Ending the myth of “work hard” advice.
What’s the key to success? For many, the answer is to work hard.
Society has sold us the idea that it is the best thing you can do to achieve all your objectives. Even Elon Musk said in an interview that he believes hard work is the absolute key to success:
Work like crazy, that is. Dedicate 80 to 100 hours a week and you will increase your chances of success.
But I realized that at the end of the day, this idea doesn’t make much sense. Many people work hard, for long hours, just to get enough to cover their expenses, or even have to look for a second job on the weekends, and increase their working hours.
However, these same people see how other people who have not made enough merits progress and growing while they remain in the same place. Or how despite their position, their boss doesn’t have the necessary skills to perform their job.
These are facts that can end up disappointing to anybody.
Hard work is never the answer to attracting more money into your life. Working hard is important, but I think that the main key is also working smart. The important thing is to work hard with a goal in mind.
There are many skills more important than working hard.
Productivity depends on self-discipline, and self-discipline is not eternal; it is limited.
Honestly, when someone says that he is working hard, quite possibly he is doing repetitive work (which he learned to do once), many times, thinking that it will give him experience and results.
And of course, the exception to the rule is not lacking, but usually, when it comes to successful people, hard work is never a requirement.
You will never see a person who earns 10 times the minimum wage working 10 times more than a common employee because this is simply something physically impossible.
The monetary income and the successful results we have in life don’t depend on the amount of work we do; on the contrary, they depend on the quality of that work and the strategy used to make it work.
If we think that achieving success is a matter of working hard, in reality, we are putting aside our power to innovate, to design successful and successful strategies with high impact and little effort.
Work hard only matter when you already know what you have to do.
When I started making money from my writing, I was very excited about the potential I could have. One of the first things that crossed my mind was that the more I wrote, the more money I could make.
However, I spent the next 8 months frustrated because no matter how much “effort and hard work I did,” I was not achieving the results I wanted.
Until one day, I decided to learn what makes a story good. I realized that the success did not depend on the number of things I published but on the value of my words.
It doesn’t matter how many things you publish; if nobody likes it, your hard work won’t help you.
Now that I know what I have to do, hard work can help me as long as the quality doesn’t drop.
I know people who tell me they hate their job, but they get up and go to work there the next day. I’m sure they work hard; however, it doesn’t help them because, at the end of the day, they still hate where they are.
If you don’t have a passion for what you are doing, it doesn’t matter how much time you spend on it; you will feel miserable.
If you don’t change your mindset first, more actions won’t help.
If Thomas Edison had kept trying to make the light bulb in the same way that it failed the first time, today we would have no light even though he would not have given up.
He succeeded because every time he failed, he changed his mindset first. HE learned “10,000” different ways not to do it. He didn’t work hard on the same steps until he achieved it.
Imagine that you have a ship with enough fuel to go from one continent to another, you are in Europe, and your goal is to travel to America.
If this ship lost its way on the high seas like the rudder stops working and begins to turn in circles, it would use the same energy that it would need to go from Europe to America, but it would not reach the destination.
People who work hard without a clear objective are like a ship without a rudder. They go to work from Monday to Friday to get to the end of the month, over and over again, without going anywhere. They are always in the same place. And this is what I mean when I say hard work doesn’t work.
The first step is to have a clear objective: What do you want to achieve? And then use the same energy and do something every day to achieve it. In this way, we are working hard but moving forward and progressing.
Final thoughts
We live in a world of false gurus and wrong hopes. We trust what others say or promise us, believing that they will give us the key to our well-being. But many times, we don’t stop to think if what that person is saying really makes sense.
In the real world, results are not only achieved by effort but by a combination of that hard work, a well-oriented way of thinking, and luck.
Working hard is useless if you don’t:
- Love what you do. If you don’t have a passion for what you are doing, it doesn’t matter how much time you spend on it; you will feel miserable.
- You are not very clear about what you are doing and why you are doing it.
- You don’t help anybody. It doesn’t matter how much effort you make; if what you’re doing doesn’t make sense to anybody, it wouldn’t have been worth it.
Sure, hard work works. But only if you have changed your mindset first and you know the steps to achieve it.