Most people don’t understand work. Tbh I still haven’t understood what real work truly is. When you’re working for someone else, work gets assigned by your employer. But when you work for yourself, it gets a bit blurry.
Work to most of us is performing actions to achieve a desired goal ( mostly financial ). The idea of working hard is mostly associated with producing more output by working 120 hrs/week. But sometimes producing a lot of stuff can harm you.
For example: if you’re in the business of mining diamonds, you need to make sure that there is enough scarcity in market to ensure high market value of diamonds, so your job in that case is to produce less diamonds. If you mine too many diamonds, you will be out of business pretty soon. ( since we live in free market economies ).
So, the definition of real work in abstract terms is hard to define, since sometimes not working enough is an important work.
World rewards scarcity, the more scarce an item is, the more value it has. Water and food are cheap commodities in today’s capitalist economies, but gold is expensive. If you were stranded on a remote island with no fresh water, suddenly water would be more valuable than gold/material goods.
The idea of scarcity can be applied to today’s free market economies as well. If you make a product that is not exceptional and unappealing, then it comes under the non-scarce category, since most products are not exceptional.
But if you create high quality products which are hard to replicate and satisfies the market needs, then you’ve just invented a scarce resource that humans value which would yield great financial benefits.
To do high quality work, one must have high standards of quality. If your bar of quality is low and you’re okay with consuming products that are unexceptional, then you will most likely produce low quality work, not because you lack talent but because your taste is bad.
So I guess real work for entrepreneurs is → actions performed with a high taste bar to produce products.