Hard work? What for?

"Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work."- Stephen King

An open ended quote like this from somebody as noted as Stephen King is bound to have a few people imagine they can work hard and achieve anything. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Hard work is overrated.

The most successful people in the world work very hard only in certain specific ways. In other words, they are very smart about where and how they apply themselves. Behind the choices they make is their inherent talent, judgement, intelligence, and sometimes, pure gut feel for what they are about to embark upon. Even more importantly, they are very good at realizing what is not going to work or what is not going to work very well. They know how to abandon and change directions.

The reason hard work gets so emphasized upon is because it is accessible to everyone. It comes with a baggage of all the good things like diligence, respect, duty, and all the other rubbish that doesn't count for anything if it led to failure or poverty, but it is safe advice, especially when it is getting dished out free of cost. I know many people who led extremely diligent, hard working lives, that never got a fraction of the success they craved.

It is easy to say, “You've got to work hard!”, but very hard to say, “You've got to become more talented!”. There is an assumption here that talent is God given but we mortals should only subject ourselves to hard work. There is another assumption that there isn't enough opportunity around, and hence, out of ten equally talented people, only one will succeed! Rubbish.

The universe is abundant.

With the human population explosion, the number of millionaires and billionaires in the world has been increasing, not decreasing. So, there is absolutely no truth to the scavenging notions that people try to put into our heads should we choose not to strain ourselves out with hard work.

Smart people have always been able to seize opportunities based on their aptitudes and knowledge, skill and experience, not by working at minimum wage towards their first million dollars. Investment in knowledge is much more valuable than investment of hours on tasks. You will never find talented people working on anything except fine tuning their very special skills. They might give the perception that they are hardly working, but that is when they might very well be taking in a lot on observation and learning.

A blind hard work approach limits exposure to new learning, new perspectives, and makes one less adept to handling change and shifting paradigms. The smart ones can see change coming, and the smartest ones are probably causing most of it!

You will rarely hear prodigiously talented people talking about how "hard" it has been for them. You will not hear them giving you any advice about hard work either. Kind of strange, you would think, that nobody has quite said, "Anybody can work hard, but only the truly talented ones will win!". Maybe kindness plays a part here.

Exposure to and curiosity about a variety of things make us better informed. Experimentation and freedom to explore further our trust in unknown things and expand our horizons. Not hard work.

The most beautiful things in the world are created by talented people, who do not fear failure, who do not give extra merit to anything just because it is difficult. They know very well that one cannot do anything special just by being hard on themselves.

So, if you are, stop harping about hard work, please. It's demeaning to a marvelously capable unit like the human being.