Work Explained (With a Matrix No Less)

Today I had an epiphany, but now it escapes me. Actually I just remembered it 'Henry George: The Greatest Thing To Happen To Sex' so I'll note that as a precursor to a future blog post. You can read the wikipedia article on him, and try and guess if you like, but you may aswell slack off right now and just wait for me to do all the thinking and writing for you.
What I was thinking about before my epiphany was this quote I stumbled across from Theodore Roosevelt:

Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

Let's assume this to be true, and not contest it. It seems on the whole to be true. One time for Brenton's birthday a bunch of us went to Cumberland River on the ocean rode and slept in tents and went fishing. The fish were biting such that all you had to do was cast out a line and reel it back in. Brenton complained that we were catching too many fish, the excitement was gone. For me lacking the patience in the most part to ever go fishing on my own initiative, it seemed to be the ideal type of fishing. I would probably be the kind of sadistic bastard who would shoot fish in a barral though, so on the whole part working hard at fishing at least varified by Brenton's account is a greater reward than not working hard at fishing.
Okay, but the post is supposed to explain work.
So if this quote we take to be true, then by rights if we invert it to its polar opposite that phrase to should be true:

Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance not to
work hard at work not worth doing.

So we have two good outcomes. And two variables, or conditions for the 'Far and away best prize' 1. Working Hard & 2. Work worth doing both need to be satisfied for work to be good and rewarding.

I like things with two conditions because it means I can use a Matrix, Matrixis are fancy diagnostic tools to enable us to evaluate our decisions or actions and most people can understand them so they tend to pop up everywhere.

Here's mine.

Let me explain the quadrants to you in agonising detail:
If we go around clockwise from top left the quadrants are 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Quadrant 1: Work Hard at Work Worth Doing

Well this is obvious, if your job is worthwhile, it means the results of your labors are of value to someone else, or to yourself. Examples might be, cooking a meal, performing surgery, scholarly study, exercise etc. Therefore energy put into the work creates value, thus thusly its own reward. Pretty much a no brainer, and the fundamental yardstick of all business ROI or Return On Investment.

Quadrant 2: Slack Off at Work Worth Doing

So the first half of the equation is known, you are engaged in cooking a meal, performing surgery, scholarly study, exercise etc. All that's missing is the energy or the effort. You give up on the surgery stating that you are 'bored' and leave early to play World of Warcraft. You can't be bothered walking to the shops, so you just use soysauce as a topping for the waffles and when customers complain you throw a tantrum go home and play World of Warcraft. You are enrolled in University and engaged in study for which you are the primary benificiary, and you break your study schedule up thusly: attendance rate at most 10%, exam preparation 10 minutes study per hour, 50 minutes per hour picking herbs in World of Warcraft. You wake up to your Alarm at 6AM in the morning and get dressed to go running, but find yourself a little chilly and sit down to play World of Warcraft.
In this case you simply forego the benifits of the worthwhile activity, by not investing any energy into it. Here the ROI goes down a bit, because arguably you aren't making an investment. Except we always are making an investment, and that is time. So slacking off when there is something worthwhile to be done, costs us our time available to work at what is worthwhile. The time is gone and it doesn't come back. And furthermore we can't make more time. To ever achieve the worthwhile activity, we are going to have to chose between it and other worthwhile activities with our time in the future.

Quadrant 3: Slack off at work not worth doing.

I am sure by now, I have been kicked out of the Guild I joined in World of Warcraft almost a year ago now, I played World of Warcraft for a grand total of 4 weeks. Whilst in general I am a fan of video games, what makes World of Warcraft bad is that it is an MMOG or MMPOG which is Massively Multi-player online game. And as it turns out, I hate all those people I was forced to play with, talking about noobs and chuck norris all the time. I quit because I didn't want to associate with people I don't like, and frankly wished ill things of, instead of spending time working with people I do like. But there are other examples of where I succeed in this quadrant, I am incredibly slack at digging holes and filling them in again, I also slack off at memorising facts about Gundam, I refuse to toe the line on producing wool, infact I'm so slack at producing unwanted wool that I don't even get up at the crack of dawn not to produce wool.
This is simply the complete opposite of Quadrant 1, made true by the same principles of Quadrant 1, that if the work is of no value to anybody, then any effort exerted in its cause will lead to waste. It's the Return on Investment. Interesting to note here is the wool example I just sighted. It demonstrates that 'worthwhile' is not a static concept. It is possible that producing wool is a worthwhile endeavor, like the wool jumper I am wearing now. It is cold outside and a wool jumper keeps me warm. I have it in white which is a nice neutral shade that is easy to coordinate with. Therefore the farmer that owns the sheep that produced the wool that was made into a jumper, that was purchased wholesale by a store that was bought by a consumer and then donated to a second hand store and then bought by me, were for the entirety of the value chain, engaged in worthwhile work. I do not however have need of any more wool jumpers. I do not need 10 wool jumpers for example. Much less 100. But if the farmer and the sheep and the store and so on, where really into hard work, they would produce 100 jumpers for every 1 I actually need. Bringing us to Quadrant 4.

Quadrant 4: Work Hard at work not worth doing.

I could explain this quadrant simply as 'World of Warcraft' but I choose not to in case you don't know what World of Warcraft is, or the useless people who play it call it 'WoW' who knows someday in the future, like Golf or other shitty pastimes played by people who run corporations, people who play WoW will run big companies and it will be considered a legitimate way to build relationships and thus 'work worth doing' by helping your boss get to Level 60 you may be fasttracking your career. Early signs don't indicate this though.
More poigniant examples are the construction workers of Japan, and this is the real fallacy of GNP, GDP or anything else, it measures worthwhileness on expenditure, therefore if you spend a heap of money digging holes and filling them up again your economy appears to grow.
And as said, you are always wasting time, when it comes to doing something not worthwhile above something that is worthwhile. This one is worse than slacking off on something that is worthwhile in my opinion because it is so often hailed as virtuous. It is people thinking in terms not of a two x two matrix, but a 1 x 1 Matrix, or work hard.
I could go out and run around a track from sun up to sun down tomorrow, the next day and the day after that. I probably would simply just destroy my body and never do anything more than get into the Guinness World Records, infact the Guiness World Records is really if anything a celebration of hard work at things that aren't worthwile. Like 'Longest Beard' and 'Longest Fingernails' a person gets etched into fame forever for really doing nothing but disabling themselves. As Lenny said in the simpsons 'Its like a lottery that rewards stupidity' and this is pretty much what a 'good' government in current terms does. But to truly appreciate it, you have to go to Tokyo, and watch a construction crew rip up a perfectly good piece of asphalt and then lay it down again, all in a single day. And walk past them two, and marvel at the complex system of flags and battons, of signs and cosigns between uniformed-hard hat wearing employees where some traffic cones would have sufficed.

So in summary, I agree with Ted, and give myself a further pat on the back for not putting any effort into anything of no value to anyone. I object though maybe to the use of the word 'hard' for effort should simply be no more and no less what is required to get the job done, which in essence is covered in that second criteria of 'worthwhile' as in any effort that is more than was sufficient to get the job done is contributed not to the 'worthwhile' part of work but the 'unworthwhile'. Now if only marketers didn't approach this problem by trying to figure at a way to sell more wool jumpers to people.