Why? Unless you are working so hard that it drains you outside of office hours, what's wrong with it? I just feel plain worse when I slack off at work, and feel accomplished and valued when I work hard. I work the same number of hours either way.
Yeah, people like having purpose and feel good contributing to a shared goal.
If the work is stimulating, and the company is doing something you find valuable (or it’s your own company) then that’s very fulfilling.
There’s some cultural trope that everything is zero sum and that people can’t possibly enjoy their work or get value from it. I think this is just empirically wrong. People don’t just “think” they enjoy hard work, many actually do - and feel worse when they’re having trouble doing it.
I like the essay a lot, but I’m not sure it meets its title How to work hard. It lays out that to do great work you must and that it often feels good to do so. John Carmack proofread the essay and is probably one of the hardest working programmers alive (in addition to massive natural ability).
I think a more common problem is people that want to work hard, feel good when they do so, but have a hard time getting themselves to do so. Strategies around getting better at this (the “how”) are difficult. He touches on it a bit with how goals must be set once out of school and no one will set them for you. Interest helps, but is often not enough.
There’s of course also the group of people that don’t value hard work and don’t feel bad from not working hard/meeting potential, but I actually suspect this group is smaller than most think (and less interesting to discuss given the topic).
