I grew up hearing that if you worked hard things would work out for you. My experience in school led me to believe otherwise.
All the amount of studying in the world couldn’t get me from a B to an A. And frustratingly, all my standardized tests, IQ or whatever seemed to indicate that I should be having a much easier time with school.
Only when I started having fun learning did I manage to bring my grades to an A and more importantly not have to spend all my waling hours studying to do so.
School got much easier for me in university when I realized that I needed to take a proactive stance on what I was learning, and let curiosity rule me more than my grades.
I skipped the first two years of Japanese after 6 months of study. History suddenly became exponentially easier when I started watching documentaries and doing my own research.
And despite being behind all the time for most of my life, I realized that I could learn at an even faster pace than the curriculem, sometime 2 or 3 times faster. All it required was for me to follow my curiosity on a topic related to the curriculum and treat the textbook as context.
People said I must be smart to be 3 months ahead of current assignments and for skipping 2 years of Japanese throguh self study, but when I asked anyone if they had done what I had done, none of them had.
It’s too easy to say something is impossible for you and only possible for someone else.
I realized school, and work for that matter, keep people disempowered. It’s designed to turn you into a replaceable part, not to achieve success, not to understand the world, not to bring value.
Hard work COULD pay off. It didn’t usually. It depended on how you positioned yourself, and as my first Japanese teacher, a graduate student from from Okinawa always loved to, “even if you win the rat race, you are still a rat”.
My experience of work has been the same.
I worked hard as an employee never to see much of a raise because the system was designed to keep everything in it’s place. And like my grades compared to my true aptitude, the value I could contribute was not easily measurable in terms of profit. It didn’t mean it didn’t lead to profit, I think it led to a lot of profit for the company, but it wasn’t measurable.
I didn’t know how to get credit for what made me unique because I was functioning at a higher level than I was supposed to in the job market. I wasn’t paid to truly help people, I was paid to keep them as loyal customers, which overlapped at times but were hardly the same thing.
Perhaps if someone had taught me that “capturing value” meant gatekeeping your skills and finding ways to “market yourself”, I would have done better in that world, but I just felt like a rat.
I left and determined to become somewhat of a freelancer or business owner. I tried everything to attract paying customers, mostly trying different ways to present myself honestly. I tried lying and misleading at certain low points and found it worked much better. I didn’t like it though and so I’ve continued looking for ways to “repackage” what I do and avoid manipulating people.
People have ideas, they want to help me. But I find that they fit into two categories: those who want to cater to people’s addictions and insecurities and want me to do the things I hated a out working for someone else, and those who have no idea how difficult certain things are to succeed at and are just throwing the easiest ideas out there for you (“Why don’t you just start a youtube?” Ha!).
I’ve had great succeess on a few fronts though.
I found that I am pretty good at long term investing and so I parked the few savings I had very well. When I have capital to play with in markets, I usually find a way to turn money into more money over the course of 2-4 years. Thanks to this, I am still able to pursue things with a more idealistic attitude and even when I cash out for emergencies, it’s only a percent.
I still refuse to mislead anyone, and refuse to try and become something I am not or to cater to people’s insecurities.
When I look at my life, I see that my successes (and I’ve had a few) have never once come from hard work for hard work’s sake. Not even a little. They’ve come from being in the right place at the right time and following my excitement which led me there. Had I been living out of primarily fear, I would have ended up with much less freedom than I have, living someone else’s live instead of mine.
“Find yourself a back door”, the line comes from a cheesey Incubus song from the late 90’s.
But this is probably the best advice I’ve ever gotten, although I never thought of it as advice until now, just a line in a song that I listened to a few times.
There are cracks in the system. You can slide through the cracks to get what you want, legally and without hurting anyone.
You don’t find succeess trying to be the best worker bee, unless your idea of success is dying for the queen. Real success, at a fundamental level (or even at a spiritual level) comes from the willingness to evolve and creating a positive, non-coersive relationship with anything and everything you can…on your own terms.
The hard work that matters is whatever grind or search it takes to achieve this kind of positive feedback loop with the world around you, and only you will know what that looks like. That’s why it’s so hard. We are using the cookie cutter model that onlt works during the short time when a country is developing faster than it ever has.
The question to ask yourself is always “Am I excited about what lies beyond this?”
For me that means that as long as there is food on the table and a plan for the next 2 weeks and some kind of a back up plan, I will never prioritize money over the things I really want to do that allign with my goals. I will never cave in to fear or believe people who say something is impossible when I know in my heart that there must be a way.
Although the world looks as if soon it will not have a place for any of the things we are pursuing right now…independent small scale musician/artists, self produced yarn products and clothing, or even a family business which is becoming more and more unattainable, I see a different writing on the wall.
Authenticity is becoming harder and harder to find and soon it will become the most valuable commodity. So I am not worried. THIS is where the hard work matters.
