Why Nobody Wants To Work Anymore

Summary

• I used to believe that work was bad, but now I see it as something to be engineered for enjoyment.
• I want to help people move towards work they love, instead of generalizing all work as bad.
• It's possible to have a rewarding career without running away from work and into entrepreneurship.
• My experience with a demeaning boss taught me to strive to create a workplace where people genuinely enjoy their work.
• I built my business with the goal of improving my employees' and customers' lives.
• I advocate for integrating work and life, so one benefits the other rather than creating a divide.
• Making systems feed each other leads to work-life integration and overall happiness.
• Confidence and growth in work can make someone a more valuable partner and friend.
• It's important to differentiate between being challenged at a job and being in a toxic work environment.
• To change one's mentality about work, being part of a positive work culture can make a significant difference.
• Remote work allows people to avoid punishing environments, but great organizations create cultures that make employees want to work more and enjoy it.
• When starting or at an entry-level job, recognize that hard work is not bad, it's a pathway to improvement.
• Embracing challenges and understanding that difficulty can lead to personal growth is key to a successful mindset.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest implementing a positive view of work by finding aspects of it that can be enjoyable. Instead of seeing hard work as something negative, embrace it as a path to improvement and personal growth. If you're looking to make your work rewarding and integrate it with your personal life, here's an action plan to follow:

1. Identify What You Love: Think about what you enjoy and how to incorporate that into your work. Can you work on projects or with people that align with your passions?

2. Create a Positive Workplace: If you're in a leadership position, strive to create an environment where employees are encouraged and supported, just like my first boss did for me.

3. Seek Work-Life Integration: Look for ways your work can improve other areas of your life. If growing in your job makes you more confident, this can also make you a better friend or partner.

4. Understand the Difference: Learn to tell apart a challenging job from a toxic work environment. It's good to be challenged but not to be demeaned.

5. Be Part of a Positive Culture: Surround yourself with a work culture that emphasizes the value and enjoyment of work, as this can help reshape how you view hard work.

6. Embrace Remote Work Wisely: If remote work suits you, make sure it's not a way to escape work but a more balanced way to integrate work and life.

7. Value the Learning Curve: Remember that it's natural to not be perfect at your job immediately. Hard work is part of the journey to excel in your role.

8. Build a Positive Support Network: Engage with friends who support your work and help you grow, rather than those who reinforce negative views about working hard.

9. Stick It Out: Understand that feeling bad in the short term, while improving at work, can lead to greater satisfaction and mental health in the long run.

10. Reflect on Your Feelings: Before leaving a job, consider if it's the job or your response to the challenges that is the problem.

By making these small changes, you can work towards finding more happiness in your job and see how work can positively influence other aspects of your life.

Quotes by Leila Hormozi

"Work is not something we want less of if it's engineered in a way that makes it rewarding"

– Leila Hormozi

"I never want this experience for people and I will create a business where I get to have an impact on people's lives by creating a culture where people actually like what they do"

– Leila Hormozi

"Most things that are good for us don't feel good initially"

– Leila Hormozi

"Understanding that feeling bad in the short term is often good for me in the long term have been what have helped me turn my life around"

– Leila Hormozi

"The ability to undergo hard and harder challenges is how you become a better person by the end of it"

