Working hard and doing your best will certainly earn you respect but to get a paycheck you have to do the job at hand.

I have been following the story of the NFL football player who had his two, young sons return their trophies for just participating in an event. His claim was they did nothing to earn them but show up. His belief is that’s not enough to claim a reward. That may seem harsh but it is the reality they will eventually face.

My experience is we all want to be paid for working hard but when we hire someone, we only want to pay them for results. That is the way of the world.

Working hard and getting results are not the same and each will have a different employment level. If you’ve ever worked in a factory or waited tables for long hours or did some kind of construction labor, you know you worked hard. The rub is you weren’t paid for hard work; you were paid to get a job done. If you were incapable of doing the job, no matter how hard you worked, you were eventually out of a job.

Results often follow hard work but not always. Some people are working hard at the wrong aspect of their job – the aspect that doesn’t get them paid.

One of the nicest people I ever worked with worked harder than anyone else. But most of his work went into the minutiae and not the job at hand. As nice as he was and as hard as he worked, it didn’t get him the rewards I’m sure he thought he truly deserved, just an invitation to pack up his things and move on.

The job at hand is getting results, not producing sweat.

People who have bought into the hard work myth generally fall into the category of what I refer to as “thinking like an employee.” But regardless of how you think, the thing you’re going to get paid for is getting results, unless you’re a member of congress.

A question that will gain you focus is: “What is the job at hand for me?”

This question applies to all aspects of life, not just what you do for a living. Zero in on doing the job at hand and notice how much you increase your results, which often results in you getting more zeros after the comma in your yearly income.

All the best,

John