Daily Inspiration Quote by Scott Adams

A neat little booby trap disguised as folksy wisdom, Scott Adams's "If a job's worth doing, it's too hard" flips the Protestant work ethic into a Dilbert-era shrug. It borrows the cadence of the familiar maxim ("If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well") and then jams a wrench in it. The joke lands because it weaponizes our expectation of virtue: you brace for uplift, you get evasion. The punchline isn't laziness so much as a commentary on how modern work routinely feels like a rigged game.

As a cartoonist who built a franchise on corporate misery, Adams is speaking from inside the cubicle terrarium. The line reads like an employee's internal monologue after their third "urgent" request that was poorly scoped, under-resourced, and destined to be re-prioritized into oblivion. The subtext: "Hard" isn't noble here; it's evidence of dysfunction. If something matters, it attracts bureaucratic gravity - meetings, stakeholders, compliance, vague ownership - until the effort becomes disproportionate to any real outcome. Worthwhileness becomes a curse.

There's also a sly comfort in the fatalism. By declaring worthwhile work "too hard", the speaker pre-absolves themselves of the guilt culture surrounding productivity. It's gallows humor for an economy that praises hustle while quietly standardizing burnout. In a single sentence, Adams turns self-help piety into a coping mechanism: not a call to do less, but a crack in the myth that effort is always rewarded, or even rational.