– Leila Hormozi

Full Transcript

seems like no one wants to work anymore there's this narrative that work is bad and that work has to be punishing and that work's something we want less of and I want to talk about how you can engineer your life so that you get to avoid those situations and be in ones where work is actually good and you want more of it it really is just like I feel passionate about like people being able to have a job they like you know I think there was a time for me when I thought that work was bad and work sucked and I wanted to minimize time spent working I was actually on LinkedIn the other day and I was looking at all these posts that were popping up a lot of them were BAS basically people who sell you on like having a business that takes you x amount of hours a week and I actually just felt really sad because they know that you probably had a job that you hate and all this [ __ ] and I was just like yo this is [ __ ] up it's like being like you should be single forever because you had one bad relationship you don't need to be single you just need to understand what to look for in the right relationship or understand how to build the right relationship rather than avoid it for the rest of your life yeah there's almost just like messaging out there that being an entrepreneur is going to solve all these problems that you encounter in your world it's not even being an entrepreneur it's that people are trying to minimize work in general whether it be at their job or it be in now they've quit their job because work sucks and now they try to start a business that takes a little amount of time because work is hard and sucks I want people to do whatever works for them but I think that there is a huge argument to be made for people making massive generalizations based off of specific circumstances and then making decisions that affect their entire [ __ ] life based off of these like couple specific instances and I see that there's a lot of people now playing up this narrative that work is bad and work means punishment if you work for a company you're never going to be happy you've got to be happy as an entrepreneur and then when you're an entrepreneur you can only work a certain amount of hours otherwise there's something wrong with you and it's a punishing experience it is true that there are certain circumstances that are punishing you can have a boss who is suppressing and demeaning you can work at a company that is shitty and doesn't care about its customers and you can have a business that's really hard and punishing because maybe you pick the wrong Market but I think that a lot of people end up punishing themselves in not just the short term but they punish themselves for the entire rest of their lives by not showing themselves what they're capable of because they're constantly running from work rather than towards it because now they've generalized that all work is bad and it's indefinitely that way and so because of that there's this constant separation between work and life and people like me who have found a way to make work rewarding are seen as [ __ ] weird and like Workaholics and you work too much and you're crazy you work 14 hours a day yes because I love it and it makes the rest of my life better so it's like we take all this time that we're trying to avoid work we're trying to build a life that we love outside of work as if you can separate life and it's like what if we took that time and we put it towards figuring out a way to engineer a business or a life where you actually love what you do and you actually want to maximize the time you spend doing it rather than minimize it and so what that could mean right is like let's think about a world in which you have a business that involves your children you get to have them participate in or you get to have a business where you work with your spouse or a job where you work with your spouse or you get to support a cause that you're very passionate about the way that I thought about it was like I would love a business where I get to work with my spouse because I like working a lot because I've engineered it that way and so I want somebody who can be in there with me I would love to build a culture where people love what they do therefore we can have friendships because it's not like I'm their boss punishing them all day it's like I'm somebody who's helping them grow and get better at a job that they like and I think a lot of people don't know that like where I came from the reason I do what I do is because I had a job that sucked it's because I had a boss that sucked and I said to myself I never want this experience for people and I will create a business where I get to have an impact on people's lives by creating a culture where people actually like what they do and creating a culture where our customers also get to experience a great service or a great team or great interactions because they also get to see people who actually like what they do and so by consequence it makes everyone else's lives better not worse I wonder actually if you could share the story of that first really shitty job because I think a lot of people could relate so I took a job at a gym and I was a trainer there and the first boss I had was fantastic he was investing in my growth he was constantly checking in on me having one-on ones asking me if I was reaching my goals like trying to invest in me giving me books to read having multiple meetings with me per week encouraging me constantly telling me that I could do things that I didn't think I was capable of and he left to go work somewhere else and a new boss came in and that boss was all of the opposite things he was punishing he yelled at me he demeaned me he told me he wanted to run me over with his truck and light me on fire he threatened me if I wasn't doing well at work which of course I wasn't because I didn't want to work for him and every single day when I drove up to work I specifically remember sitting in my car and I would just try not to cry because I was scared of him so going to work was just like a very stressful experience and two I just felt like I was no longer doing anything that was meaningful to me because he had taken all the meaning out of it by making it such a punishing experience after I left that job the first thing I thought to myself was like I have to have my own business so I can do things the right way not because I think that all work is this way but because I would love to set an example for people of what it can be rather than what people think it needs to be that was when I made it my mission like I always want to build a place where people genuinely want to work where people genuinely come here and say my life is is better for having this job my relationship is better for having this job my health is better for having this job not worse that's the goal and I think if people thought about that as their frame how do I find a job that makes the rest of my life better rather than how do I find a job that I have to work so little I can focus on the rest of my life yeah cuz it's like even for someone who's able to let's say shrink their work day to 6 hours or take a part-time job like they're still putting in 4 hours into something that they they might hate I think that the difficulty is that if you build a business that does not benefit the rest of your life then every time you work on the business it takes from here and every time you work on these they take from here and I don't think a lot of people think about this the goal is how do I create it so that they all make each other better whether it's a job or a business if people actually put this thought into it how do I Engineer my relationship so that I do things in my relationship that make my job