Work is the Reward

Twenty four hours after winning the college football national championship, Nick Saban moves on to the next season. The former Alabama head coach was known to be ruthlessly competitive and intensely focused on building his program, which is part of the reason why he went to 9 national championships and won 7 of them, arguably making him the best college coach of all time. He was so focused that when asked in a 2018 interview how long he lets the celebration go after winning a national championship, he said, “in 24 hours, you probably need to move on.”

A whole year and football season worth of preparing for the moment, and the next day, he would already turn his mind toward the future. Some of this is the nature of the sport — college football requires coaches to recruit high school students year-round, and the process never ends — but it is also the character and identity of a winner like Nick Saban. He loves to work at what he does. For a competitor like him, it is not the national championship accolades that make him fulfilled; it is the process of aspiring toward one. Happiness is not something a head coach gets from winning a title, it is something they get by working ridiculously hard at their craft. And if you don’t take it from Nick Saban, take it from our very first President, George Washington:

"And the consideration that human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected, will always continue to prompt me to promote the progress of the former, by inculcating the practice of the latter.”

Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected. What an incredible way to phrase such a foundational human truth. In a world where “work-life balance” is the goal and we don’t want to become too busy or unbalanced, this is an important realization: your happiness is tied to your ability to practice your responsibility. Working hard and experiencing happiness are a part of the same equation. Business owner Alex Hormozi put it this way: “If you talk about work-life balance as a 22 year old, you’re hanging out with the wrong people.”

None of this is to say that rest or relaxation is not important. What it is to say is that resting is what you do in order to work again. It’s Biblical, too: think about God’s design for the Sabbath. We are given a 7 day work week with one day designed to rest, but that rest is put in place to be able to work hard. Resting is a tool we use to get back to what we are designed for, which is work. Work is the reward.

This isn’t tied to your career, either. Part of what we are designed for is creating something with the life we have, whether we were born with a lot or born with nothing. Whatever we choose to pursue in life, we should work hard at it, not flutter around with hobbies that never progress. Ideally, our career and our work-related goals align, but it is not always that perfect for people. Either way, the reward still comes from the work we choose to pursue. We are meant to create, and creating comes in many ways. Once we learn to love a craft, we find that work-life balance isn’t quite as meaningful a goal in the first place. What is meaningful is the never-ending process of working, not tirelessly without rest, but continually. To work is to live, and to live is to work, and when we find what we are meant to create, we find the reward of life.