Hello Reader,

There's a line in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly that gets passed around like folk wisdom: If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working?

It comes out of Tuco's mouth. That matters more than the line itself.

Tuco is a bandit. He spends the entire film scheming, running, getting double-crossed, walking across a desert, and coming within an inch of being hanged more than once. Nobody works harder in that movie. Nobody suffers more for what he's chasing. He just doesn't call it work, because no one's cutting him a cheque for it.

So the line is a diagnosis of the man saying it. He's identified the sickness perfectly and can't see that he has it.

I think about that more than I'd like to admit, because I know a lot of Tucos. I've been one. People who left the job, or never took one, or built something of their own so they'd stop killing themselves working for somebody else. And they didn't stop. They just stopped having a word for it. The effort got reclassified as passion, or the calling, or the build, and once it had a nicer name it stopped counting. You can walk away from the wage and keep the pathology intact. The ugly truth is that the wage was never the thing.

Which brings me to the part of the line I actually want to sit with.

For a living.

We say it constantly. What do you do for a living. Working for a living. It's such a worn phrase that the preposition has gone invisible, and the preposition is the whole argument. Work is for something. It's in service of a life. It's the means, and the living is the end.

Somewhere along the way those two swapped places, and now the life is what we squeeze in around the work. We schedule rest so we can get back to it faster. We call a vacation a recharge, which is a word for what you do to a battery you intend to drain again. The language kept the truth even after we abandoned the practice, and now the phrase sits there like a receipt for something we returned.

This is the part where I'm supposed to hand you the anti-hustle slogan and let you off the hook. I'm not going to, because I don't believe it and you'd catch me.

There are seasons where you go hard. I just came through one. Productiveness arrived in the world last week, and the months that led up to it asked more of me than usual. I said yes to that with my eyes open. Cadence was never a flat line. A sprint you choose, with an end date you can see, in service of something you actually want, is not the same animal as a life spent running.

The difference is the question Tuco never asks himself.

He never says what for. He wants the gold, sure, but he never gets far enough past wanting it to ask what the gold is meant to buy him, or what he'd do on the other side of having it. So the chase becomes the life. Not by decision, just by default, the way most of these things happen. Every day he doesn't ask the question is a day the answer gets a little further away.

Ask it, and the same hard work turns into something else entirely. Same hours. Same tiredness at the end of the day. Different thing.

So the line is worth keeping. It's just aimed the wrong way. It sounds like it's about how much you're working, and it isn't. It's about whether you can still finish the sentence.

Work for a living. Not the other way around.

See you later,
Mike

P.S. If "five practical things in twenty minutes" sounds like your kind of session, I'm presenting one for free at The Grand Productivity Group later today: save a spot here, and registering gets you the replay even if you can't make it live.