Hundreds, if not thousands, of workers have been laid off in the past 18 months. The dominant corporate theme is to be efficient. Do more with less. I understand the logic, but I can’t help but think about the one thing that I came across in the past: it’s supposed to be hard.

Harvard Business Review once told Jerry Seinfeld that writer burnout contributed to his ending the famous show early. The outlet floated to Larry David and Seinfeld the idea of outsourcing the writing process to an external party like McKinsey. Seinfeld responded: “If you are efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The show was successful because I micromanaged it – every word, every line, every take, every edit and every casting“.

Kobe Bryant was the legend of the game of basketball. 1 MVP, 5x NBA Champion, 4th on the all-time scoring list, 2x NBA Finals MVP, 18x NBA All-Star, 2x Scoring Champion, the score of 81 points in a game (2nd highest in history) and numerous other accolades. One of the most inspiring aspects of Kobe’s life and career was his work ethic. He was notorious for putting in an insane amount of work to hone his craft. Just Google and you’ll see past and present players talk about how hard Kobe worked despite all the successes. There could be some small adjustments along the way, but there was no alternative or more efficient method other than actually getting shots up and sweating it out on the floor.

Soy sauce is very popular in Japanese cuisine, but only 1% of soy sauce is made using the traditional method. Yasuo Yamamoto is a 5th generation soy sauce maker and a traditionalist. His brewer is one of the only few in Japan that are committed to the traditional way of making soy sauce which includes hand-making the giant wooden barrels, letting the soy beans ferment for at least 3 years and patiently manually squeezing the sauce out of the beans. No industrial firm would follow this time-consuming and resource-intensive process. To Yasuo and those that relish the authentic taste of soy sauce, though, there simply is no better way.

I’ll share a story of my own experience. When I first joined my current company, I knew nothing about the credit card industry nor the data. As an immigrant, I understood that I must deliver results quickly if I was to get sponsored for a visa and eventually a Green Card (permanent residence). It was extremely rough. Not only was our data complex, but it was also poorly documented that there was a lot of tribal knowledge known by only the tenured and available only when asked. To make matters worse, getting data is only 30% of the job. An analyst has to communicate with the business, develop a relationship and learn to present effectively. But it also starts with understanding the data and extracting it effectively and efficiently.

I spent hours, including at night and on the weekends, learning how to pull the data and immersing in it. It was not efficient to literally look at all the fields across dozens of tables; as well as test-code it so that I could learn how the tables worked. At the time, we had two data warehouses. The old one was known by most analysts and coders in the organization, but it was going to be retired in a few years. The new one was potentially more powerful & flexible, but few knew how to use it. I made a conscious decision to ignore the old warehouse and work only with the new version. My only intention was to carve out a niche for myself to stand out. Nothing more. But that decision cost me even more time chasing down answers.

Looking back, I am pleased with my effort. Those long hours of laboring over tables and fields (which felt pretty hopeless at times) paid off as I now understand our data as well as any of my colleagues. About two years ago, our data team decided to simplify the warehouse with data marts to make data extraction in some cases easier and establish one version of truth. There is value in making some data pulls more straightforward, but at the same time, it robs analysts of an opportunity to grind, to get their hands in the mud and to actually learn the craft. I felt bad for interns and newcomers for that.

Life is all about balance. We should leverage technology to be more efficient in some ways, but at the same time, there is still tremendous value to be derived from hard honest work. Given what I have seen lately with the economy and my own company, I keep wondering if we have lost sight of it. Of the fact that sometimes it’s supposed to be hard.

To cap this off, I’ll leave you with the immortal words of one Marie Curie: “I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.”