Does Hard Work Really Pay Off?

Imagine you are working in a goldmine.

You get up before the other miners, stay later and dig faster than the rest. You put in more effort every day and sacrifice more to do so. Yet, somehow, after years and years of digging you still haven’t struck gold whereas so many others have.

They have come and gone, finding rich gold-veins while you are left with nothing but dirt and rocks.

After years you eventually give up and find a new job. Years later still you revisit the mine and find that it has been completely hollowed out and someone has mapped the mine for patterns. When you take a look you recognize where you dug and see that you missed just about every gold vein there was by a mere couple of inches at most. All that hard work went to waste.

Hard work doesn’t necessarily pay off.

Just because you do more or work harder doesn’t mean you will get more done. You can work hard all your life and never get any reward for it, because the hard work you did may not matter.

A person who buys equipment to test for gold will have to dig a lot less than the person who just swings his pickaxe in hopes of striking gold at random.

“Being busy is not necessarily productive.” — Timothy Ferriss

You have to work hard on the things that matter, not just work hard.

If you only answer emails in your office then of course you will not get very far, just like if all you do at the gym is stretch and warm up you will not build any bulk!

But that being said, if you work hard on the things that actually matter, then of course you will be rewarded!

If you, for example, call 100 businesses to work with you every day whereas everyone else only calls 10, you will gain far more than them. But if you are only closing 1% vs. someone who closes 90% that person will still get more sales only doing 3 calls to your 100.

It’s about working hard AND smart, not either or.

Both can go wrong, but together, they lead to great things. You have to work smart to figure out what really matters. Where is the 5% of the work that will lead to over 90% of the results?

Do that work and ignore the rest!

Timothy Ferriss puts this in a really nice question by asking: “If you had only 2 hours a week to work, what would you need to do in those 2 hours?”

If, instead of 40 hours, you only had 2, what would be the things you had to get done first?

Focus on those things! Do what matters rather than getting busy on the details that don’t matter and then work hard.

“Being busy is a form of laziness — lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.” — Timothy Ferriss

Be everything you want to be, reach your potential and get the life you want. Send me a message saying “1 to 1” to get life coaching with me. Lukas Schwekendiek

Originally published at http://quora.com.