John Henry hammered in the mountains
His hammer was striking fire
But he worked so hard, it broke his poor heart
And he laid down his hammer and he died
Traditional
John Henry was a steel-driving man, or so the song goes. A figure of American legend and the subject of many heroic songs and tales, John Henry was a Black railroad worker in the 1800s who challenged a newfangled steam-powered drill to a contest. Henry, according to the lore, won the competition but died soon after from the strain.
That model of labor, the man who can just push himself further and further — suggesting that all effort is just a matter of willpower — is a myth that still burdens our workplaces and our approach to work. It’s the idea that if we just do more — one more thing — productivity will increase, as though we will never reach the point of diminishing returns.
The Lure of Fake Rigor
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.
Various attributions
I taught college composition for years, and I have heard some interesting theories of learning from select colleagues. These are the ones who would insist that students just need to write longer and more demanding essays to become proficient writers. They were blind to the fact that assigning unreasonable work just overwhelmed students and stifled their ability to learn and progress. Those teachers not only pushed their students past the point of diminishing returns, but they also engendered unintended consequences — including cheating.
If you suggested that perhaps a different type of assignment would be more effective, they would invariably claim that their expectations were “rigorous,” implying that your practice was not. This came up all the time in discussions of college courses of every sort. “More is better,” was the mantra. Read more pages, write more pages, take more tests, break more backs, and the only thing there was less of was time. I coined a phrase to describe this wrongheaded and lazy — yes, lazy — thinking: “fake rigor.”
Fake rigor is when something is harder but decidedly not better. Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating against hard work, but, as I have written elsewhere, hard work is no substitute for smart work. The lure of fake rigor in our culture can be powerful, and I am afraid I succumbed to it my first few years of teaching. Over time I wised up and started experimenting with shorter assignments on the basis that almost all professional writing is, in fact, brief: emails, memos, letters, summaries, etc. It is pretty rare that an individual will have to crank out a lengthy report, if ever, and very often it will be a team effort.
Moreover, short writing is more challenging. Anyone who sends you a multi-screen email is just slacking off. I noticed that when I gave students 20-page assignments, they tended to pad the content with fluff. There is no room for fluff in a 4-page paper let alone a thoughtfully crafted email. I eventually came to reward students for coming in under length while still covering the topic in a persuasive manner. That’s inherently good writing!
In other words, there is more rigor (discipline, if you will) in creating something succinct yet sufficient than in self-indulgently blathering on. Oh, and it is harder to get away with plagiarism in a short piece.
There is no doubt that you improve your writing through frequent practice, so I saw to it that my students wrote at least as many pages per semester as anyone else’s students only they did so in shorter, pithier assignments rather in one or two unwieldy fluff-fests.
The Deception of Rigmarole
This propensity to privilege longer over better has nothing to do with rigor. Having the biggest pile of garbage is not something to crow about. As with fake rigor, it’s still just stinking garbage.
Here is a useful word you don’t hear too often: rigmarole. Rigmarole is much like fake rigor in that it masquerades as quality because it is hard. If you have to fill out two forms to perform one function, isn’t that inherently superior? After all, more is always better, right?
This sort of thinking is the hallmark of bureaucratic mindlessness. It’s why health insurance companies put you through the wringer every time you go to the doctor and then pretend they don’t have to cover your bills. Rigmarole.
The Power of Tiny Thinking
I recently trained to become a certified Tiny Habits coach. If you don’t know what Tiny Habits is, I suggest you check it out here: tinyhabits.com. Better still, buy the book. B.J. Fogg, the behavioral scientist who created the Tiny Habits method, is a big proponent of the idea that less can be more. Here are a just a few of his discoveries.
You can accomplish more by expecting less — particularly at the outset.
“Powering through” often leads to mediocrity and even failure.
The feeling of success leads to positive outcomes.
The best changes result from feeling good.
Tiny Habits sounds easy, and the method is so in many superficial ways, but that ease can be a bit misleading. The true Tiny Habits practice is, in fact, rigorous in application and profound in impact. Tiny Habits unleashes the power of small.
The Tyranny of Bossware
You may have heard of bossware. It’s software installed on workers’ computers so that their overlords can monitor their “productivity.” I put productivity in scare quotes because bossware has little to do with being productive. It’s really about time on task, which is an entirely different thing. If you don’t see the difference, simply consider the last time you were caught in traffic on a trip you normally make with no delays. Same distance as always, same destination, but this time the traffic exacted significantly more time on task. Was that extra time inherently more productive? Now imagine you had no mobile phone or audiobooks.
The use of bossware is a classic example of the confusion of rigor with rigmarole — mistaking time on task or sheer effort for productivity and treating a measure as a goal. For more on this latter, see my essay on Goodhart’s law called “Soviet Nails.”
Bossware, like pointlessly long assignments, will likely lead to costly unintended consequences, including corner-cutting, subversion, malcontentment, insubordination, sabotage, and employee churn.
The Benefits of Rigor
Rigor, in its purest form, is about holding yourself and others accountable. Effective leaders know that they cannot fake rigor and cannot substitute rigmarole for it. Good leaders know what bosses miss. We cannot put quantity over quality, and, by the way, quantity and quality are not mutually exclusive. You can have both.
My first job out of college required me to teach a reading rate and comprehension course. Our operating premise was that if you read too slowly, you will be bored, and your comprehension will drop. If you read too fast, you will be overloaded and face identical results. The idea of the course was to teach people to increase their reading rate to the point of maximum comprehension and no more. It worked pretty well, I’d say.
The premise of that program is precisely what so many organizations and their lousy bosses don’t get. The more you push effort, the more return you get until you don’t. Bossware is just the latest fad in the misguided mindset of many workplaces. Bosses who treat a worker as they would a machine claim they don’t want lazy workers, but they themselves are lazy thinkers. While I can imagine some industries where bossware might make some sense, I am going to guess that those are usually not happy places to work.
The days of John Henry, the steel-driving man, are long gone (if they ever existed). Workers are not interchangeable with steam engines. People are not expendable like equipment — mere human resources. And true leaders understand the difference between rigor and rigmarole. Furthermore, true leaders, even when they are in charge and have a big title and a corner office, are never bosses.
How do you differentiate between rigor and rigmarole, between being a leader and being a boss? How can you resist the lure of fake rigor?
You can tap into true rigor and be the leader you were always meant to be, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation.
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Rigor vs Rigmarole & the Lure of Fake Rigor