>Hard work is frightening. We shy away from hard work because inherent in hard work is risk. Hard work is hard because you might fail. You can’t fail at long work, you merely show up. You fail at hard work when you don’t make an emotional connection, or when you don’t solve the problem or when you hesitate.<p>I disagree with this, at least what the author classifies as risk. I'm more than happy to take on challenging work, work I am emotionally connected to and want to see succeed--then fail. I can deal with failure and progress on just fine because I have pretty iron clad motivation. I've worked in R&D environments most my life and I can assure you, research has a lot of failure if you're doing it correctly.<p>The risk that makes certain work "hard" vs others is that failure results in livelihood setbacks: not having food, not having a place to live, financial failure, health risks, not having any bit of job security, etc. Those to me are the real risks people shy away from when we talk about "hard" work.<p>Give me a difficult/creative problem or task and I can try for hours, days, weeks, months, years... to find a solution, but only if I know at the end of the day I'll have a reasonably comfortable life.<p>The way a lot of work is structured, I find "hard" work is that which has inherent livelihood risk to the person doing the work in some way, shape, or form. It could be health risk work (say a police officer), failed research resulting in lack of a job, or a poor new art collection that ruins the future career of an artist.<p>Our society needs to learn to be more accepting to to a few more degrees of failure than the hypercompetiveness currently allows. Less and less failure is being acceptable and it's completely unrealistic to hold all humans to these standards. Yes, we should reward high risk success but should we punish every form of failure as we often do? Sure, laziness can be masked under failure and abuse this leniency, but so can success.