Is hard work and any sense of a "work ethic" dead in today's society? Read the article below and reflect with a well-thought out response.
Work Ethic 2.0: Attention Control
By Mike Elgan
December 29, 2008
The industrial revolution didn't arise out of nowhere, and it didn't arise everywhere. It was made possible by the emergence of a set of personal values that came to be known as the "work ethic."
The idea behind this -- inconceivable 400 years ago -- is that hard work is good for its own sake. Hard work makes you a better person. With hard work, our parents told us, we could grow up to become anything. Work hard, and we could get good grades, elite-school acceptance and scholarships. We could invent things, launch businesses and change the world. "Genius," Thomas Edison told us, "is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."
This industrial-age work ethic has its variants, including the "Protestant work ethic," the "American work ethic," and the "Asian work ethic" to name a few. The success or failure of regions, nations and subcultures has been massively influenced by the degree to which populations embrace the value of hard work. And that's why the idea is hammered into kids in school, and lauded and rewarded in the workplace.
When the "information age" started replacing the "industrial age," hard work seemed more important than ever. Until the 1980s, to use a computer was to program it. Silicon Valley corporate culture, from tiny startups to the massive Googleplex, emphasizes long hours and feverish work.
But since the turn of the new millennium, the nature of work has evolved to the point where hard work is becoming less important to a successful work ethic than another, more useful value: attention.
The New Work Ethic
Columnist David Brooks, commenting in the Dec. 16th New York Times about Malcolm Gladwell's latest book called "Outliers," made a statement as profound as it was accurate: "Control of attention is the ultimate individual power," he wrote. "People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them."
But why is that truer now than ten or twenty years ago? Why will it be truer still ten or twenty years from now? As I wrote in May, Internet distractions evolve to become ever more "distracting" all the time -- like a virus. Distractions now "seek you out."
Distractions mask the toll they take on productivity. Everyone finishes up their work days exhausted, but how much of that exhaustion is from real work, how much from the mental effort of fighting off distractions and how much from the indulgence of distractions?
Pundits like me are constantly talking about Facebook, Twitter, blogs and humor sites, not to mention old standbys like e-mail and IM. One gets the impression that we should be "following" these things all day long, and many do. So when does the work get done? When do entrepreneurs start and manage their businesses? When do writers write that novel? When do IT professionals keep the trains running on time? When does anyone do anything?
The need for "attention," rather than "hard work," as the centerpiece of the new work ethic has arisen along with the rise of distractions carried on the wings of Internet protocol. In one generation, we've gone from a total separation of "work" from "non-work" to one in which both work and play are always sitting right in front of us.
Now, we find ourselves with absolutely nothing standing between us and a universe of distractions -- nothing except our own abilities to control attention. Porn, gambling, funny videos, flirting, socializing, playing games, shopping -- it's all literally one click away. Making matters worse, indulging these distractions looks just like work. And it's easy to work and play at the same time -- and call it work. These new, increasingly compelling distractions get piled on to older ones -- office pop-ins, e-mail, IM, text messages, meetings and others.
Kids now grow up with the whole range of distractions, from big-screen TVs to video games to cell phones to PCs in their rooms. They're addicted to screens before they even start high school. Their attention spans have been whittled down to seconds, and their expectations for constant amusement are highly developed.
In a world in which entire industries bet their businesses on gaining access to our attention, which value leads to better personal success: hard work or the ability to control attention?
A person who works six hours a day but with total focus has an enormous advantage over a 12-hour-per-day workaholic who's "multi-tasking" all day, answering every phone call, constantly checking Facebook and Twitter, and indulging every interruption.
It's time we upgraded our work ethic for the age we're living in, not our grandparents' age. Hard work is still a virtue, but now takes a distant second place to the new determinant of success or failure in the age of Internet distractions: Control of attention.
Hard work is dead. Are you paying attention?
In addition to writing for Datamation, where this column first appeared, Mike Elgan is a technology writer and former editor of Windows magazine. He can be reached at mike.elgan+datamation@gmail.com or his blog: http://therawfeed.com.
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18 comments:
Hard work and any sense of work ethic is obviously not dead in todays societies. If the urge to do good was non-existant then how is all of this new technology coming out? If it wasnt fotr the hard work people put in every day we would still be stuck in time never advancing.
I do not believe that work ethic is dead in todays society. Sure many people are lazier than before and more distractions exist in todays world than in the past. But people act the same way they have for the past few decades, and people have been argueing and complaining about peoples actions throughout the past few decades as well. People just need to stop being concerned with how people do things and how they work and just worry about their own problems, as long as our society is functioning and thriving in some ways i dont see what the problem is.
