If you are obsessive about what you like in life, and you seem to dive deep into anything and everything you do — if once an idea, concept, goal gets between your ears, that’s the end of it — then you must understand what I am about to develop in these next few lines.
“The reward for good work, is more work”. Tom Sachs’ words stroke home when I first read them. Like any other phrase, quote, small piece of motivation that keeps us going on our darkest hours. It appeared out of the blue as background noise while working on some graphics I’ve trying to put together to — let’s be honest — escape work and feel a little bit more like myself.
Sometimes that patina of art in life can make all the difference, especially if you are creative. Because those are the moments when you clear your mind and let room for innovation and structure so deadly needed in the day to day work. Yes, I do work to escape work — as weird as that sounds.
See, to me, everything translates to work. Let that sit not very well with you and let me explain, I mean it in the best way possible. Work is respect or at least it should give the sense and illusion of respect. When I am tapped by a boss, a colleague or a client with a task, it is the great amount of work I put into it, that lets them know I respect them and their needs.
For example; It is the countless hours of attention, effort and carrying that I put to my daughter’s experiences in life that will eventually show her that I have great respect for her and her place in my life.
I am a hardcore gardening enthusiast, title that comes with tons of hard work on it. Whenever I visit a zoo / zen / Japanese / hotel / bamboo / butterfly / aunt’s / grandma’s / public garden and find myself admiring and adapting a new idea for my garden, it immediately translates into hours of planning, measuring, designing, budgeting and actually executing the idea. It doesn’t mean I am any good at it, but it means I am willing to go through that process.
As a designer I remember burning through nights, trying to learn, practice, understand the why, how tos and casting my ideas into any medium possible. But those ideas were personal, not founded on the fact of making money or sustaining my lifestyle. However, these nights would actually make my days easier, since they could provide immediate answers to relatively complex issues, they would give me the ability to handle the schematics of big problems and turn them into smaller and chewable bites, for the big issue to be digested.
Fatherhood, gardening, designing — even fitness — comes down to two things: Work and work capacity. Greg Glassman defined fitness as “Work capacity across broad time and modal domains“ and that’s as close to a full definition we’ve ever been. It’s measurable, it is quantifiable and if done well, it is evident. Your process and the results are the only things that matter.
Your process and the results are the only things that matter. Work and work ethics transcend the words, the conversations, the one-on-ones, the Zoom calls, the “email about the call that we mentioned on the chat the other day — and we need to come back to it, maybe, on the next appointment, to discuss it with the team and gather our thoughts”. This evident property of work and work ethics is what brings me to the point.
The natural path of working hard is for it to grow into more work.
To elaborate on this I’ll use gardening as a free interpretation analogy — see; you can do anything and everything for your plants. Work the soil, set up a watering system, use the right products at the right moment, with the best technique and periodization, pour your sweat, blood and tears into your soil and you can get all the great results and you can get no results. But you can always be proud of your effort and learning curve.
That said — your chances of success and perfect growth. Your chances of having the lovely beautiful accidents, to enjoy the colors, the aromas and all the amazing things that come with your best effort, are better if you work hard. Me personally, I would highly recommend it, but here’s the catch:
Once your garden reaches the point you considered perfection a while ago when you started working on it, you will realize that you are only midway to the new standard you blindly set for yourself while working on your first vision. Along with what people expect from you and what they know you are capable of.
Hard work shows and pays off. It will only bring you more of its kind. Hard work is a non instant gratification reward system, it’s a grind, a long grueling, non paved road, full of bumps, ups, downs, unwritten laws, no manual, barely any written instructions, a few pirates, a million legends and a whole lot of luck. Luck that has to find you while moving, luck that wants to find you working.
So where does that leaves us? You pick the answer. You pick your path, your poison, your goals – I know this sounds terrible if you are looking for an answer within this lines, but it really is like this — “You, do you”. That’s the beauty of your process, it is owned, performed, designed, reviewed and powered by you for you and your benefit.
However there’s one thing and one thing only that you do not control, and alters your process, its results and the outcome. It is a very important variable and I would argue with anyone this variable accounts for more than 50% of your results, and that is: Your environment.
This one requires of a whole lot of introspective conversations. For once, it needs for you to drop your phone, leave it inside your house, go outside, sit in your garden and ask the very difficult to answer question; How the hell do I feel? It won’t happen there, it is not that easy. But that question will snowball into a healthy analysis of you, your composition, your life, people around you, circumstances and your environment.
Let me use a Lantana — one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my garden — to explain this:
If you’re in an environment that does not propitiates, help or has in consideration your growth, as a person and as a professional, and you are serious enough about your process to be working hard for it — then trust me, and the millions of hardworking people who also believe in this — you need to leave that environment.
You need new soil, more sun, better watering. Remember, you deserve growth, health and wellness. Your financial freedom requires work and money, but never forget the freedom part. Don’t be like the people that fret so much about “making it” in the financial aspect that they don’t make it pass the first word in their lifetime and sacrifice their freedom.
And never forget that in life “It’s better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener at war”.