WORK HARD , success will follow you

If You Want To Be Successful, You Need To Work Hard

If you want to be successful in any walk of life, hard work is a necessity!

You cannot get anywhere without working hard. The trouble is that hard work is, hard! This stops a lot of us from doing it. We are not willing to put in the hours required, because it is difficult.The majority of the time we do this, it’s because of a few factors. Maybe, we don’t like the job we are doing and see no reason to bust a gut. Maybe, we’re not seeing results, become demotivated and stop giving 100%, or maybe we can’t be bothered anymore.

The thing with hard work is that, yes, it may be tough, but it is much better than the alternative. If you don’t put in the work, success is much harder to achieve.

A few years down the line you could be rueing the opportunity that you passed up, all because you were not willing to put in the hard work when it mattered the most.

In the end, it comes down to two things. Do you want to endure the pain of hard work? Or do you want to endure the pain of regret for not giving it your all when you had the chance?Working Hard or Hardly Working?

Before I became self-employed, I worked in an office. This was a job that I did not enjoy in the slightest. Sitting in an office and doing monotonous work is not my cup of tea.

Despite this, whenever I turned up to work, I still worked hard. I took pride in what I did, despite gaining little satisfaction from the work I was doing.

I recognised that the job was a stepping stone. It was providing me with the capital I needed to invest in my travel blog and take a chance of going all-in on it.This was all the motivation I needed to show up in the early days and do a lot of work. However, the longer this went on, my enthusiasm did begin to wane. No matter how much work I did, it did not satisfy me.

Plus, when I went home I had to work on my blog as well. I was burning the candle at both ends, and there was no way I could carry it on for much longer.

About 5 months into the job, it became clear that no matter how hard I worked, there would be no reward for it. The incentive to go in and work hard was removed, and I decided to do enough, and focus my energy on turning my passion project into my full-time job.

It would have been easy for me to lose focus on making a success of the blog and just idle along in my office job, but that was never an option. The thought of working there long-term made me feel ill, especially when I had to deal with nonsensical demands most of the time.

I could have taken the easy route and barely worked as some of my colleagues did in the office, but I knew the pain of regret would outweigh the pain of effectively working two jobs at once.

Do Something You Love And You’ll Never Work A Day In Your Life

I remember reading this quote a few times and never thinking much of it. Growing up I never had any idea of what I wanted to do. This continued as I got older and graduated from university. I still had no clue about which path I wanted to take.

I ended up travelling and doing a lot of work in the construction industry. I thought this may be something that I would enjoy doing. I get a lot of satisfaction from building things, but working on construction is truly hard work.

Could I do that for the rest of my life?

It was a question I couldn’t answer. As luck would have it, I decided to start a travel blog after being unable to find information on somewhere I was going.

While it was tough going at first, I was able to slowly build up some momentum with the blog after a while. It was during these early periods and later on when I came home from working in the office that I realised how much I enjoyed working on the blog.

I got an immense amount of satisfaction from writing a post and seeing it perform well on Google. It was at this moment that I realised I didn’t consider the blog work. I thoroughly enjoyed sitting down and doing hard work, even though it didn’t feel like hard work.

I realised the value of the above quote in these moments. Not all of us can do what we enjoy for a living. However, I think the main reason for this is that a lot of us don’t know what we enjoy doing when it comes to working. A large reason for this is that we neglect to do hard work when it matters the most.

It took me a good 27 years to figure out that I enjoy building things, whether that be in the physical or digital realm.

If you start a passion project but give up halfway through because you aren’t seeing results, you will never know what could have been. The pain of regret will always be there.

The Takeaway

Hard work is a fundamental part of life if you want to be successful in any field. There is no getting away from this. Work isn’t always fun, but it is necessary.

Life is all about opportunity. The more you put yourself out there, the more opportunities you will be presented with. We do not regret the opportunities we took, it’s the ones we don’t take that we regret.

Framed in this manner the alternative to working hard is laying out and missing out on a life you could lead. Nothing worth having is easy, you have to work to earn anything in life.

Sometimes, I don’t want to put the effort in. All I want to do is relax. I do this to give myself a break, but I can’t do it all the time.

You reach a point where you have to put the miles in and do the work. You don’t have to do it all the time, but more often than not, you will need to work to get anywhere.

The alternative is simply not palatable if you want to lead the life you desire.