I’m very good at straining.

We Japanese come from a culture where we beautify strain and struggle.  It’s good for the soul, they say.  Perseverance builds character.  A mature character never complains.  Take strains and hardship with grace.

I do still believe in all that, but I’m trying to unlearn a piece of it.

The idea that success comes from “hard” work.

By Hard Work, I mean work that truly strains.  Work that drains and weigh you down, where at the end you just feel like collapsing.  You resent Hard Work yet you do it, either out of obligation or guilt.  Anything, even an activity that you most enjoy, can become Hard Work if you force yourself to do it too long, too intensely.

I’m not afraid of hard work, yet, so far in my life all Hard Work produced was situations requiring more Hard Work.

I’m trying to differentiate Hard Work from what I call Good Work.  Here are the characteristics of Good Work:

• It is self-rewarding.  You do it even if you don’t gain anything else from it.
• It doesn’t feel like work a lot of the times.  It can feel like playing.
• It still requires discipline and diligence to do it, oddly enough — just like Hard Work.
• It has tons more Resistance surrounding it.  It takes more courage, and it’s harder to justify than Hard Work.

Now, both Hard Work and Good Work can produce success, at least, of a certain kind.  A lot of work is required to produce certain kinds of success, like mastery of something.  When you are a master, you can create demand for your expertise.

But life-sucking Hard Work, imagine being a master and being in demand for it.  That’s not a success in my book.  That can feel more like Hell.

Good Work, on the other hand — being a master and being in demand, is like Heaven.  I’d do it, even if I wasn’t asked to.  To meet someone else’s needs, to be appreciated, for something that I enjoy, something that gives me energy — what can be better?

To give a more concrete example: I only enjoy certain kinds of web work.  The kind where I’m creatively engaged and challenged.  Yet, a lot of web work can be so dehumanizing.  It can be just millions of copy and paste.

I tried to have a go at making music for commercials, years ago.  I couldn’t do it.  I just could not muster enough energy to sustain Work and master it, let alone build demand for it.  It’s creative and engaging work for some people, I’m sure.  For some reason I couldn’t do it.

It may sound like I’m just being whiny and picky, but I beg to differ.  My goal is not just merely surviving, it’s thriving.  The Thriving Me is the one that can make positive impacts to Humanity.  Survival, it just takes up space and resources.  Of course, you have to survive first to thrive.  But we all need to move beyond it.

So I’m diligently trying to ditch Hard Work and engage in Good Work.  It’s been a surprisingly hard lesson to learn, perhaps because I come from a culture that glorifies it.  (People exhaust themselves to such an extent that they literally die in Japan.  Well, that can happen other places, too, but I’ve never seen a place that expects and demands Hard Work like we Japanese do.  For example, I’ve read comments by American baseball coaches going over to Japan and see Japanese players “over-practice”)

But really, if I create a success out of Hard Work, that’s really not success to me.  I may be affluent and in demand, but that’s not my goal.

What I need to thrive, is Good Work.