or a professional become successful using this linearity? Probably not. The reason is simple, and it's called the opposite—non-linearity. Business is a non-linear game because business, as a socioeconomic fabric, is a complex system. Here we go again. The reason for linear thinking, though, is much more profound and dates back to the scientific revolution and the physics of Newton, but we'll get to that later.
The closest definition of hard work that I can come up with has to do with a certain way of doing things to increase the odds of something positive happening. In other words, hard work, for me, resonates more as smart work following some basic principles to expose yourself to high payoffs using the power of non-linearity. You can do 100 things with very modest or no payoffs at all, but the 101st thing can make the payoff explode. And this is what happens all the time in business and in life in general. Small things can lead to big effects. Its extreme version is described as the butterfly effect, a layman's example of formal chaos theory. Meaning, the flapping of a butterfly's wings can cause a hurricane thousands of miles away. Here's the sad story, though: a butterfly can flap its whole life with no effect at all—no hurricane, not even a breeze—and no one would notice. No one would post on social media about how beautiful, energetic, and hardworking the butterfly was. No book on butterfly flapping either or how to become successful through flapping. It will most certainly die along with the vast majority of its species members in complete anonymity. This is what constitutes the unfairness of non-linearity. It basically tells you that whatever you do, no matter how hard you work, things are outside your direct control, and this seems very depressing at first sight. The first 100 things that you do are very painful to endure as no significant external validation comes along and may never come. At the same time, as much as non-linearity is unfair, it is of extraordinary value. It reshuffles things. It provides huge opportunities through the power of randomness, and the payoffs can be immense, but they are not certain. It's this hope that drives us forward and blindly pushes people to "work hard" so they can achieve their goals. Non-linearity is a bipolar, dangerous, and fascinating beast, and we need to have the guts to deal with it.