For my parents, hard work paid off no matter what they did. That’s because they were riding on the coattails of the previous generation which was full of flexible, innovative problem solvers. Say what you want about them, they certainly had their issues, but they had a drive that my parents generation did not, pampered and sold lies in order to snuff out their life force in favor of empty security. (Nevermind that they were also canibalising on their children’s future, never questioning debt based money and endless inflationdifferent topic for a different day.)
The only hard work that really pays off now is the hard work to become the person you are meant to become, and no one can decide that except for you. Study hard to learn the things you truly want to learn. Practice hard to gain the skills you know you want. Work hard to do the work you love. And search hard for a way to make it all work for you.
If you have no idea what it is you truly want, first identify the things you’ve been taught to want and question them. Think about what kind of insecurities you have and what those insecurites are preventing you from doing.
There is so much more within our grasp that we can see right in front of us and most of it just requires tuning in to the energy of who it is we know we could become.
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What I’ve worked on recently:
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Yep only true for very specific things. And jobs definitely aren't always one of them anymore (unless you're lucky/conveniently into something high demand). Additionally things are always going to be a struggle if you don't have the right type of brain. Your school experience (and my very different one) was why I homeschooled and pretty much the same thing happened (and youngest has finally stopped insisting that he doesn't know a lot of things some of his schooled peers know and that I didn't teach him things when I remind him that he actively refused to learn a lot of things I was trying to get him to learn because he wasn't interested XD).
One of the interesting/annoying philosophical discussions that happened here was whether or not every interaction was technically a form of manipulation though the word is associated with the negative side of things. I don't know if a consensus was reached because I fell off the discussion (either ended up in Minecraft with sibling dearest or remembered I hadn't finished lesson planning x_x).
My brain is super right though, it does things! Cool things!
I think one of the problems I had growing up was that I needed a convincing reason to do something, and I never got one so I felt ANGRY about having to do all this nonsense that no one could give me a good reason for.
I stand by the idea that if they had called it socialization instead of education and said “we do this to make sure society doesn’t has fewer psychopaths and learn to socialize and complete tasks, I would have been like “cool” ok, let’s do it and been more proactive. Instead it was always “education is so important, think of all the poor kids who don’t have it, this will help your future!” But why will it help my future mom?
I think the unwillingness to discuss this in a respectful way by every single adult is what made me so reluctant to do anything. Like I see chocolate on your shirt, don’t tell me you don’t know what chocolate is.
I acknowledge that it’s not easy for parents too. God, if I had to deal with classmates and the dumb things they told my kids and showed my kids…
And on manipulation… i mean words are sticky. You could say our hands are manipulating the enviroment.
Self serving? I believe we need to see the interconnectedness of all life in order to be decent people because we are ultimately self serving, but what’s wrong with serving yourself if you can see others as an extention of yourself? I don’t see self serving as bad if it’s done right.
This is all so on the spot man, not only is it a more effective approach on getting closer to the life we truly desire, but also takes care of our energy and health while walking the path, making sure that the money can come bigger and not have to be spending it all on doctors and meds when it gets to our hands
My grandfather was never sick a day in his life until the very week he retired. It’s almost as if he was bottling up his sickness and when he lost the means of distracting himself, they all came pouring out.
Most people wait until a problem is diagnosable before doing anything about it, but if we become more sensitive to what our body is saying, it tells us everything, what we need right now, what we are scared of and need to face…. Most people’s bodies in far worse shape than they realize and it’s mainly because they don’t let themselves feel things honestly. Distractions are easiest, even I fall into the trap, knowing this.
I believe that we are all meant to be in 100% health into our 70’s and 80’s when the mere force of gravity SLOWLY starts to show its effect.
Haha! Love Incubus!
I have "worked hard" all of my life and not done so bad, but it rings hollow and I am realizing that I am just a slave to others and not free.
Working on finding that back door. 😜
Funny thing about Incubus is that I liked their “later” albums when I was in my teens and early 20’s (Make yourself to the one with Megalomaniac) but I their older stuff aged much better for me.
I hope you keep finding back doors, the ones where there’s the secret party and VIP lounge
I pretty much like most of their stuff.
I don't even need the party doors, just freedom! 😜
Very very true, hard work only matters when it’s aligned with who you are. Just grinding for the sake of it doesn’t lead anywhere meaningful. Authenticity really is becoming the most valuable thing these days
Even at this young age, I'm trying to do a lot of things that I feel is right to do. Bu,t I think I now have a mindset shift. Working hard to learn and acquire the things I truly love, and not just anything.
What do you love to do?
I love seeing people happy. I love to write too but this depends on inspiration and motivation.
There are so many gems to take from this post. Thank you for this. Perhaps one day I will explain better later...hopefully it will a happy story
Hope to hear about it. I don’t like when people randomly drop links but you have an invitation to link me to your post if you write about this!