BobMat

When your friends (and not friends) are working harder than you, you start rethinking your efforts. You are not working as hard enough. So you grind as hard, work longer hours and sleep less; hell, you even get to the point where your efforts are nearly identical to the hard-workers you admire (on a meta level you envy them). But then the results are out and…they are terrible.

Define hard work.

Exactly.

They don’t teach how hard you should work, and so you try to emulate the best guy out there as your guide. It’s appealing, but it’s a bad idea.

One day I got tired of all this bullshit.

“Fuck you,” I said. “Fuck you all.” I knew who I was telling, but only abstractly.

And then I grabbed my piece of paper and a pen, and I scribbled on top the title: “Let’s define hard work.” My kind of hard work. And then the words poured out of wherever they came from:

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Define hard work by your effort. Use results as a guide to your effort. Effort is the priority. So how much effort?

Enough effort to make you say, “this is wrong,” and “I’ve gotta do better.” Then you are done for the day. Come back tomorrow and do better until you say, “this is wrong” and “I’ve gotta do better.”

The point of your effort, the hand wrote, is to try not to repeat the same mistake twice (ideally), and the results guide your effort to what is right, and what is wrong. The ‘wrong’ of today should be the base for tomorrow.

Hard work, therefore, involves daily failure and constant effort to overcome that failure. You have to be willing to invest in loss and come back strong the next day. Hard work is not a matter of time, but of effort.

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Life has never been more focused ever since.

Thank you for reading.