“Work hard and you can achieve anything”. Good classic advice that has been repeated to us many, many times before. Yet, we all feel we are working hard but many of us feel they are getting nowhere. If you don’t know the elements of success now, you’ll definately hate yourself later.
What is defined hard work? One can go to college, study very hard and get good grades, get a job,… We did exactly what everyone told us we should do. Get out of bed, we go to work, pay the bills, take care of ourselves and we go to bed each evening feeling somewhat tired.
The main problem with: “working hard to achieve anything” is not what we define as hard work but what really successful people meant when they gave this advice to us. Hard is not about our daily tasks, which can indeed take up a lot of time, but we do these things because they need to be done. Your daily chores, your job, family meetings and favors for friends is just normal work. This is what you and every other person on this planet do every single day and by considering that hard work you are not going to cut it.
Hard work is what comes on top of all those regular tasks. It’s what you do after come home from a long day at your job, after you made dinner and cleaned the house. Hard work is what pushes you to grow as a human being. And what makes hard, work hard isn’t even the work itself, it’s everything else that happens when you make the decision to start working toward your goals. It’s the painful honest self-evalution, the nasty personal sacrifices and the uncertainty lurking around every corner.
The elements of success:
Hard work is one of the few ways you can achieve your goals and ultimately success. For those of us who haven’t been lucky in winning the lottery or aren’t extraordinary wealthy, smart or lucky, hard work is often the only way. And while each person path to success is different, the tools to get there are very similar. There is no secret formula: there’s only hard work and perseverance. We can break this up in 5 different keywords. They are subscribed below.
The Drive: This is the goal, your motivation and inspiration. The entire reason why you should be working hard. The engine that pushes your efforts forwards.
The Plan: when the drive is the endpoint, the plan is the route on your map. The plan maps outs your actions and helps plot your progress and keeps you on track.
The Grind: The grind is when hard working stops being fun and becomes stressful and discouraging. How the grind is handled is often what separates the winners from quitters.
The Sacrifice: This is what makes hard work truly hard. Every ambitious goal requires a level of significant personal sacrifice. Enduring the stress in your relationships, finances and comfort is the real test of hard work.
The Payoff: This is your achievement. In order to keep putting effort in hard work you will have to define a number of goals and milestones and recognize when you’ve achieved them. And once you have, enjoy your achievement and keep going towards the next goal.
So now you know the 5 steps to hard work and success, the next part is doing them. This is easier said than done. In the next blog posts we’ll discuss each one of the parts apart and give tips and hints that can help you on your path to success.