<\/span><\/h2>\nI’m all for paying your dues if it serves a practical purpose. When you start a business, part of paying your dues is indeed constantly working your butt off in order to get things going — that’s part of the luxury of working for yourself and being a self-made person. In this case, “paying your dues” serves a practical purpose.<\/p>\n
But working overtime simply for the sake of “paying your dues” makes little sense to me. You’d think employers would value quality and hard work over the premise, “well, that’s what I had to do, so you have to, too.”<\/em><\/p>\nAnother on-the-job example:<\/p>\n
I was working on a project at an engineering firm. More than the project managers wanted to do a good job, they wanted to look<\/em> like they were doing a good job. Which meant that employees, freelancers and contractors were expected to work at least 10 hours a day, despite having absolutely nothing to do. Because I didn’t want to be singled out as “the girl who goes home at 5:00,” I did my work very, very<\/em> slowly. Put nicely, it was a really inefficient use of assets. Put rudely, it was a big, stupid waste of time.<\/p>\nAnd I think the whole pay-your-dues mentality comes from the same place. In most cases, it’s an empty gesture — like sitting on your butt for an extra two hours just to appear dedicated. What’s more, it turns a blind eye to waste, and it undermines true, hard work. Again, long, overworked hours “diminish both productivity and quality.” Talk about counterproductive.<\/p>\n
In contrast, when you’re resourceful, efficient and diligent, you can get a lot<\/em> done.<\/p>\n<\/span>Loss of Quality<\/span><\/h2>\nPick your clich\u00e9: Jack of all trades, master of none; burning the candle at both ends; spreading oneself too thin.<\/p>\n
All of those maxims point to the same problem: overdoing it usually makes things suck. And that’s what I’ve been reflecting on in terms of my career. I don’t want to be a “work-churner.” I’m a workaholic not because I want to churn out as much work as possible, but because I actually enjoy the work. And more than I want to work a lot,<\/em> I want to work hard<\/em>.<\/p>\nI’ve worked for employers who simply wanted me to churn out as much work as possible as quickly as possible. And I’ve worked for employers who encourage me to take my time and produce something of quality. At least in my own experience, the latter paid much better.<\/p>\n
In most cases, quality pays off in the long term, and I think that’s true with becoming a high-earner, too.<\/p>\n
<\/span>A True High-Earner<\/span><\/h2>\nDon’t get me wrong. Again, I’m not saying that, if you have the opportunity to earn a lot of money by working 75 hours a week, you shouldn’t do it. Based on my current situation, I’m all for grinding as many hours as possible while still maintaining a quality of work, life and health<\/strong> — all so I can earn as much money as I did last year.<\/p>\nOf course, I’m also not knocking workers who don’t really have a choice. Plenty of people are struggling just to survive, and that’s brutal. I’m certainly not above it, either. If I had no money, and I was struggling to pay my debts, and I lost my job, I’d definitely take the first job I could find. I just think, if we can, we should strive for more than that. My mom didn’t have much of a choice, and it was her goal to raise children whose work was valued. When it comes to being appreciative of what you have, I’m all for looking at things against the backdrop of “someone has it worse.” But using that perspective to keep you from your goals doesn’t seem like a good idea.<\/p>\n
I’m also not necessarily arguing that working a lot is a bad thing. I’m simply saying: Even more than a worker who simply makes a lot of money, I want to be a worker whose time and skill set are worth a large amount of money.<\/p>\n
Personally, I don’t want it to take double my time to earn a single salary.<\/p>\n
It’s not an easy goal, and maybe it’s an ambitious one that will take time; but I think that, in the long run, quality beats quantity.<\/p>\n
Like I said, at my core, I revert back to the thought that I should be lucky to have any job at all. I’m not quite sure what part of myself I agree with more. So I’d like to know what you think\u2026.<\/p>\n
Are my thoughts unappreciative? Does striving to be a high-earner without wanting to work 80 hours a week make me entitled? Is it audacious to set a value for my time?<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I recently read a short article in The New Yorker titled “The Cult of Overwork.” In it, James Surowiecki writes:<\/p>\n
\n“For decades, junior bankers and Wall Street firms had an unspoken pact: in exchange for reasonably high-paying jobs and a shot at obscene wealth, young analysts agreed to work fifteen hours a day, and forgo anything resembling a normal life.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Reading that, I had a thought. If you’re working 75 hours a week, is your job really “high-paying”?<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3162,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[479],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171021"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3162"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171021\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}