Success literature going back hundreds of years espouses the benefits of hard work. Yet everywhere you look , you have so called experts deriding “hard work” as being somehow not so good.
They would have you believe that you can live a laptop lifestyle, without having to work that is challenging and putting in the time required to get the job done.
Vince Lombardi said it best, when he said:
The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.
“Hard work” as work that is challenging. Both hard work and “working hard” (i.e. putting in the time required to get the job done) are required for success.
A problem occurs when people think of challenging work as painful or uncomfortable. Does challenging work necessarily have to be painful? No, of course not. In fact, a major key to success is to learn to enjoy challenging work AND to enjoy working hard at it.
Why challenging work? Because challenging work, when intelligently chosen, pays off. And if you infer that we are saying people who avoid challenging work have a character flaw, you’re right… and a serious one at that. If you avoid challenging work, you avoid doing what it takes to succeed. To keep your muscles strong or your mind sharp, you need to challenge them.
Show us a person who avoids hard work, and we’ll show you someone who hasn’t found their purpose yet. Because anyone who knows their purpose will embrace hard work. They’ll pay the price willingly.
If you don’t know your purpose yet, then in the world of mature human beings, you don’t yet matter. You’re just a piece of paper on the flow created by those who do live on purpose. And deep down you already know this, don’t you? If you want to make a difference in the world, then hard work is the price. There are no shortcuts.
Purpose and hard work are buddies. Purpose is the why. Hard work is the how.
Purpose is what turns labor into labor of love. It transmutes the pain of hard work into the higher level pleasure of dedication, commitment, resolve, and passion. It turns pain into strength, eventually to the point where you don’t notice the pain as much as you enjoy the strength.
Once again it all comes down to purpose. Create a purpose for your life, and live it each day. And many of the other success habits like hard work and working hard will fall into place automatically. Figure out the why. Why are you here? Why does your life matter? That is the ultimate test of your free will.
