(This post is targeted toward people in business and product functions, but may be useful outside, too.)

I began my career in management consulting - a field famous for long days (70+ hour weeks were typical), high-pressure and arbitrary deadlines, relentless pressure, and constant burnout, especially in how it used up its bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 22-year-old new recruits. (My friends in investment banking had it far worse.)

We were grateful for our luck, so we did what we were told. But “grinding” in my 20s as I was then taught to do led to burnout for me -- and for them. Later, another cycle of burnout happened in my product career.

So when I see viral Twitter and Tiktok conversations about #hustle and #grind culture, I worry about the people caught up in them.

1/ Egoic attachment to hard work = unnecessary suffering.

A successful startup CEO/founder friend recently told me: “Smart, ambitious people who work hard make great entry level employees. It’s the smart, ambitious, lazy ones who make great CEOs."

If you've ever noticed that cleaning the house is more pleasant when also listening to a podcast, or that you'd rather work on a complex new problem than answer the same old question in the 10th email the same day, you know that easeful is not the same as “easy.”

Early in my career, in my commitment to hard work or looking like I was working hard, I was failing to ask the critical questions: Was this work necessary? Was it really my work to do? And could I make it go away in the future?

Ironically, it was laziness that helped me grow from that rut, because it made me keenly interested in how automation, simplification, delegation, and prioritization could help me and everyone around me. It made me lean into flow states that delivered 10x or greater value to my goals than responding to yet another repeated email with the same question (a case that any good PM should tell you is a problem with documentation).

2/ Discomfort is a signal of redirection. If you don’t pay attention, you’ll miss it.

It’s worth asking why something is a grind—you’re making a lot of phone calls and getting rejections, why do the rejections feel bad? If you’re saying the same thing in meetings again and again but it’s not changing behavior, why not? Pain in our somatic systems is a first signal that something’s wrong:

• We feel unsupported by our environments (physically or relationally);

• We're abandoning our own needs and stretching too far;

• Subconsciously, we don't have hope that more effort matters.
  

If you've felt the difference between your strength when going on a totally optional hike at 1 pm while overheated and dehydrated -- and how you felt after you decided to give up and begin the march back to the car for water -- you're dialing into this set of signals. Our bodies are very good at ignoring suffering when we're committed to what the suffering is for.

So pay attention: why don't you believe in what yours is for right now?

As a panel of successful founders at South Park Commons in SF recently tackled this topic with agreement I find pithy and wise: Success does not feel like a grind. When it's working, you may be working hard, but it feels easy.

3/ Grinding makes you less kind to yourself and others.

Grinding means a bit that you’re doing something you hate, because you think it will be better "one day." But the future just comes from the right now, again and again, and a view upon the future pulls you out of being fully aware of and present with what’s happening right now.

The more I was in a "grind" mode, the less I was present with myself, and the less I was present with others.

Check in with yourself - is grinding making you "difficult," "perfectionist," or "critical"?

Is it making you feel the need to "play hard" after a tough week, or have 2 drinks to unwind after a hard day?

Is it making you resentful of the colleagues who seem to balance work with a full and happy life outside of work, and somehow are doing well anyway, while you bash your head against every wall?

You think they must be cheating the system somehow. You think they must have cracked some code.

They are. They've learned that suffering is redirection -- and to walk around the wall.

This is post #2 in a daily writing challenge, #ship30for30. On Saturday, I wrote about embracing failure as unlock to success; yesterday, I failed to publish this one on time, so here it is late!