Hard work may (or may not) pay off
We’ve internalized this moral fact when we approach the adult phase, where we have to go to great lengths to secure a future for ourselves, levelheadedly plan our finances so we won’t die poor.
The “hard work always pays off” mantra circulates on social media like a meme. Almost as if it’s codified in religious texts.
Not to mention the bills to pay and the family to take care of.
And trust me, if construction workers are the hardest working people you’ve ever come across, chances are they’ll be rising to the top of the wealth hierarchy.
But my soul laments every time fate decides to betray my efforts and convictions. Hard work pays off super well if we don’t have to contend with competing desires, conflicting priorities and instability in life.
But my biggest regret about working too hard, on the other hand, is that I don’t learn much beyond the realm of self-help.
Hard work may not pay off because of pure luck.
It bothers me, as a faithful person, to this day that luck plays an outsized role in deciding your life trajectory.
The world decides who has, and who has not.
I knew from the beginning that I wanted to content create, and my creative mind has led me to spend countless hours creating one project after the next, with hopes that people to flock to visit one day.
But after all of this mindless struggle, I learned that most people don’t give a dime about my work and subsequently they ended up as portfolio projects, or as pundits would put it, pet projects.
I quickly found myself isolated among the sea of people living paycheck to paycheck, with no interest in making content and seeing my content, except for a few handful of very privileged people in my country.
I completely neglected self-promotion because I saw it as an unworthy thing to do —to the point it’s almost insulting. But on the other hand, the hours spent on writing captions for posts and cold emailing other like-minded people is nothing short of grueling.
My lack of success actually made me even more desperate the more wishful thinking I did. And the inability to cut my losses kept me inside this vicious cycle.
Unless you’re making content that people can’t help but seeing, no amount of work can take you anywhere. And no one is ever completely sure whether people are into what you’re into.
Sometimes your enthusiasm to achieve doesn’t match with the amount of opportunities you’re given.
Not to mention that you may still be recovering from toxic relationships, debilitating illnesses and financial hardship.
You must be thinking that I’m complaining all the time, but I think that I’ve done everything right, and still the results are still not coming.
Hard work, in my opinion, only work well if you happen to live in the right time and knowing the right people.
Hard work doesn’t pay off because it’s not proportional to the amount of success you expect to have.
We all like to think that hard work will efficiently translate to more results, but we hate being told that luck solves everything.
In fact, this article from Medium thinks that hard work is the prerequisite, and I totally agreed with the author in most things.
What the author tries to preach is that productivity solves nothing if the goal you’re trying to achieve is outside of your control.
And in order to know if something is worth your sweat and tears, is by sitting back and assess which goal you think you can realistically achieve within a given amount of time.
While this is a highly personal question to ask and I’m sure that this one can send your head spinning like a top, this existential question can save you hours of cyclical thinking and obsessive rumination.
In fact, it took me years to have a somewhat concrete answer. A few years ago, I was a starry-eyed who thought his world was his oyster, and with his enthusiasm and talent he was confident that he’d be able to receive the admiration, the recognition and the opportunities that he so deserves. But the harsh truth is that law of attraction doesn’t work at all, and sometimes it even makes you delusional about life.
I thought I could get myself a nice job overseas by simply knowing the subject matter and impressing them with my solid work ethic, but the logistics of competing with the local candidates and studying for another degree snaps me back to reality.
In all seriousness, it’s better to achieve something small with high certainty rather than risk your wellbeing for something huge.
Hard work doesn’t solve your life problems (unless….)
As much as I hate saying this, but hard work doesn’t always change how you feel about yourself, unless you change yourself.
We’re all too familiar with the feeling where the excitement of success is ephemeral.
Like when you finish your valedictorian speech, the dopamine was overflowing with the sense of accomplishment, but after the hype subsides you, you’d see that much of your problems are still there, waiting for you to solve them.
I struggled a lot with loneliness and dissatisfaction about my social life. I never dared ask a girl out or handle a long conversation with strangers, and I thought the only way to solve my social anxiety is to be a successful and talented brat.
Even though I’m able to achieve all the self development goals that I set out, I actually went nowhere, even though my friends and family are impressed with what I do.
My insecurities are still intact and my relationships don’t really change much after all that I did.
It was at this moment I realized I’ve been over-prioritizing on one thing, and neglected just about everything else besides eating and sleeping.
My mental health suffered, and the lack of necessary connections in life meant that I couldn’t do anything much besides embarking on one project to the next, never enjoying the taste of success like so many others.
And that’s when I learned to balance my needs and my desires. By going out with friends more, by being more active in social events and traveling more.
By slowing down, you actually move faster forward.
If hard work sounds so trivial, so why bother ?
The product of our hard labor, however influential, is still a triviality on a cosmic scale.
Seriously there’s a lot to unpack and remember from my screed, and gotta admit — I don’t think I follow all the advice I give.
Sometimes hard work is like the red pill that you’re really tempted to take — because the world around me doesn’t naturally move on unless I do something for once.
In fact, nothing’s gonna happen if you sit there and wait. Right ?
But hear me out — hard work is just as valuable as the value that our work brings to society.
There’s nothing wrong about being productive and spending most of the time working on yourself.
It’s easy to clock in hours on finishing a task, or to focus on doing urgent things, but as the Pareto rule say, 80% of your effort should go towards:
- Deciding what sort of value you can derive from your work
- What your definition of success is
- What can you achieve within your scope of control
Those stuff, in my opinion, only takes around 20% to 30% of your workload. But for years, I’ve been asking myself those same questions after so many failures and disappointment.
Hope you find this article helpful and let me know what you think in the comments.
Thank you for reading and enjoy !
