Hard Work
"Hard Work" is the new religion.
Your miseries conveys the lack of hard work in your life. Hard work begets success which begets money. Your problems would go away if you are rich enough. Something is lacking. This is the message of the self help. Amusingly it's the message on our social media feed. Self improvement might be the most viral content. Softcore porn comes second.
But what is hard work? When you don't want to, but still you go through it. When you exercise a certain discipline to get at it. Everybody knows what it is but not sure whether they are doing it. Any kind of success can be explained away with these two words. Even if you did work hard and didn't get to your goal, a common refrain is you didn't work hard enough. Hard work like pain is vague abstract concept that can't be measured. All we agree on is that it works.
Why don't people do it then? People do it all the time. Personally I haven't met a person who when it really came down to it, didn't give all of herself to the task at hand. When someone truly believes in the path that will take them from A to B. They will do anything.
Then why do people give up? Because success isn't guaranteed.
We can divide hard work into three types.
- Physical hard work.
- Mental hard work.
- Creative hard work.
Physical hard work is limited by your body. Not much you can do about the physics and biology. You can only push your body so hard.
Mental hard work is limited by your brain. Amount of working memory and processing power. Training for and applying abstract concepts at a problem for hours. Can be reproduced.
Creative hard work is when a trained mind sits with a problem. For hours or weeks or years. And the solution just strikes you. What happened? Where did it come from? Can the results be reproduced? You can put works of geniuses here. Was it really hard work or just luck?
It seems like all three kinds of hard work is somewhat based on luck. And that's when despair comes in. When you start to doubt that you are not strong enough or smart enough or talented enough. Belief will keep you working and keep despair away. But when belief wanes, what then?
Shouldn't we tell people how to get more lucky?
How to get lucky? Get moving. You won't stumble into luck if you just sit there. I have never played basketball. How many repetitions do you think it would take me to score a half court shot? 500? 10k? 50k? There is a number. It's not impossible. Number of reps count. By a single rep, I mean a full feedback loop. Action. Reaction. Analysis. Action. Reaction. Analysis. You take a lesson from each rep and you apply it again. A little sidenote. If I flip a coin for heads hundred thousands times, I won't be an expert coin tosser. I shouldn't apply myself to a "random" environment. Unknown variables should be kept minimum. So the lesson seems to be this. Take shots. Get into a feedback loop. Reapply your learnings. Keep the outside variables to a minimum.
That takes care of first two kinds of hard work. Keep putting in the reps if only because you don't know your mental and physical limit. For the creative hard work, I have no guide. Light bulb goes on or it doesn't. Maybe it depends on your experiences or your curiosity or your love for the thing or destiny. But keep putting in the reps, because it might just be your destiny.
We aren't working hard for the sake of working hard. We are trying to get lucky.