People love to work hard on goals they're excited about, when the work feels meaningful, when they know how to clearly make progress on the task, when there's a shape to the work and a clear criteria for completion, when some combination of the financial and psychological rewards of the work are better than they'd get doing something else in the same time.

People hate work that feels undervalued, that's not clearly defined, that feels like an endless churn with no end in sight, when harder work does not turn into better results for them.

AI it feels like is making the latter far more common than the former.

Play. People love to play.

The culturally assigned meaning to work seems more like a social coercion.

If given the choice, including choice in mind, then people will likely choose community and play.

I don't necessarily disagree with the premise here, but the other makes the claim that people love to work hard based on their experience founding startups. People who gravitate towards that undoubtedly like to work hard, seems like sample bias.

Yes, I like to work hard. But not for 8h a day, 365 days per year and for 40-50 years.

People love to say they are working hard. 9/10 times they are not.

It is culturally important (at this point in time) to be "working hard" and "busy".

People don't love to work hard per se. Sisyphus works hard. A prisoner in a labor camp works hard. They don't love it.

What people love is purpose and agency. They love to do what they feel is right, and / or what they enjoy doing. They love to feel that they make a difference. This is why volunteers work hard. This is why the gamedev industry, known for low pay and long hours, never experiences a lack of applicants. This is why I prefer to work for startups.

It looks easy: just give your employees a purpose, and let them go on! But if your purpose, as a founder, or as a CxO, is to make the most money until it becomes clear that what you're doing is humbug, the people you will attract will likely be inspired by a similar purpose.

> 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:

> A clearly understood goal > A common set of values in pursuit of that goal

The only time when i have seen this to be true is when people don't have to work for money and when they believe that their basic needs (maslow's hierarchy's bottom 2 layers) have been taken care of forever (FIRE). That's when they truly work for a shared set of goals/values

Very much agreed. I’ve found most large companies so dysfunctional that there really is no way to or reason to work hard. At the end of the day everything that matters is controlled by other people somewhere else who make strange decisions. These large companies rarely let you use your own judgement to decide what to work on and often don’t have their own ideas sorted out enough for you to work uninterrupted on.

So while I find it significantly more satisfying to have actual work to work on, I don’t blame myself for being lasy when the real issue is the extreme amount of organisational dysfunction above that I have no control over.

People have different priorities, different purposes, and different passions. Maybe a success is as simple as to build a team that has some overlaps of these things.

I love to explore, I don't love to work, and I hate to work for someone dumber than me.

The work experience I've had was that CEO's/Founders are genuine retarded when it comes to knowing things about their own company, let alone the industry.

When there's a gap, they hire someone to do the work for them.

This doesn't apply to all leaders, but definitely to most.

Takeaway from the comments is that "work hard" is ill-defined and there's no effort done to fix that

Author should spend less time founding startups and more time working in government, then come back and post a retraction.

Working hard means lots of hours paid out of owners' pockets.

Working fast and avoiding work means short time-to-market.

I love to work hard on my projects. I don't love to work hard for someone who underpays me for things I don't care about.

“People” do not love to work hard. Some people love to work hard. There are enough people that love to work hard to fill your small startup. There are not enough people who love to work hard to fill the economy. Only someone who has had the privilege of working in well-paid technology companies could write this article. People work to survive.

If you’re a startup founder, and your employees aren’t working hard, it is a failing of the founder to pick the right people and create the right environment, but that covers less than 1% of the economy. The other 99% aren’t working hard because they just want to go home and be with the people they love instead of generating shareholder value. No amount of goal sharing will change that.

I recommend reading about the concept of alienation in Marx and Marcuse. They argue that it’s systematically produced, which I can’t prove, but just the observation that it exists, is very insightful.

Nah, this is an advertisement for the toxic work culture in countries where people get pushed to live to work, make the workplace the reason of their existence, know noone outside work.

In most places around the planet, if given the option, most people will work to live, not live to work.

That purpose and passion will mean nothing when the time to lie down on the place of eternal rest comes.

Lack of imagination and vision? Maybe, I rather have it that way.

"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"

lol, no offense, but if you helped found the company this pretty much excludes any impartial view of what your employees actually might feel, and i say this as a founder myself.

it's a wonderful thing to have a team that is on board with you and the mission, but at the end of the day they just want to go home and relax and you want to work on your baby.

that's not to say people are lazy by any means, just don't drink the coolaid too hard. even if i'm working for someone else i'm using my hard work to optimize my free time not putting in extra work unless i'm getting paid for it.

Wow, fresh take. Not.