Does hard work drive success?
There are many posts on the joys of hard work. The more I read the more I find the authors are trying to justify why you should work hard in order to get the best out of yourself. How about another point of view…
If you ask a successful person their underlying reason for success they will probably mention hard work. They never mention that at times they slack off, go for a long lunch, leave early to see the kids, wife or just go fishing.
The successful hard workers have the ability to take themselves out of the loop and still have a place of work to come back too.
I would say to you that Hard Work is not a reason for success but hard work is a by-product of their success.
What drives people to work hard?
- Civic duty.
- The persons upbringing.
- The drive for a greater share of the pie.
Those who who perform services for the community and do not want monetary success, from their work they might derive motivation from the reaction they recieve from co-workers, customers or the community they serve. These people in turn work hard to cultivate continuing similar reactions to their toil.
The hard workers may be born to work hard.
Deep within a persons DNA maybe the reason why the work themselves to exhaustion every day. However it is important to point out that while these persons have a predetermined disposition to hard work they are not happy to carry out the work without benefit to either themselves or their family.
Success will bring benefits, either more money, or could even be subsidised health-care or status which they can leverage within their society.
The drive for more is a reason given for a person to work harder.
More money can sometimes equal hard work. More often than not hard work does not equal more money, hard work can equal less money when compared to another persons hourly rate who does enough work and less time for building relationships with family and friends.
I don’t believe that hard work drives success. I believe the Success Drives Success, hard work is sometimes a by-product.
Those who claim that hard work is the reason for their success may have been fooled by randomness. Their success takes the form of a cartoon snowball rolling down the mountain. Their first small success was generally through more luck than design. In his book ‘Fooled by Randomness’ Nicolas Taleb argues that luck equals randomness. Their next success was a little bigger and probably helped by more luck, the following successes get bigger and bigger as their expertise grows so does their need for luck, this is where either one of two things happen, they are what Taleb describes as a “Lucky Fool” and they succeed again or they “Blow up”. They become a victim of survivorship.
Survivorship.
When looking at successful people there is a bias towards seeing only the ones who “make it”. Those who are not successful are not visible, they could still be toiling away working extremely hard for no reward, but as a case of “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” these people do not enter my argument because they are cloaked by the invisibility of their own un-success.
If they are fortuitous and they achieve a little success and their success starts to grow. At this stage they may put in extra hours because the benefit of doing so is immediately obvious, hard work helps them to achieve success, but their are other factors at play which are equally as important to whether they succeed or not.
Factors such as, passion, drive, motivation and market sentiment.
Passion is important as without passion their is no drive or motivation. Drive and motivation are important as these factors are imperative for belief and direction in both the though times and the good times. Hard work flows of the back of these three factors, as when a person has passion, drive and motivation they are happy to work hard. Market sentiment feeds success, positive market sentiment allows the person to be successful, people wand and need what you are selling. Negative market sentiment towards your product destroys success and erodes your passion, drive and motivation.
Where am I going with this?
Hard Work does not guarantee success. Those who believe that it is a panacea for success are wrong. Those who get hung up on their ability to work hard may find themselves in the realm of the un-successful.
Sure there is nothing wrong with hard work, it may help achieve success but remember that it is only a small part.
Your product must be on target, pricing must be agreeable to your customer, your distribution must be seamless and on time, you sales pitch must be compelling.
If you are to succeed you will succeed!
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Luke, some interesting thoughts, I agree if you are working hard with no goal or reason you are wasting your time, we have to work smarter, weather that be working hard to acheive a stretch target to set your self apart, or targeting the key areas that require more time / harder work. where people fall down is they try to work hard at every little aspect hence running out of time and getting stressed out etc. the successfull people you talk about who have time for fishing and have a better overall balance are probably better at prioritising and working hard at only the things that make a difference. Therefore leaving more time available to live life, hence they are successfull
Hi Luke.
Anton here. Long time reader, first time poster. You make some valid points. If ’success’ was just a matter of hard work, housekeepers and ditch diggers would own my ass. But they don’t, because there’s nothing new or different about their role.
To become successful you need to offer more than your role entails, thereby creating a new role and opportunities that perhaps didn’t exist before you came along. Because you are the driving force of this new direction, and essentially breaking new ground, people would rather give you what you need to try and break that ground than try to break it themselves. It’s less risk, and people are cautious dicks like that.
In a way, it’s good to know most workplaces are made up of at least 70% followers who are ready to follow people for the rest of their lives and get excited about anything new or interesting in the workplace – particularly if there’s no risk to their job security whatsoever.
Another thing I’d like to add is that you need to enjoy your life. If you don’t do anything other than work, you’ll not only end up being the most boring person in the office, you’ll probably have a lot less energy to put into your work. Some people get energy from playing golf in the weekends. Some travel. Some get into weird swinger fetish parties. It doesn’t matter what your thing is, but you’ve got to have a passion of some kind.
If your boss works you so hard that you can’t do anything but be at or think about work, it’s going to be a lot worse for his or her (but probably ‘his’ – sorry ladies, statistics don’t lie) business.
And that’s how I convinced my boss to open a strip club in my office.