"Pay your dues." 

You've heard it, maybe you've even said it. It's one of those phrases that gets passed down in workplaces like a family heirloom, with total confidence and very little examination. Older generations are often citing strenuous situations as necessary ways the younger generations need to pay their dues, earn their stripes, or any other variation of the concept.

And there is actually something to it. Early career difficulty does help shape you, and for that reason, you can't shortcut experience. At some point you're going to have to do things you don't fully understand, work on problems you're not yet equipped to solve, and sit with the discomfort of not knowing what you're doing, because that discomfort is where a lot of the learning actually happens. You need to understand the infrastructure of work before you can start managing it. That's just true.

But along the way, the phrase got warped.

What Senior Leaders Actually Remember

The leaders who talk most loudly about paying your dues are usually the ones who are furthest removed from their own early careers. And what's interesting is that when they look back, they tend to remember the grind, including the long hours, the yielding to more experienced colleagues, and the feeling of having to prove themselves. 

So they pass down what they remember. And what they remember is the grind.

But what they were actually doing, back then, was learning. From building pattern recognition and developing judgment to figuring out how work actually worked. The difficulty was the vehicle instead of the destination. They just can't see that anymore.

The Grind for the Sake of the Grind

If you're in an environment where grinding is the expectation but actual learning isn't part of the deal, an environment where you're not getting feedback, not being given real responsibility, or not being mentored through the hard stuff, then something's gone wrong. You're just burning through instead of developing.

And your early career experiences shape you in ways that are hard to undo. If you're taught early on that work is something you endure, you tend to carry that. You might become more guarded or more transactional.

Turnover and disengagement are high, and more young workers than ever are walking away from traditional corporate careers altogether. Side hustles, portfolio careers, early exits from companies that aren't delivering. They're not waiting around to see if it gets better.

This sounds like a win for them, but it's a big problem for the organizations doing the losing.

What Younger Workers Are Really Saying

What gets misread constantly is that younger workers don’t want to put in hard work. But younger workers aren't showing up to their first job thinking they deserve a seat on the board on day one. They want to learn, grow, contribute, and be taken seriously. That part hasn't changed across generations.

What has changed is the conditions they're willing to accept to get there. They're looking at cultures that treat long hours and limited autonomy as rites of passage and saying, that's an unnecessary cost.

They see that suffering and growing aren't the same thing. And it's worth really sitting with the question: are the conditions we're asking early-career people to accept actually producing better professionals? Or are we just recreating the grind because it's familiar?

What Are You Passing Down?

You were learning back then, even when it was hard. The question is whether the people coming up behind you get the same chance, or just the hard part.

Because that's really the whole thing, isn't it? Somewhere along the way, the difficulty and the learning got all tangled up together, and it became easy to hand someone the difficulty without ever checking if the learning is actually built in. While the grind is easy to replicate, mentorship, context, feedback, and room to ask questions takes more effort. 

If you want the people behind you to come out the other side better, the challenges have to come with something. Otherwise you're just making them tired.