The Quiet Power of Hard Work

Being in the early stages of my career, I often seek out advice from the ultra-successful - through books, podcasts and other sources. As I’ve started to connect the dots, one theme shows up over and over again:

The Importance of Hard Work

It sounds simple, you work hard, you get better results. But it’s often easier said than done. The distractions that are engineered to hijack your attention are at an all time high.Social media, video games, those same podcasts or books (!!) - they’re all pulling you in different directions, but all pulling you away from being able to work hard. 

So I asked myself - why is it so hard to work hard, and why is it important? 

From the outside, the most successful seemed to have had luck on their side (I’ll come back to this), and they figured out the right problem to work on. And while it is important that you work on the right thing, it is just as important that you are willful and you work hard at it. The main reason?

Hard work compounds - quietly.

Chinese bamboo trees provide a great analogy -  they require daily nurturing for several years before coming out of the ground. Then once they’re out, growth is exponential - often ~100 ft in as few as 6 weeks. With hard work, a lot of times, your efforts will feel like they lack results. But just like the Chinese bamboo tree, remember that there is progress being made beneath the surface. Keep at it until you come out of the ground too and see results grow exponentially 

There are countless other examples of this. Pablo PIcasso, the famous Spanish painter, was once walking down a street and a girl recognized him and asked him to paint her a picture. Within a span of 30 minutes, he painted her a masterpiece and asked for $1M in exchange. WIth a confused look on her face, the girl asked how it can be $1M if it only took him 30 minutes. Picasso responded that while it may have seemed easy, it took him nearly 30 years to be able to paint this in 30 minutes. If Picasso had been frustrated with the early results of his hard work, we wouldn’t be talking about him today. The biggest blockers to working hard and reaching your full potential are often self-doubt, giving up too early and not pushing hard enough. 

So how do you push through?

I run into this tension all the time. When I’m tasked with a complex project, it often feels more ‘productive’ to work on other, smaller but easier tasks instead. Knocking more items off that to-do list feels good, but the project that requires learning something new, and more time working on it - never gets done. It lingers on the to-do list. But pushing through requires persistence. Even if something doesn’t make sense initially, break down the project into little increments and let momentum compound. The longer you stay at it, the harder you will work. The harder you work, the more chance you give yourself of success and of luck going your way. Speaking of luck: 

Hard work increases your luck surface area.

The biggest advantage of working hard is that you increase your surface area of luck. There’s no doubt that becoming super successful requires an element of luck. So while luck is seemingly something you cannot control, I would disagree. James Austin, the author of Chase, Chance and Creativity talks about the four types of luck. 

1. There’s blind luck, i.e. winning the lottery - this is one that you can’t control or do much about. 

2. There’s luck by motion - you try different things, you read about different fields, and eventually two dots will line up for an opportunity to be created. Lucky? Yes, but you created that by hustling or working hard, long enough. 

3. There’s luck by preparation - it is the same as luck by motion but you work hard and prepare, you become the best at something. And if you are the best at let’s say - finance, you might be more attuned to noticing a lucky break that others won’t pick up on. 

4. The last one is luck from character / skill - this comes from having a specialized skill so you are in demand for a certain type of problem. Let’s say you are the best deep sea diver, you go deeper than others. If someone else randomly finds hidden treasure, but they can’t reach it, they will come to you. You weren’t lucky per se, you created that luck through your character or skill

Other than blind luck, I believe hard work can help you increase the surface area for all other types of luck. And the bigger your surface area, eventually you will ‘catch a break’ and see a step change increase in the results you are able to get

So just like the bamboo tree, nurture the roots in silence—so the world can one day watch you grow in the open