It's not how hard you work, its what you work on.

There are two popular misconception about what creates value in life. Now when I talk about value I'm not talking about what god wants or less or more expensive or any of that. What I'm talking about is more abstract, mainly, if I value one thing more than another it means that I prefer it to that other thing. I value eating sushi more than I value eating at McDonalds. I value getting a raise more than I value getting fired or going home early, etc. So how do you get outcomes that are more valuable? There are some popular misconceptions of this.

The first is "The Spanish Theory Of Value" which comes from what the Spanish where after during their periods of conquest, etc. The Spanish though that all the value in the world was contained in gold and slaves and the more you accumulated of these, the better off you were. Well all the gold returned back from the new world and arrived in Spain and caused lots of inflation and wrecked the economy. Slavery we found out in the 19th century, was very inefficient as freed slaves could be involved in more productive jobs and a lot of effort went into guarding slaves. Both slaves and slave guards could have been boat builders, or blacksmiths, or sailors, or tailors but where instead confined to a short life of brutal agricultural manual labor and repetitive sadism. The modern analogy of this is people who try and dominate other people, even destroying the companies they work for, and doing anything they can to pillage and strip any thing of value that they can gain control of. If they weren't such pricks and didn't try to actively destroy and dominate they'd do a lot better but instead they spend their years fighting and sueing and swindling people.

The second misconception is "The Labor Theory of Value". Ok I know I just offended everyone out there who is to the left of Ronald Reagan, and Marx said a lot of good things but the labor theory of value was incorrect and is a subtle fallacy that a lot of people live by and I think it leads to lack of happiness (value) for the amount of time put into one's efforts. The problem with the labor theory of value is that labor is not the source of all value but is the source of all costs. The difference between cost and value is that cost is how much effort you put into something and value is what you get out. So if you work really really hard digging a hole in your backyard for years you can't just add up the amount of hours you spent digging it and expect to be as happy with the result as if you had spent the same amount of time planting and harvesting a vegetable garden. Nevertheless, people still engage in the labor theory of value. They spend a lot of time working very very hard on THE WRONG PROBLEM. Often this takes the form of working to patch up and maintain a dodgy software program, business model, relationship when they should really just throw the whole thing out and start over, learn from their mistakes and meticulously stear the venture in the right direction. Sometimes it's not throwing things out that can increase value but merely figuring out what is the source of the problems in the current system or analyzing how it can it be radically improved.