Though now proud to call America my home, I did not grow up in this country. I was born in the rural Atlas Mountains of Morocco, in a semi-nomadic community with no electricity, running water, or gas-powered vehicles. There, people worked very hard, but I never heard anyone preach hard work as a national value, or a moral virtue, or anything else so abstract. They worked hard for one simple reason: if they didn’t, they wouldn’t survive.
With an MA in journalism under my belt, I make a practice of handling absolute words, such as “always,” with care, but I will say this without reservation: Hard work always does pay off. I consider this thesis a first principle, a cornerstone of my existence, a fulcrum with which I raised myself from ignorance and poverty.
I arrived at this principle thanks to a cow.
As a child, orphaned and neglected by my family, I often fended for myself. Whenever I needed food, I would sneak into my uncles’ livestock pens and drink directly from the animals’ teats. One hot summer day, I arrived at the barn, parched with thirst, only to find my uncle’s cow standing placidly in the corner, her udders hanging slack and useless from her skinny frame, empty of milk.
I was disappointed, of course, but I knew exactly what to do. There was an alfalfa field a couple of hours down the road by foot. I didn’t hesitate. I started walking.
Reaching the field, harvesting the alfalfa, and carrying it back took me most of the day, and then I had to wait for the cow to consume and digest it, but eventually, her teats began to swell. With the sun dipping low in the sky, I was finally able to slake my thirst. Hunger and exhaustion made the fresh milk sweeter. So did the knowledge that I’d earned it by working hard.
Today, like most of my fellow Americans, I live in a city. Instead of livestock, fields, and orchards, I’m surrounded by computers, smartphones, coffee makers, and refrigerators. I travel to and from the grocery store, at least as far as that alfalfa field and back, by car, and I drink the milk I purchase at my leisure. In nearly every respect, I’ve become a modern, American woman. I still remember where I came from, though. I still remember where the milk comes from, too.
Remembering where you came from while still remaining grounded in the present can be hard. I’ve struggled with this as an individual, and so I feel nothing but sympathy when I witness America, my adopted home, struggling with this as a nation. When I first arrived in the US, I grew accustomed to hearing Americans speak proudly of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. At first, I didn’t know what this meant, but when someone explained it to me, I immediately saw the parallel between this way of thinking and my own. Americans speak of their bootstraps. I speak of a fulcrum. These are two different ways of saying that if we want to improve our circumstances, we must work hard.
More recently, though, I’ve been troubled to notice that my fellow Americans are bringing up bootstraps less frequently. The tenor of the national conversation about hard work seems to have changed. A new belief is spreading, especially among younger Americans: a conviction that hard work does not always pay off.
According to this ideology, institutional biases, corruption, and greed systematically get between hardworking people like me and the fruits of our labor. This problem, which has an outsized impact on people who are “marginalized,” can be solved only by saviors, who usually come in the form of states, NGOs, or other similarly uncorruptible institutions, with the power and initiative to intervene on behalf of the marginalized.
As it happens, I check many of the boxes that make someone “marginalized.” I’m an immigrant, after all. And a woman. And an indigenous person. And a person of color. And totally blind. I suppose this must be why my self-styled saviors get so flustered when I push back against this line of reasoning, citing my own lived experience and arguing that no matter where I come from, regardless of the color of my skin, notwithstanding how many body parts I happen to be missing, hard work always does pay off.
It’s true, of course, that external obstacles, including flawed systems and corrupt institutions, sometimes interfere with hardworking individuals’ aspirations. Though I’ve won the respect and support of merit-based institutions like the Fulbright Program and the MacDowell Foundation, I’ve also encountered corrupt organizations that have misled, exploited, and abused me. These experiences are real, and I have learned a lot from them. They have not, however, shaken my faith in the idea that hard work always does pay off. They never will.
If anything, like the hunger in my belly as I carried the alfalfa on my shoulders, they have strengthened my conviction.
Since the mere existence of such obstacles alone cannot explain why some people lose faith in hard work, I’d like to explore a few other factors that may be driving this trend.
The first is a failure to distinguish between two related concepts: “work” and “effort.” Physicists, who cannot afford to ignore this distinction, define “work” as the net change of state that results from the application of force to an object or system. Built into this definition of “work” is the concept of change. Effort alone—or, in the physicists’ parlance, force alone—does not imply change. You can apply force to an object for years, but if your effort is met by an equal and opposite force, you will never get anywhere. You will have done no work. To work hard, you must apply leverage. You must find your fulcrum. You must think strategically.
The second is a failure to distinguish between hard work and the mere idea of hard work. This may be an unfortunate byproduct of the largely positive fact that, in American society, hard work is an explicit value, which has been passed down from parents to children for generations. Because many modern children are exposed to the words “hard work” before they experience hard work directly, it’s possible to get confused. Usually, this confusion gets cleared up with time, but not always. Recently, an elderly woman came to me complaining that her son couldn’t find a job. When I asked her what kinds of jobs he was looking for, she said that he wanted to be a C-level executive. When I asked about his credentials, she said he’d never gone to college. She’d raised him to believe that hard work always pays off, but apparently she’d failed to make him understand that simply saying the words “hard work” over and over doesn’t actually get you anywhere—that you actually have to do something hard if you want to get results.
This leads us to the third factor which I believe is contributing to the erosion of younger Americans’ faith in hard work: an unhealthy fixation on external rewards. Almost two thousand years ago, Marcus Aurelius knew better. “It is not in our control to have everything turn out exactly as we want,” he wrote. “Our control and power are limited to our own thoughts.” But, he added, “When you control your thoughts, you control your destiny.”
Too often, we assume that if we do not get the outcome that we want—if we do not secure the grant, or get the client, or land the job—then our work has not paid off. Too rarely do we realize that simply by doing what we can, approaching the client or submitting the application, we’ve already reaped the rewards of our labor. “I never lose,” Nelson Mandela once famously said. “I either win or learn.”
You can’t force the cow to digest what it’s eaten. Its intestinal enzymes, like the thoughts in strangers’ heads, lie beyond your control. That said, assuming that you’ve given it something that cows can digest, you will get your milk sooner or later—unless there’s something wrong with that particular cow, some disease or parasite preventing it from turning your offering into something potable, in which case you probably don’t want to drink its milk anyway.
If you accept that the presence of obstacles, even such daunting obstacles as flawed systems and corrupt institutions, means that your hard work may not pay off, you’ve already lost. Whenever you approach a challenge with the fear of failure, you instinctively hold something back, and what you hold back may turn out to be the very thing that makes the difference between success and failure, hunger and satiation, life and death.
The overwhelming majority of Americans used to understand this, not so very long ago, which is why I feel so at home in this country, so honored and proud to call America my home. I’m troubled by younger Americans’ loss of faith in hard work, but I also trust that such a deeply rooted ethos cannot simply be eradicated from the culture overnight. Plenty of Americans still remember. Still more teeter on the brink of remembering. I offer you this dispatch from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco to remind you of that which you already know in your bones: that hard work always does pay off.
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