Hard Work vs. Lost Work
There's 2 types of work. Hard Work. And Lost Work.
Hard Work is the work you're taught about in school, if you study hard for this history exam you'll get good results. If you solve these equations you get a gold star.
It's very much you're given the direction X to get the output Y. When you leave school you get a job. You swap out a teacher for a boss. That boss will give you X.
X in this case is a direction.
Your boss will lay out certain tasks to complete and if you manage to complete them you'll consistently earn a monthly pay check, say £2,000 pre-tax. And if you work really hard and do lots of long nights you might get a bonus at the end of the year, say £10,000.
That's Hard Work. You're given a direction and you just have to work hard to accomplish the task.
But you find as you rise the ranks of any corporation you start getting the feeling that Hard Work actually matters a whole lot less than a new kind of work you start to get a feel of.
Lost Work.
This is exactly the same as Hard Work minus one key ingredient: direction.
Lost Work is the work that nobody wants to do because by definition we don't like feeling lost. To not have any direction.
Lost Work is deciding the kind of strategy to take the company in, it's deciding which tasks need to be completed by your team this week. It's completely alien to anything you've done at in school because there are no solid answers at the end of the book. No boss or teacher telling you: "hey you, you need to go in this direction".
And you'll be going in the wrong direction. A lot. At least with Hard Work, if you've gone in the wrong direction it's not really your fault. You're there to do Hard Work. To push on the door. Not to guess if this is the right door to be opening.
But out of the 2: Hard Work and Lost Work it's the Lost Work that pays the big bucks. One directional decision of Lost Work is often worth more to a company than a 100 years of Hard Work.
Lost Work is the Einsteins and Feynmans, it's not that they didn't work hard (they did) but they're not remembered for working hard. They're remembered for being lost.
Because being lost is the only way to find the right path.