You have been working hard. That much is clear. What is not clear is whether the effort is pointed in the right direction, or whether you are mistaking motion for progress, and discipline for wisdom. The question of whether to work harder is, in many cases, the wrong question. The right one is whether you are working on the right thing at all.
Three thinkers on the Consilium roster would each reframe the question differently.
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Maslow: are you becoming what you could become?
Abraham Maslow would start with a prior question: what are you actually working toward? Not the immediate goal, not the project or the promotion, but the underlying direction. He believed that human beings have a deep drive toward what he called self-actualization, a tendency to grow toward becoming what they are capable of becoming. Work that serves that drive has a different quality than work that does not, even when the effort level looks the same from the outside.
What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization.
Maslow would want to know whether your work is a vehicle for something you genuinely care about becoming, or whether it has become its own justification. The danger he observed was not laziness. It was people who worked very hard in directions that kept them from growing in the ways that actually mattered to them. He would ask: when you imagine the best version of yourself, does the work you are doing serve that? Or is it just the work that is in front of you?
Russell: you may be over-valuing effort
Bertrand Russell was suspicious of the moral weight that modern culture places on hard work. He thought the glorification of busyness was partly a defense mechanism, a way of feeling virtuous without having to ask harder questions about what the busyness is actually for. He wrote famously about the virtues of idleness, not as an end in itself, but as a corrective to work that has been elevated beyond its actual importance.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
Russell would ask whether you are working hard because it is genuinely necessary or because you have absorbed the belief that working hard is what makes you a worthwhile person. Those are very different things, and confusing them leads to a lot of suffering. He would point out that effort spent on the wrong problem is not virtuous. It is just misdirected energy with good intentions.
Chekhov: you're asking the wrong question
Anton Chekhov was not a philosopher of work, but he was a physician and a writer, and he understood something about how to look at a problem clearly. His instinct was always diagnostic: before offering any answer, state the problem correctly. Most of his characters suffer because they are asking the wrong question, solving the wrong problem, waiting for a change that cannot arrive because they have misidentified what needs to change.
The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.
Chekhov would sit with you in the uncertainty longer than the other two. He would not be in a hurry to resolve the question of harder versus different. He would want to make sure you had actually identified what the problem is. Is the work wrong because it is misaligned with your values? Wrong because the environment is bad? Wrong because you have changed and the work has not? These are different problems with different solutions, and mixing them up produces the worst possible outcome: trying harder at the thing that is not working.
Where they pull differently
Maslow would say: the question is whether the work is in the direction of what you are capable of becoming. If not, effort is just maintenance.
Russell would say: the belief that working harder is always the answer is a cultural assumption, not a fact. Question it.
Chekhov would say: before deciding anything, state the actual problem. You probably have not done that yet, which is why the question keeps coming back.
The prior question
There is a version of this question that is really asking: am I good enough, disciplined enough, committed enough? And the answer to that version is probably yes. The work ethic is likely not the problem.
The harder question is whether you are building something you actually want to have built, or whether you have been working so hard for so long that you have forgotten to check. That check is uncomfortable. But it is harder to do in year fifteen than in year one.