better how do I Engineer my job so I do things at my job that make my health better and it's just that most people instead say I'll separate these systems but then every time you're doing one you are quite literally taking from another and starving the other whereas they can feed each other and actually make each other better over time we just put some thought into it we have all these social norms like Sunday scary can't wait for the weekend like Friday happy hour and no clock out early it is really embedded into our culture kind of joke about work as if like it's like bad traffic or like shitty weather it is and the thing that sucks is that because it's so embedded in our culture to avoid work to try and minimize work to try and do less of it when you do get an opportunity where you work somewhere or build a business that you want more of everyone else around you wants you to do less of it and then what happens is that because you do not educate people on how your work makes you a better spouse a better friend a better family member they try to pull you away from it because they assume they generalize that your experience is like theirs and therefore you create these two competing systems and then you never win the only way to win is if you can make the systems each system makes the other system better and until people figure that out I do not think that they can achieve work life integration work life integration is just one system one understood thing rather than looking at them separately and allowing them to feed off each other like parasites like what does it mean to have work that is contributing to your relationship if I am constantly growing as a person I'm becoming more confident because I'm taking on challenges I'm putting myself in uncomfortable situations that grow my self-esteem and I'm putting time into things that matter to me do I think those are going to make me a better or worse partner for my spouse do I think those skills will translate do you think that a wife who shows up more confident the more a more autonomous sense of self with more self-esteem is going to be better or worse to her husband do you think she would be more valuable to his life or do you think she will take more from his life the more valuable we are as individuals the more valuable we are in a relationship if we can create a an environment where our work makes us more valuable then by consequence it makes all of our relationships more valuable the difficulty is a lot of people see one person becoming more valuable and instead of saying I should be inspired by them and also become more valuable they say come back down here with me don't work so much why do you try so hard you look tired yeah because I'm [ __ ] winning at life I know a a lot of friends of mine out of college who went into like the investment banking route could definitely argue that like I'm getting you know destroyed $100 hour a week and I'm getting better at you know making spreadsheets like do you think the difference between that and like a job that someone really likes but is also putting in the same hours as autonomy think about like someone like Elon who's like also doing 100 hours but probably loves his work nobody likes something they're not good at at first but a lot of people don't stick it out long enough to get good at it or they don't have enough base level intelligence to realize that if I eat [ __ ] now it pays off later and I think whether it's in business or a job sucking at something is different than being threatened and yelled at sucking at your job is part of getting to a place where you're ever good at it being yelled at and threatened by a boss is completely different but we're at the point now where people think sucking at their job and not having a sense of self-esteem in the beginning people are quitting and they're saying you know what this isn't for me it's too hard on my mental health it's too challenging if you really cared about your mental health then you would do hard things the reality is is that most things that are good for us don't feel good most things that make our lives better don't feel good think a lot lot of people when they talk about their mental health they talk about not what is good for them but what feels good for them whereas I would argue that if something makes you feel angry depressed anxious sad for a day maybe it's because it's a new experience it's a skill you don't have it's a challenge you're taking on and if you get through that day your mental health will be better for all those days after if I look at the pivotal moments in my life that made me better and Made Me Stronger stronger they were the hardest moments of my life but I trade those hard weeks or months for good years or decades and a lot of people just are cashing and chips day after day saying you know what doesn't feel good try again tomorrow if I feel good I'll do it if it feels good tomorrow maybe I'll do it tomorrow maybe tomorrow won't makes me as anxious maybe tomorrow I won't be as angry about it maybe tomorrow won't feel so hard they say that day after day after day and so we've gone into this cycle where people perceive mental health to be feeling good rather than being and doing good understanding that the two are not the same and understanding that feeling bad in the short term is often good for me in the long term have been what have helped me turn my life around the ability to undergo hard and harder challenges is like the is is how you become a better person by the end of it yeah not by avoiding them so you you've talked about meaning do you feel you could Define what makes meaningful work meaningful work is based on the person which is it means something to you so for me lots of people look at me and say you have all this money why are you still CEO it's so much better to be an owner it's so much about just own an asset that gives you dividends over time I'm like that's great I have real estate I don't think I'm making anyone's life better by owning real estate and making money off houses I like making people's lives better and it means something to me because I've had people make my life [ __ ] and I've had people make my life amazing and I want to be the person for everyone else that makes their life amazing and better and so I feel like I derive meaning from that because I get to choose what I want to do with my life and where I derive meaning and I would like to do it in a way that benefits other people not just me but the real estate example made me think of this idea that I think both you and Alex talked about of like passive income like what do you think about the word I think that again like people who seek out passive income they seek out passive income because they are trying to avoid work than they're more than they're trying to get income it's not that they want income it's that they don't want work which again comes from this belief that work is bad and punishing and I think actually a lot of even it's actually I want to avoid people because what is work have you do interact with people all day so a lot of people try to avoid people because of one or two bad ones it's just like somebody doesn't get into a relationship because one bad boyfriend let's say I'm at a job that that feels punishing and I I'm not totally convinced that I want to leave yet what are some things I can do to make that better I think you have to figure out if you are truly being punished by the organization and boss or you are punishing yourself or not meeting your own standards and I think a lot of people cannot differentiate the two just look around at where they're at and say oh it's the job it could also be the fact that you beat yourself up when you do not exceed standards set by other people it could be the fact