Is there such a thing?
And should there be such a thing? I suppose it depends on what one wants to accomplish in their lifetime.
Be happy? Well, then just do whatever you want, then. If you love cooking, do it. Watch movies? Do it. Play games. Garden. Start a club with friends. With no hesitation. Flip on a dime, if you want, if a project or activity if it no longer makes you happy. As for money, do whatever it takes to sustain yourself, then go home and enjoy the rest of your day. Some work still must be done. That much can’t be helped. However, limit your commitments, and you’ll free yourself of work. The bar for working hard enough is fairly low.
Raise a happy family? Then you suddenly raise your commitments. Commitments not only to your children, but your spouse as well. Don’t forget about them. Circumstances vary, but it’s not an insignificant amount of work to accomplish, whether you have an obedient child or children that need a little help. Since it is a task carried out through thousands of generations, it can be easy to belittle the effort it takes, especially for a happy family. The involvement of multiple people adds more moving parts, each person exponentially increasing the number of targets to track. Still, if a happy family is the only goal, and everything else takes a backseat, then you can still limit your commitments and make life manageable. If another commitment is taking time away from being an effective parent, then you can either find a solution or drop it. Without hesitation. I’d say the bar for working hard enough is significantly higher than being single, but still quite manageable with this goal.
Then, what about running a successful company? In some ways, though you may not spend as much time with each other, companies can be a family, or a compound of families. Relationships are involved. You still have to deal with each other’s quirks or problems. You are not dealing with children, yet, at the same time, you kind of are. Again, circumstances vary. However, all that said, once we move to dozens of people, hundreds, thousands, we are talking about an incredible number of moving parts. As important or sacred it is to raise a good family, running a successful company just takes more work once it reaches a certain size. The caveat, of course, is that work can be divided, and for sure they should. Yet, there are still instances of a sole person being the sole face or single workhorse of a company. Or, even with properly segmented work, the leads for each department are still managing tasks for a company that operate on a national or international scale. For these individuals, the bar for working hard enough is even higher still.
But I wouldn’t say it stops there. Some might wonder what could be harder than managing a multi-million or billion dollar company?! Well, besides the easy answer of running two or three companies at once, that would be running a successful company and raising a happy family. Imagine the bar for such a life. The number of commitments that will compete for your precious time. When faced with that responsibility, it seems to me that one can never work hard enough. There is always a little more work that could be done to improve things now or allow yourself to work smarter in the future.
In reality, life is more complicated than this simple breakdown. For simplicity’s sake, I won’t delve further. I don’t even think this scale is the best way to think of work. Not that I have any evidence it isn’t great, other than the fact I’ve only allowed myself one week to write it all out with little research. It is all inner monologue, so take that for what it is before applying what I write to yourself. I write about it as a record for myself. A record for how I break up the scale for “working enough” in my mind at this moment, and maybe the conversation could be helpful in spurring others to think of their own scale.
Now, to return to the question I ask myself. Is there such a thing as not working hard enough? If I think about what I’m doing now on the scale I’ve laid out, I wouldn’t say I’m even accomplishing the simplest level. I may be working hard enough day to day to satisfy myself in the moment, but I still go to sleep and wake up each day deflated, not satisfied I worked enough. All because I’m fussing about the highest level of the scale. The highest rung of the ladder.
Let me lay out the situation first.
For the better part of the last year, I’ve been working on my health. By the end of university, I could no longer pull the all-nighters I was doing before, no matter how much time I wanted to dump into my thesis. My endurance eroded significantly from the chronic practice of sleeping improperly. It was the first time truly recognized: I was growing old already. After graduation, though I went to work immediately, my time was freed up to allow myself to sleep whenever. And I did so. Yet, I still did not have a consistent schedule yet, leading me to experience the same fatigue everyday as if I’d only slept a few hours the previous night. It was not until I moved out from my hometown a year later when, in conjunction with everything else changing, I established a consistent sleep schedule. It took some effort to maintain. Particularly, it was easy enough to misuse that newfound energy to stay up later into the night, thus ruining my schedule. The other difficulty was, it did not actually make me significantly happier, because this effort came at a cost. I did not feel like I was moving forward with my work. By work, I’m not referring to my dayjob, but my passion projects. After waking up, doing my job, cooking lunch, doing my job, napping, cooking dinner, then finally getting a few hours for creative work before winding down the rest of the day with mindless activities, I am left with little time, let alone worn out motivation, for the projects I truly care about. As part of my health efforts, Saturday is designated as a completely mindless day, while Sunday is flexible, though I often use it to start my week’s work to replace Friday’s work, freeing up time for the station. To make more room, I would have to drop those wind-down hours. Even then, those extra hours might not be productive. Depending on what I worked on for my job earlier that day, I might be worn out to do anything creative. For the longest while, I thought I wasn’t disciplined enough, but I recently discovered why this was natural while reading an article about how humans can only manage around four hours of intensive work a day. I no longer remember the original source I read. It focused on what work would look like post-pandemic. However, this older article by The Week is a good reinforcement of that message. Back to the issue at hand: I did not feel like I was accomplishing my creative goals. It made me wonder: If I can’t improve my lifestyle while advancing my work, am I not working hard enough, or is that just how I am? Something I’ll have to work around?
I have a magnum opus. A masterpiece. A project so important that it should define my life as an artist. For Tezuka Osamu, that was Phoenix. For me, that is Wanderer. The main difference is, I pursue an animated series, a product that requires much more moving parts than a manga. We’re talking on the scale of dozens of people, perhaps multiple studios, coming together to produce a product in an industry that is inherently subjective by nature. Value cannot be calculated before the product airs. It can only be appraised based on the current trends of audience sentiment. Though artists abhor to refer to their works as products, the hard truth is it must be. Animation is such an expensive endeavor that requires a business in order to get it out on any reasonable schedule. To succeed in carrying out my masterpiece, I must weigh myself on the scale of running a successful company. And in that ambiguous journey to get off the ground, first by building my name, it has opened a new perspective on the invisible work you don’t see.
People who like to criticize celebrities at first glance, claiming they shouldn’t be famous, clearly never tried to do so themselves. Part of the reason is luck and opportunity, of course, but make no mistake, their fame is not an accident.
(speaking of not working hard enough… the rest of this station will be posted at a later hour)