HARD WORK (Life Lesson Series)

InterviewGirl.com’s Lesson of the Week: HARD WORK

Thomas Edison once famously stated, “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” There is no substitute for hard work. This is an age old adage. We’ve heard it time and time again, but there is such truth in this statement. There are no real secrets to success.

Success in anything has one fundamental aspect: effort. To achieve exponential results requires additional effort and then even more effort after that.

One needs to take action. Action needs to be taken with commitment. When extra effort is applied, exponential results come about. Sometimes in life that little extra determination will get you to go beyond the original results that you were hoping to obtain. There is the famous saying, “Hard work beats talent when talent does not work hard.” On an athletic level, it is clear.

There are plenty of “gifted” athletes that never excel because they rely on their natural ability to get them through the game or competition. You can give examples of this with players in middle school, high school and/ or in professional athletics. It is always sad to see money and fame ruin a great athlete’s career. This lesson of “hard work beats talent when talent does not work hard” can also be seen in academics.

Some students refuse to study because they think that they don’t need to because they can get by with not studying. We all have heard stories about kids who struggled through school and ended up very successful in life.  Sometimes those challenges individuals face, make them far more prepared for the real world. Working hard pays off in life.

In Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius, as Michael Michalko explains how the minds of geniuses work, he writes, “a distinguishing characteristic of genius is immense productivity.” It turns out that geniuses produce a lot of material. They produce a large quantity of work and in the process, a masterpiece is then created.

In order for an individual to be immensely productive, he must work a lot. He must work continually. Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents. Bach wrote a cantata every week. Mozart produced more than six hundred pieces of music. Einstein published 248 other papers in addition to his famous paper on relativity, and T.S. Eliot had numerous drafts of “The Waste Land.”

Another way of looking at producing a massive quantity of work as the above individuals did is that in order to do that someone must work hard day in and day out. As Michalko brilliantly points out, “a distinguishing characteristic of genius is immense productivity.”

Ultimately, an individual is productive by working hard.