I believe that "work ethic" is dead in todays society. People of the past, actually do have "work ethic" and do their jobs, but the upcoming teenages and most people up to their late 20s have hardly any attention span at all and are constantly distracted by silly sites. My dad works in the deli in a supermarket and he comes home complaining and in a fluster everyday because as they hire new people for his job, they do nothing. They sit around and don't do their job; instead they socialize. The thing is that they don't even get in trouble. Even his boss doesn't want to do hard work and he does just about everything in the department when their are 4-5 people working in it each day. His boss even gets mad sometimes when he finishs his work before others and take on other tasks that need to be done. He is just there with his "work ethic" using it like he has been doing his whole life, and the new age is sitting on their butts saying that it's way too much work to make a simple sandwich, or texting up a storm when they applied for the job. I think any kind of "work ethic" has gone down the drain. I do my work and what i'm suppose too, but who isn't guilty of sending a text on the job? It's highly unlikely these days to not be guilty of that and to actually putting your all into your job. People's attention span have gone down the drain, they won't even wait in line to get into a store on Black Friday, I mean something needs to be done and people need to pay attention to tha task at hand and not all these distractions. "Work ethic" needs to be stressed and more strict.
I don't believe that work ethic is dead in todays workld. I do think things are different but, people still have work ethic. Since society has changed, work ethic has as well but i dont think that it is dead today, it is just different.
I think that hard work is in some ways dead. Many young americans today have never faced a serious hardship. They have never experienced an economic downturn, and expect to be able to continue without facing any problems. These americans don't think that they have to work hard for what they want. There are still many americans who have a good work ethic but there is less of a work ethic present in america today.
I don't beleive that hard work is dead in today's society. I beleive that the author of the second article made an excellence point by acknowledging the numerous distractions we are constantly bombarded with during our day. When I sit down at the computer to do homework each night I often find myself having great difficulty resisting surfing the internet and browsing different websites. However, I beleive that many people have managed to resist the distractions and continue their hard work.
Work ethic is not dead in today's society, although government handouts are promoting laziness. Everyone has an opportunity for greatness (or at least middle class status) if they work hard. Yet some people decide to wait for Prime Minister Obama to give them money instead. I'm sick of it raul!
I do not believe that work ethic is completely dead, however, it has seriously been lowered. People have become very lazy and unmotivated. Many people in our society do have an excellant work ethic though. There are many successful people that work hard and I beleive they make up for the people with no work ethic.
I do not think that people do not work hard in today's society. Sure there are a lot of lazy people who try to take the easy way. I think that there are more people who work hard to earn a living and try to iporve their lives and their families lives, than their who don't.
I disagree we most deffinatly still have hard work in this society. i for one consider myself to be an extremely hard worker. i have school and wreslting and after school activities and just attending them is hard work. besides me look at what people of my gemeration have already accomplished, leaps and buonds in modern medecine and techonology. hard work is NOT dead in todays society.
i dont think that hard work has died completely but i do believe that it has been lowered a dramatic amount. many people today think that they can get whatever they want whenever they want because they are used to their parents getting them everything they ask for. they are used to everyone else doing things for them and doing the work for them instead of doing it in class. an example of this is when kids are asked to read something in school and then write about it as a do now, most kids sit back and wait for the teacher to go over it and then write down that answer instead of taking the time to find the answer themselves. although there are many people who dont work hard there are still many that do. eventually though i do believe that with an increase in technology and america as a society getting lazier that there will be no work ethic left.
The work method and hard work is not dead yet, but it is on its way out. With so many more distactions in the modern world, it is much harder to get work done and not give into the temptations around you.
Hard work isnt dead in our society its just been less of it within our everyday lives. A lot of people get caught up with distractions such as tv, video games, facebook/myspace, text messaging that they forget about their priorities. However, there are still many hard workers out in this work force.
I think that hard work is still around but many things can now substitute for hard work. Using computers gets things done so much faster then it would normally take that people feel they don’t need to spend as much time on it and get distracted by other things. On the other hand there are plenty of people that I see even at my job, and I work in an office building, that take there jobs very seriously and work very hard. Unfortunately I can’t say I’m one of them, I waste a lot of time on the computer and try to get my work done quickly, so that ill have time to fool around on websites and listen to music. I think that if you really like your job you might work harder at it, and I think that might be a big factor in today’s lack of work ethic.
I think that work ethic has decreased over the past years. I see many teenagers and people in their early twenties who get paid to sit at a register and text their friends. I feel that I have a good work ethic because it was how I was brought up. I have worked for everything I have. I bought my saddle, field boots and a lot of my show clothes. I pay for my car insurance and all the services it needs, and that is why I have been forced to have a job. I have had a constant job since 9th grade because it was the only way to get money. I was never handed money and I feel that many families just hand their kids money. Parents are so focused on making the kids do well in school so that they are accepte d into college that they no longer care about teaching thme how to survive on their own. I feel that now kids are taught book smarts, not common sense or work ethics.
Hard work is certainly not dead in todays society. Everyday new things are shooting up all around the world, and I can guarentee that people aren't just stumbling into creating these new innovations. For a person to get what they want, all they have to do is believe in themselves, tell themselves that they can do whatever they want, because they control their lives, not anyone else in the world. If a person thinks that they can accomplish something, then they will work hard to do it.
I think that it is very easy to be distracted in today's society. A lot of kids in school, including myself, find it extremely hard to stay focused in class. For example, a lot of kids constantly need to be texting during class. These distractions make it a lot harder to get work done. However, I think it is needed in a way (unlike how the article said that multi-tasking is inefficient) because if you work straight through without thinking about anything else, you will get exhausted very quickly. This makes doing work seem more stressful and make you less likely to want to do it.
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