One of the most infuriating tropes that I see repeated in media is executives (usually from boring old companies) insisting that their employees don’t want to work hard. Media outlets dutifully repeat this pernicious lie, despite there being no evidence to back it up, and then cultural commentators either credulously amplify it, or actively take part in advancing the narrative as part of their agenda, even though they know it’s false. There is an apparently infinite attention appetite for commentators who troll for attention by saying how “kids these days” don’t want to work hard.
As has often been documented , the hoary chestnut of saying “nobody wants to work anymore” dates back decades, if not centuries, and it’s never been true in all those years of deletion. It is, firstly, a tactic that bosses use for negging workers in a vain attempt to try to drive down wages (and to successfully get media to blame people for their own underemployment), but it also serves as an effective demonstration of just how little society understand about what actually motivates people .
I’ve helped found six companies in my life, and been involved in the start of a handful of other startups and nonprofits, and literally every single one was full of people who love to work hard. The simple reason for that shared trait is that all of those teams were comprised of groups of people with a few key things in common:
If people have these things, and believe in what they’re doing together, they will joyfully work their asses off.
It is genuinely one of the best feelings in life to be completely exhausted while sitting next to someone who’s been right beside you, shoulder to shoulder, fighting to accomplish the same goal. I’ve known that to be true whether we were launching a new company into the world, campaigning to get a candidate we believed in elected, organizing to rally people around an issue, raising funds for an important cause, or even just trying to get people together for a big event or party.
Every time, the feeling of being soul-tired next to folks who you know you can trust because they showed up and worked their asses off just like you did, is among the most motivating and inspiring things you can experience. Nobody who’s ever been lucky enough to have had a moment like that could ever think that people “don’t want to work”.