Hard Work is the Key to Success…Or Is It Not?

“Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.”- Pele
Growing up, we have continuously heard that hard work is the key to success. This phrase was always uttered to instill in us only one value i.e. if you will continuously and consistently work towards your goals, you will surely reap the benefits. But if you ponder upon it, you need a lot more than a hardworking attitude to soar your way towards success. You need to be prepared to face all the failures and disappointments and see them as learning opportunities. You have to implement a persistent and persevering attitude to ensure that you are giving it all. Through this blog, we will find out whether hard work is the key to success or if you need to do more than just tirelessly and laboriously chase your goals.

Hard Work vs Smart Work

While working towards your goals with a focused and hardworking attitude is integral, discovering efficient ways to actualize them is equally important. This is where smart work comes in. While it is true that hard work is the key to success, smart work is concerned with finding innovative tricks and techniques to accomplish your goals. To understand the distinction between hard work vs smart work, let’s take an example. Suppose that you are gearing up for a competitive exam, you are devoting almost 8-10 hours to preparing every day. But if you are just cramming up different concepts and not efficiently memorizing them and utilizing different tricks to remember them for a longer time, the hardworking hours you have devoted might go to waste. Thus, locating effective ways of saving time and putting it to those places where you can devote extra efforts, can immensely help you attain your defined goals in lesser time by bifurcating hard work from smart work.

How to Work Hard to Be Successful

While everyone knows the well-known saying that hard work is the key to success, there are certain factors that you should keep in mind in order to ensure the success of your endeavors. Below we have listed some of these factors that can help you bring fruition to your efforts.

1. Keep Your Goal in Sight 

The first and foremost thing you need to keep in mind is the goal you have set for yourself. While there can be distractions that might come with the uncertainty of life, you need to ensure that you are consistently chasing your aim even if they are just little steps. 

2. Plan Your Actions in Advance  

To be better organized, and have a sense of orientation, start with listing down your long-term as well as short-term goals. Then, start drafting your plan for each of the goals you have set for yourself. While your short-term goals will bring you instant gratification, they will also provide you with the right confidence and guidance to pursue your long-term goals. Don’t forget to review your progress on a timely basis which will further help you assess how much efforts you are putting towards actualizing your aims and ambitions.

3. Consistency 

Consistency means that you are continuously striving towards something no matter how many times you have faced disappointments and failures. So, on your path to attain success, you need to be consistent and persevere even if that means that you are coming across a large number of setbacks on your way. Remember that in order to shine brightly, you need to realize that every failure will test how strong you are and how much you can bounce back from a bad phase and it will ultimately transform you into a determined and relentless individual. 

4. Say No to Sluggish Behaviour 

The first rule of success is to give up that one minute of sleep that we often long for after putting the alarm on snooze. You need to understand that being lazy won’t get you anywhere. You can make as many excuses as you want but at the end of the day, you can always utilize the time that you might have wasted on a worthless task. And if it comes to seeing it on an organizational level, there is nothing worse than sluggish behavior especially when it can potentially lead to incompetence. Hence, only those who are actively chasing their aims will realize the true essentiality of the old adage of “hard work is the key to success”. 

5. Build a Disciplined Routine

The most important part of transforming your hard work into success is to manifest discipline towards whichever goal you want to fulfill. By making a plan for your goals, you can carve out a disciplined approach to successfully accomplishing them. Discipline will also help you realize your aim within the specific time period thus working further to steer towards better goals and achieving more in life!

6. Remember “Why” You Started in the Beginning

On your quest for success, you might come across days when you will feel like giving up and that’s when you will need to remind yourself why you actually started in the beginning. The ‘why’ will help you stay focused on your goals and plans and will also help you put things in perspective in the long run while also assisting you in analyzing how far you have come. This is how you can make the most of your hard work and turn it into success.

7. Stay Optimistic

As a hard-working individual, you must also be positive and optimistic to make the most of the target goals you have set for yourself. No road to success is easy and you will also encounter many hurdles that might try to set you away from your plans but keeping an optimistic approach, you will be able to see a silver lining thus you will be able to turn those obstacles into opportunities to become better and more persevere. To stay optimistic, you can implement your own ways of bringing as much positivity as you can into your monotonous routines!

Article Credit: https://leverageedu.com/blog/hard-work-is-the-key-to-success/