Value in the effort

There’s only so much pleasure you can get from pleasure. There’s only a limited amount of satisfaction you can experience from the good, enjoyable and valuable things that come your way without your effort. Sure, it can be nice for a while to receive life’s goodies without having to put forth any effort. But only for a while.

Even if you could snap your fingers and make anything appear — anything you wanted — you would soon be left empty. Because those things would have no meaning.

The effort you put into achievement is valuable not just because it earns you a reward. That effort has value in and of itself. Even if the reward were to somehow be denied you, the effort would still bring something positive to your life. And when the rewards do come, it is the effort that gives them real value to you.

Consider someone who has amassed a fortune worth billions of dollars, who continues to work more diligently than ever. Will an extra two or three hundred million dollars, or another billion, really make much difference in that person’s life? Of course not. That person continues working in order to get something that all the money in the world cannot buy — the satisfaction that comes from the process of achievement. It’s not selfish altruism, no matter how noble the cause. It’s self-affirmation. It’s the desire to matter, the desire to make a difference.

It can be all too easy to focus solely on the rewards you intend to gain from your work. But the fact is that the work itself has great and irreplaceable value to you. Whatever external rewards your work may yield, the sense of satisfaction and confidence from a job well done will always be even more rewarding.