Personally, I didn't take "motivated" in the original article to mean just how many hours are worked. One person can spend an 8 hour workday taking the initiati

Personally, I didn't take "motivated" in the original article to mean just how many hours are worked. One person can spend an 8 hour workday taking the initiative - spotting gaps and proactively jumping in to pick up the slack, learning new concepts when needed, suggesting new product ideas, etc. Another person can spend the same 8 hours passively doing only what was assigned to them and passing the buck whenever possible. I worked on a team at one point where someone sat on a high-priority bug for a couple weeks without saying anything. Someone finally asked if he was making any progress, and his response was just: "Well someone else wrote that code, so..." He hadn't even tried to look at it. His response after that conversation was to start emailing other people asking if they could fix it, instead of trying to learn that part of the code base. You can spend hours doing that sort of thing, but it's not time well spent.