"करत करत अभ्यास के जड़मति होत सुजान; रसरी आवत जात ते सिल पर परत निसान"

I’m sure you might have heard about this doha by Saint Kabir das. It signifies that if you are committed to working really hard, ain’t no challenge is hard enough for you. Just like repeated rubbing of a rope on a rock can create significant marks on the rock, nothing is out of your reach if are dedicated enough to work hard for long stretches of time. Starting on this note, let me take you through this bitter-sweet journey, in which you would learn about the pros and cons of the idea of “Working hard in order to achieve success”. Is it really necessary to work hard? Should we couple hard work with smart work? Results are directly proportional to the amount of work and hours you put in it. Grab your laptops and smartphones folks because I would be resolving all of your queries in the next five minutes. Here it comes!!

ORIGINS

Take a moment and just think how the earliest of the human species would have lived! No cars to drive, no footpath or roads to walk on, no supermart to buy groceries from, no gas stoves and utensils to cook your food in and I could go on forever and ever!! The things which we don’t even give a second thought about, took literally centuries to come into existence. The early humans had to hunt if they wanted to eat, build a shelter if they wanted to sleep, had to fight off the predators if they wanted to keep themselves and their families safe, they had no choice but to ‘earn their keep’. Nothing was served to them, they had to work really hard to fulfill even the basic necessities they had, in order to keep themselves alive. According to me, that’s where the concept of working hard came into the subconscious of the human brain. You can call that a default setting of our human race. Let me give you an example, imagine if you wanted to learn a new dance move, what will you do? I’m guessing the first thing that came up in your mind was ‘practice’. See I told you it’s in our subconscious! A man who literally has no knowledge and a below-average IQ too knows that he has to work hard in order to stay alive and be wealthy. At one point of time in your life you could even forget your name, your relatives, and your identity but the only thing you would remember and feel proud about would be your hard work and struggles! That’s how significant your hard work is to you.

THE DEBATE-HARD V/S SMART

Now that you have learnt, that hard work is an essential part of a human being, let me introduce you to the materialistic world. Here no one sees how hard you work, what you have done to achieve, and what you had to go through! The only thing that matters here is the results and how you present it in front of the masses. In my opinion, the first person to have ever thought of exploring further than their default would have thought of the above-mentioned. Why should we spend hours worrying about things carefully observing each and every step, spending hours on particular things when the thing that the masses only care about are results? And that’s how folks ‘shortcuts’ came into existence.

There are people in our history who worked really hard and achieved great success in their life. There are people who did work a lot but still were not rewarded as they should be. Although working hard should assure success, still an incomplete story. Our world is oriented in such a way that to stand out from the rest of the 7.5 billion people, merely spending hours and working tirelessly doesn’t assure you success. As the competition is getting tougher and tougher, human brains are evolving, evolving in such a way that it could retain and execute information in an ungodly speed. As a result, in order to compete with such ‘holy brains’, the general public has to find ways to look beyond the traditional stuff and take a deep dive into the pool of ‘smart work’, as they say ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. Our world was happy as it was. But the curiosity, the hunger to bring about an advancement in stuff, to make life easy, to double the production in order to cater the demands of the ever-growing population, merely spending an ample amount of time on something wasn’t alone the option. “Curiosity leads to complexities and complexities lead to randomness.” (written by yours truly).

PROS AND CONS CLUBBED TOGETHER

Although, hard work alone can’t win you battles but underestimating it is a big red flag. Working smart alone could guarantee success but let me break it to you, it is very short-lived. The base of a human being is completely based on the amount of time and work that he did on his persona. At some point of time, you would even regret taking the easy way around and would never be satisfied with it but working hard never disappoints you in a long run. You would always be proud of yourself that you absolutely left no column unchecked.

Now there’s always a negative side of each and everything in this world. Putting your precious efforts in something increases your expectation of getting high results from it. But let me bring it to your knowledge that hard work does not always assures you results. It’s the hard way around folks, you have to fight your way through it. You would have to wait patiently, get used to accepting failures, giving your everything in the process. When you choose the path of working the hard way, you are stuck in there for way longer than you expected. Probably that’s the biggest con of all. Time is a very precious concept in this world and it never comes back. Working your heart out is not for the faint-hearted.

CONCLUSION

In the end, I want to close out by saying that nothing alone can guarantee you success. You have to club working hard and smart with a little pinch of cleverness if you really want to bring about a significant change in the world with your thoughts. And it all starts with learning to accept the failures and mishaps and moving on. In the old times when people knew nothing but to work hard, they were happy inside but outside the things weren’t good. Someone had to come up with some other worldly idea of inventing a wheel which brought an industrial revolution, to bring about an advancement in order to simplify various tasks and save time. Once you learn how to efficiently incorporate hard work in your day-to-day life, I'm sure you would achieve great things in the near future. And remember, I believe in you!!!

Thank you!!!

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