that you are complete perfectionist and anytime something's not perfectly to order you feel like you hate yourself it could be the fact that you have the compulsion to work extra every day if one thing is not done and therefore you overwork yourself where on the other side if you have somebody who's forcing you to do those things I would say that's a punishing work environment but if you are the one forcing you then that is just you I bet a lot of people would rather blame the circumstance of their job or someone else because it feels I don't know if like easier to do or like they don't have to do as much I mean I think for good reason changing your environment to change how you feel is smart because humans need to be efficient We cannot put 10 out ton effort in everything if every time you needed to change something you had to do all these like crazy it's much easier to just switch the situation there's some situations that it just it makes more sense so that's sensible in my opinion it's when it becomes a compulsion to switch situations that it's a problem and when you're switching situations more than you are improving yourself most people have a compulsion to do something when an emotion occurs an emotion occurs they must take an action and all that you need to do is allow emotion to occur and just do what you were going to do next no matter what were you going to go eat breakfast with your spouse were you going to go to work were you going to leave work were you going to go play with your dog were you going to go watch a movie you just have the emotion and go do that thing anyways what you teach yourself over time is that emotions are not directed just because you feel a certain way doesn't mean you need to let it dictate your behavior also if it sucks to like be bad at something then restarting is probably not the solution because you're going to have to start over right because a lot of people escape one job to go restart another job because they feel like they're not good at it or they suck but then they're just even worse at the new thing there's the learning curve and so they're not getting the compound Returns on their skill as they would if they were to stay in the job that they're at like I'm going to constantly try to get into a new situation and I haven't even worked on myself in 6 years well what's the common denominator amongst all these circumstances you've had six jobs Sally why do you hate all of them with completely different bosses and completely different Industries where other people liked it is there an example of someone that you've seen that has taken a mindset shift from work sucks you know I don't want to do this till like they're they're totally turned around and invested now the easiest way to change your mentality about work if you are the kind of person who thinks I should minimize how much I work work is punishing you put yourself somewhere where you are the one standing out for example if somebody comes into acquisition. comom feels that way they will quickly conform to the opposite because as humans how do we survive we blend in with everybody else that's in our our clan or whatever if somebody puts themselves in a situation where everyone else talks about how much they love work they like working and they work more how much work benefits their lives they will very quickly change I bet the flip side of that is if your friends outside of work are all the kinds of friends who are just [ __ ] on working harder it's probably also going to be hard to adopt a new Behavior yeah I think a lot of people have friends who reinforce the belief that work is bad you know you've got Taco Tuesday whatever hump day Friday beer something you know turn Sunday mimosas and it's like you literally are reinforced constantly by people who also have these two things that compete with each other the more time you spend your relationships the more it hurts work the more time you spend at work the more it hurts your relationships people say why do you work with your spouse and I'm like like if you understood this you would do it tooo because every time I make my business better it actually makes my husband's life better and every time my husband makes himself better it makes my business better which makes me better who won where do you think like remote work fits into this I think that the problem that remote work solves is that a lot of workplaces are punishing and so what you get to do when you are remotely working is avoid a lot of the punishing situations you don't have to interact with people nearly as much there's many less social interactions and the ones that you do have are in a much more controlled environment where people can get their [ __ ] together for 5 minutes to send a slack or they can show up to a zoom basically put on a face for 30 minutes and then go back to whatever they were doing I actually think that remote work has just allowed us to avoid work by disguise if the work is not bad then you want more of it then in person makes sense the reason some of the best organizations have wonderful workplace cultures and they have in-person headquarters and such is because they know that work doesn't need to be punishing and they engineer an environment where it's not so people want to work more and they want more of those social interactions why are people moving to Vegas to work with acquisition. comom why are employees going from remote to working here because they come here for a week or two they like the social interactions because it's not a punishing place and they say gosh I'd like more of that and I think a lot of work places are just the opposite are there other pieces of advice you have for someone who's like in the struggling through the [ __ ] phase of like not being that good at their let's say entry level job I would just say that anything worth having is hard and hard doesn't mean bad and you don't need to make the hard times mean bad and I think this is something that I've learned because even in my first business it was so [ __ ] hard and I was so stressed that I was unhappy and I was unhappy because I didn't know that he was okay for it to be hard and that was actually a good thing and even just the other day I was talking to Alex and he said you seem pretty stressed and like what you're doing is pretty hard right now I said but I'm happy what more can you ask for than like when you're striving towards a goal that's really high there's a lot of hard things happening and you're stressed also happy a lot of the times where that came from for me was just thinking that hard was bad but now I've just have I have enough evidence to show me that every time I do something hard my life gets better on the other side doesn't feel good while I'm going through it sometimes it feels terrible but my life will be better in the long run and so heart is good it feels like a superpower just to like extend the time Horizon through which you're evaluating something the biggest superpower of all I think in people is people who can enjoy the negative feelings they create a relation ship with negative feelings where they don't run from them but they actually embrace them because they know that they're going to come out a better version of themselves on the other side better than they ever were and I think that that's a huge attribute of successful people you see it to the degree of people who are like give me more give me the hard stuff give me the [ __ ] that's not a coincidence it's because they've created a relationship with all of the quote bad in life whereas other people are just avoiding it because they've told themselves that that's a bad thing they told themselves that pain is bad there's many instances pain is useful pain is good pain tells us a direction to go