Are You Working Hard? Some Real Stories To Inspire You To Work Harder

Lukas Schwekendiek
7 min readMay 22, 2021

Michael Phelps.

Everyone knows the Man who won more Olympic gold medals than any other person in the history of the world (and that by quite a bit) and many contribute his success to his physical attributes, many of which have been disproven (such as his lung capacity).

However, what the man did do is revolutionize Swimming Training as a whole. You can barely find information on this anymore, but before Michael Phelps ever won a Tournament Trainers that knew him would criticize his training routine.

6–8 hours a day, 5–6 days a week of Swimming was too much for everyone. Trainers and even Doctors were in agreement, yet he still did it.

Today, all the information you can find regarding his Training is filled with positive remarks and people praising him for the discipline. No one is questioning the routine anymore and almost the entire Swimming World had to adopt to the sheer willpower of this one Man and his coach.

Eric Thomas, Tony Robbins, Jim Carrey.

I’m grouping these three names together because they all have similar difficulties they overcame.

Eric Thomas, now a doctor of Psychology and one of the biggest motivational speakers in the world, was homeless in Detroit for 2 years, after which he found a way to go back to school and became an academic advisor that would start to give more and more talks, until he finally built his company that travelled the country and gave coaching to all kinds of people.

Tony Robbins, a name everyone today recognizes, sometimes tells his story of having barely enough money to eat for the month. Without a job, without any idea how he would survive the next month, he still ended up giving what little he had away.

Jim Carrey, before the shooting of Dumb & Dumber Jim Carrey was another struggling actor in L.A. who would always dream of more. He said he wrote himself a check for “Acting Services Rendered” for $10 Million for 3 years in the future. This was in 1992, 3 years before Dumb & Dumber released. He was able to cash in that check.

Eminem.

Bullied, fatherless, and a mother who fed him Valium to keep him calm, he had no…

Lukas Schwekendiek

Life Coach, Speaker, Writer. Published on TIME, Inc & Huffington Post.