I was scrolling through LinkedIn the other day, which is the professional equivalent of loitering at the mall food court (lots of noise, smells, and people insisting you try their samples). That’s when I saw a post from a woman who announced, with complete sincerity, that she was developing a new system that would “rewrite quantum mechanics.”
A bold ambition. Unlikely, sure. But if she pulls it off? Fantastic. That’s how innovation happens: someone staring at the universe and saying, “I bet I can fix that.”
The problem wasn’t the idea. The problem was her job posting, which essentially read: I need someone to do all the grunt work while I float above the clouds like Zeus tossing down lightning bolts of inspiration. She wanted people to run the numbers, crunch the data, and compile the results. Basically everything but think the thought.
“I’m an IDEA person,” she wrote in the comments, as though it were a credential.
I laughed. Everyone is an idea person. Sit next to a drunk guy at a bar and he’ll have fifty, half of them about how to get rich selling deer jerky door-to-door. An idea, on its own, is like a gym membership. It feels productive the moment you sign up, but it doesn’t get you any muscles until you actually show up and sweat.
What I see more and more are these self-anointed “thought leaders.” Their only discernible skill is forwarding tasks to someone else. They dress up their avoidance with shiny words like “strategic mindset” or “product visionary,” but really, they’re allergic to effort. They treat labor like a contagious disease. You half expect them to sanitize their hands after shaking yours, in case a little actual work rubbed off.
This is where the “nobody wants to work anymore” chant always gets it wrong. It’s not the grocery clerk, the plumber, or the fresh-out-of-college kid with student debt the size of a starter home. The people who don’t want to work are the ones holding conference calls about their “disruptive ideas” while someone else updates the slides.
On this Labor Day, I want to say: ideas are nice, but labor is what matters. It’s the work you do, not the inspirational LinkedIn post you make about how much you’re doing. Without labor, there is no holiday. There’s just a long weekend where you tell people, “I could totally rewrite quantum mechanics,” while waiting for someone else to bring you a hamburger from the grill.
As for me, I’ve got plenty of ideas too. They’re all written down in a notebook somewhere. Maybe one day, when I find someone to do the grunt work, I’ll get around to them.