Hard work isn’t all it takes

With very little resources in my pockets, a head full of ideas and a determination to escape the difficult life that was mine, I set out to invest in my ideas with the hopes one of them will be successful one day and give me my lucky break. Being a young student just getting into college, it's quite easy to be bored out of your mind, so you look for inspiration in different things, some become fond of friends and socializing, while others focus on their studies and the gratification of good grades.

For me, it was easy, I found my inspiration in all the success stories of entrepreneurs especially in the tech field so that's where all of my passion deviated. Becoming a successful entrepreneur was my ultimate goal, even though I didn’t have a clue of how to do it. It is just common sense to think that if you don’t have certain things, it is best to focus your efforts on the things you do have, in my case I didn’t have a lot of financial, human and material resources, so I had to focus my energy on my intellectual resources, placing my bets totally on hard work.

Now the question becomes, is hard work all it takes to succeed in a project?

Well, for a young boy like me at the time, the only possible answer would be “yes”, I didn’t have much of a choice after all and no other option for an answer. I was definitely not going to say “no” and with that admit my own powerlessness, but now with some retrospective, it's quite easy to realize that hard work isn’t all it takes.

People are working hard all around you

It's quite easy to assume that people aren’t working hard enough already and that's what justifies their apparent failure, this is so mostly because the only metric we use to measure success quite often is just the financial returns, but hard work and returns aren’t in a direct proportionality. Your brain often tends to assume that the more hard work you put it, the more returns you are going to get, while there are many other factors which play an important role as catalyst to all that.

There are already people all around you working very hard and yet failing, that tells you clearly that hard work isn’t the only factor, neither is it the main determinant of success. I think hard work is more of a booster to success than it is a synthesizer of success. So you can clearly imagine a young boy like me who could only place his bets on hard work with nothing else to count on, failure was the elephant in the room I desperately refused to see.

All the false stories

It's quite obvious to me where the problem comes from, when we want to embark on an adventure, we tend to look for motivation and the best place to find it is in success stories which a very often the exceptions to the rule rather than the general rule. In my case I was inspired by the stories of Facebook & Apple which all had their humble beginnings in very casual places, I thought to myself, Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in a dorm room, I also have a dorm room so am good to go, Apple started in a garage, I do have a garage as well so am good to go.

Unconsciously in our minds, we tend to attribute all that success to merely hard work, which is the first mistake we make. That dorm room was in Harvard, one of the best schools in the world which is very selective, and that garage was in the suburbs of Los Altos, California. This shows you that the creation of those companies wasn’t by some young guys who just had hard work to rely on, but they did have access to other vital resources like; finances, environment, human resource, time etc.

What you need

You may think to yourself that since you don’t have all the other things, all you need to do is to work very hard, so hard that it makes up for everything else. Work day and night, thinking, reflecting and dealing with all the possible issues which come up. Sure that's great, but how do you pay for the bills? the employees? the tools? etc How do you deal with the accounting, human resource and much more.

The perfect recipe can only be attained with the right combination of different ingredients. In my case I put too much of hard work and too little of the other ingredients, so I ended up with a horrible sauce. The recipe for success is a mixture of the following ingredients; Financial resources, timing, passion, strategic planning, communication, hard work, knowledge, leadership, information, faith, focus, support, and perseverance.

Of course, I can’t tell you what quantities of each you should put in because it depends on the sauce you are trying to make.

Exceptions don’t make the rule

The population of the United States is over 300 million people, the story of one person out of that bunch succeeding can’t be the rule which should be applied to everybody, sure it can serve as inspiration and motivation to others but not defined as a model to be replicated. The blueprint for success will rather be; finding a job, saving, investing and success. This is what so many have already done, and it worked out well.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t go out there and give it your best shot, but I think you should know what it takes, rather than just blindly hope in some lucky success stroke from the universe. What most people don’t get to see is all the work being done behind the scenes for the few minutes of success advertised on the screens. Days of man-hours, huge bills, intense planning, numerous trials and errors, all of that to achieve those results which seem easy.

Conclusion

I won’t bet all my cards on hard work alone if I were you, but rather on finding the perfect combination with these ingredients to lead you to success. Remember that if it could be easily done then everybody will do it which wll make it worthless and undesirable, but the complexity serves as a filter for those who are undeserving of it.

Thanks for reading ☺️

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