Productiveness

Productiveness is the virtue of sustaining one's life by the creation of material and intellectual values. Objectivism treats productive work not as a regrettable necessity but as the central purpose of a rational life, and as the virtue by which the cardinal value of purpose is achieved.

“Productive work is the road of man's ultimate achievement, and calls upon the highest attributes of his character.”
~ Ayn Rand, "The Objectivist Ethics", The Virtue of Selfishness

Why production is the human mode of survival

Every living thing must act to stay in existence, but the form of the action differs by the nature of the organism. An animal adjusts itself to its background: it eats what it finds, shelters where it can, and its range is set by what nature happens to supply.

Man does the reverse. He adjusts his background to himself — clears ground, plants crops, smelts ore, builds engines, writes down what he has learned so that the next man starts where he left off. The faculty that makes this possible is reason, and production is reason applied to matter. See Technology.

Two consequences follow:

Wealth is created, not found. The raw materials were there for the whole of human existence; what was missing was the knowledge of what to do with them. Oil was a nuisance before it was a resource.
Production is primarily mental. The physical labour in any product is the smaller part of it. Rand's argument in Atlas Shrugged is that the thinking is what the labour depends on, which is why a society that penalises the thinker eventually has nothing to redistribute.

A central purpose, not a job title

The virtue is not a demand for a particular occupation or a particular scale of ambition. What it requires is that a person choose a productive purpose and organise his life around it:

The choice of work is the choice of what to do with one's life. Objectivism regards it as the primary field in which a person's abilities are used and his self-esteem is earned; see Pride.
Scale is not the standard. Rand's position was that the standard is the full use of one's own capacity, not comparison with anyone else's. A person doing the best work he is capable of is practising the virtue whatever the size of the enterprise.
"Productive" includes the intellectual. Science, philosophy, art, teaching and medicine produce values as surely as steel does. See Art and Aesthetics.
Ambitiousness is part of it. The virtue includes the refusal to settle into work below one's capacity once one is able to do more.

Common misunderstandings

That it means workaholism. The purpose of production is the achievement of values, and the values include leisure, relationships and everything else a life is made of. Work that consumed all of them would defeat its own point. See Happiness.
That only business counts. Rand's own productive work was writing. The virtue is indifferent to whether the product is sold.
That it excludes people who cannot work. The virtue is a policy for a life, held in the context of what a person is actually able to do. Illness and age are not moral failures.
That it makes money the standard. Money measures the value others place on a product, which is useful information and not the same thing as the value of the work to the person doing it. See Money.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. "The Objectivist Ethics", The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library, 1964.
Rand, Ayn. "The Money-Making Personality", The Voice of Reason.
Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged — Francisco's speech on money, and Galt's on productive work.
Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapter 8.

External links

Productiveness at the Ayn Rand Lexicon