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Seth Godin writes A Brief History of Hard Work, Adjusted for Risk in Fast Company. Check out Seth's Blog for more of his views.

Seth contrasts the physically hard work with the emotionally hard work. He calls on us to face the fears of speaking up in organizations.

Hard work is where our job security, our financial profit, and our future joy lie.

It's hard work to make difficult emotional decisions, such as quitting a job and setting out on your own. It's hard work to invent a new system, service, or process that's remarkable. It's hard work to tell your boss that he's being intellectually and emotionally lazy. It's easier to stand by and watch the company fade into oblivion. It's hard work to tell senior management to abandon something that it has been doing for a long time in favor of a new and apparently risky alternative. It's hard work to make good decisions with less than all of the data.

The everyday hard work is speaking our opinions for the good of the project and the organization while doing so skillfully.

I will continue to write about the linguistic action perspective (LAP) of project management. One significant impediment to adopting the LAP approach is dealing with the misplaced fear of being out-of-control. (Isn't control just an illusion?) As Seth goes on to say,

Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you'd rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And, after you've done that, to do it again the next day.

Succeeding on projects is all about taking risk. The risk of sharing one's views and exploring others' views — all for the sake of pleasing the customer. Remarkable!