Facibus On Blogging

In his Labor Day post, Seth Godin talks about the old-fashioned idea of hard work:

Your great-grandfather knew what it meant to work hard. He hauled hay all day long, making sure that the cows got fed. In Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser writes about a worker who ruptured his vertebrae, wrecked his hands, burned his lungs, and was eventually hit by a train as part of his 15-year career at a slaughterhouse. Now that’s hard work.

He then defines the modern concept of hard work by these examples:

It’s hard work to make difficult emotional decisions, such as quitting a job and setting out on your own. It’s hard work to invent a new system, service, or process that’s remarkable. It’s hard work to tell your boss that he’s being intellectually and emotionally lazy. It’s easier to stand by and watch the company fade into oblivion. It’s hard work to tell senior management to abandon something that it has been doing for a long time in favor of a new and apparently risky alternative. It’s hard work to make good decisions with less than all of the data.

The hard bit - the hard work - is in taking the responsibility to step beyond the comfortable. To dare to be truly remarkable. This sounds trite, but trust me, the last thing that a consulting client needs from a consultant is to never hear a question, or never be told when things aren’t going well.

What is the modern conception of hard work for bloggers? I’m thinking it is something like this:

• Don’t be shy about telling it the way you see it: Have the courage to tell your readers what they need to hear (if offering advice - and this needs to be taken in context of being prepared to back your advice up if there is follow-on legal action as a result).
• Be prepared to be different: don’t follow the accepted wisdom if you can see a better way - life’s too short for beige.
• Accept the risk: accept that failure is a real possibility. Most of the time (for bloggers at least) it isn’t fatal.
• Look beyond the safe: the outwardly safe path is not necessarily the best long-term solution. It is one of those weird Zen paradox things that letting go of self-preservation allows for absolute concentration on the task at hand, sometimes ensuring preservation in situations where it is not a given. In many of his books, Seth Godin advises that the safe way is not really the safe path - that white collar workers are paid to take risks and rise above the widget-stamping process level to create something of real value. In this post, he says “The big insight: The riskier your (smart) coworker’s hard work appears to be, the safer it really is. It’s the people having difficult conversations, inventing remarkable products, and pushing the envelope (and, perhaps, still going home at 5 PM) who are building a recession-proof future for themselves.”
• Think: think, and don’t be afraid of your thoughts. Cherish them, write them down, develop them.
• Act: When the time comes, don’t blink. Act.

And the funny thing is that the “hardest working” professional bloggers probably work fewer hours than I do. Hard work isn’t.