When the going gets tough, does your work ethic kick in?

Your hardest days have likely not been at work. The moments that affect us most deeply tend to be personal struggles about loved ones, our health and relationships.

Yet our work ethic, which we develop during school and employment, can be our saviour during these times. Just ask Nedd Brockmann — the electrician who ran across Australia in 47 days to raise awareness for homelessness.

Brockmann tells LinkedIn he had tough days on the road, but it was his work ethic that got him through.

“Through suffering — through committing and seeing things through – I saw that that's how you get through stuff. You have to pay the price, without complaining."

“My dad would show up every single day to work before I'd be up. He’d go and feed cattle that are starving and get home up when the sun's down. And I watched that. I didn't hear my dad talk. I watched him walk the walk, you know? And it was something that I think was in me and ingrained from a very young age.”

He says this work ethic is more valuable than discipline because, “I'm motivated all of 4% of the time.”

“Motivation's cool and that's great. You might get a whiff of it and you might go for a run and you're motivated for that period of time. But that is not going to stay with you.

"For me, it was discipline — doing the things I didn't want to do every single day. So that when I got to the run, I was disciplined. I knew that at 4am when that alarm goes off, I'm going to be up. I'm going to be at it. I'm going to be getting that run done each day.”

He’s keenly aware the majority of Australians don’t need to toil to achieve the little things anymore, which he sees as a kind of short changing.

“We have everything so easily accessible these days. Like, you know, we have instant dopamine hitting on our phones. We can order food from an app and it gets delivered to our door. We don't have to pay the price for things.

“We don't have to work for stuff. And I wanted to change that. I wanted to put myself through these kind of hard things. And I just found the more and more I did it, the more and more my perspective changed on life and how, you know, things that might've been significant were completely insignificant by the time I'd done something hard.

“It gives me a kind of profound view on life. And I kind of love it.”

Does your work ethic propel you forward during tough moments? Share your experiences and tips to develop resilience in the comments.

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