Why Doesn't My Hard Work Translate into Success?

1.1. Hard work is actually just one part of the story

The humbling, brutal, messy reality of life is that you can do everything in your power and still fail. Hard work in and of itself is no guarantee!

This statement seems counter-intuitive. When we look at the stories of many great leaders, persons who have gone before, we find they attribute their success to hard work. For examples:

●      With hard work and effort, you can achieve anything. – Antoine Griezmann

●      Without hard work, nothing grows but weeds. – Gordon B. Hinckley

●      Hard work compounds like interest, and the earlier you do it, the more time you have for the benefits to pay off. – Sam Altman

●      I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. – Thomas Jefferson

●      Talent means nothing, while experience, acquired in humility and with hard work, means everything. – Patrick Suskind

●      Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. – Proverbs 6:6, ESV.

Presidents, entrepreneurs, and leaders across a variety of fields have identified hard work as a major contributor to their success. So, if you want to succeed, working hard is actually a wise thing to do. However, many people have worked very hard but have not succeeded. What makes some of these hard workers succeed while others do not? Lets first  dig deep to really understand the role hard work plays in our journey to success.

1.2. Deliberate practice and a clear goal

In his book, Outliers: The Story of Success, the New York Times best-selling author, Malcolm Gladwell, quotes a famous study conducted in 1973 by Herbert A. Simon and William G. Chase that strongly suggests that in order for someone to become a master in a cognitively demanding area of endeavor, they need to put in about 10,000 hours of work. That's a lot of hours! If we think about 10,000 hours, that is like 250 working weeks. Technically, we are looking at five years if we think about 250 working weeks - and forget about time off for holidays, sick leave, and all other such unforeseeable factors! So, in reality, we need at least 10 years to become masters. But what's important to note is that it's not just about doing the same thing over and over again. To become masters, we must put in the time, but even more importantly, we must perform what is known as Deliberate Practice. 😎

What exactly is deliberate practice? Deliberate practice refers to a way of practice or work that is both purposeful and systematic. One thing that differentiates regular work from deliberate practice is that deliberate practice does not include mindless repetition. Deliberate practice is characterized by focused attention to the task at hand. It is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance. So, it's not just about doing a lot of things or just working hard, there must be a clear goal.

It is also important to understand that deliberate practice may not be a comfortable activity 🙂; sustained effort requires sustained concentration. The person who practices deliberately is someone who is committed to the process. They are curious. They are constantly interested in lifelong learning. They are committed to achieving mastery, and the process is just as important as the goal they seek to achieve. They have a big Why that drives them! They are inner-motivated and self-directed.

In their quest to improve, they are not afraid to explore new ways of looking at their area of focus. They experiment. They are willing to go down dead ends and return to the main path to hone and refine their knowledge and processes. This means that such persons generate what we call Mental Toughness and Resilience. The outcome is not guaranteed when you experiment and try new things. Still, we have read stories about people who transformed…. Consider Thomas Edison, who is credited with contributing significantly to the development of the incandescent lightbulbs. He and his team are said to have done over 10,000 different experiments before coming up with a commercially viable light bulb: one that lasted a long time, was effective, efficient, was standardized so that it could be readily manufactured, and represented value for money to the purchaser.

One of the first procedures Edison and his team put in place was to keep a logbook where they recorded each experiment and its outcome. This systematic process allowed them to learn from what they were doing and map their progress. With this process, they could step back and say, “Yes, I found another way that doesn't work!” or “This approach looks promising!” Also, by regularly reviewing and reflecting on what had been done and achieved, they began to see patterns. This, in turn, inspired hunches and informed their brainstorming sessions about new ways of finding solutions.

The benefits of this approach are not limited to areas such as science and business. We can also see this in the professional careers of many athletes. Basketball players like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant have been known to conduct exhaustive practice sessions where they focus on just one specific move over and over again, frequently assessing their performance with the aim to do better. Both of these icons owe their success to deliberate practice.

Bruce Lee, perhaps the best known and great karate expert, is credited with the saying:

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” 😃

So, as in the case of Edison, taking action, implementing it repeatedly, breaking it down, and seeing what you have learned from it, is crucial. Feedback allows you to refine your technique and improve. This deliberate practice also contributes to building muscle memory and creating new neural pathways, which, over time, allow actions to be performed seemingly effortlessly. 

Another area of literally life and death endeavor where this approach is applied is in the field of surgery. Medical students spend hours and hours learning about anatomy, physiology, and other disciplines. This gives them an intimate understanding of how the body's many organs and systems are connected and interrelated. They supplement this theoretical knowledge by working with simulators and cadavers. Yet, these actions are not enough to ensure success in the operating room.

One resident once shared his experiences from his residency days:

“You go into the operating room, and you're being exposed firsthand to seeing a human being cut open....you are super alert, and your emotions run high... you see the blood, the different smells, sights, sounds. You get to see and know what you have to do in that setting. You get a chance to see several of these operations... And then, one day, it's your turn to actually do an operation. Of course, they don't simply shove you into the deep end. You have a knowledge base, you’ve studied, you've been in operating rooms, and you are supported by an entire team. They are people there you know who can step in when you need help. It’s a big moment, an opportunity for you to actually do an operation. So you go in, and you do what you have to do. You draw on your knowledge.., you're cutting, and as you go in, you're getting that sort of immediate feedback in terms of what did I do? What happened? What should I do next? Etc. And then, there’s the next stage, where you have the opportunity to teach and guide someone through these first two stages. Therefore, by being in these different positions, you're able to have different perspectives and also get different types of feedback. This includes the immediate feedback from what you are doing as well as the postoperative reviews and debriefs. Together, they accelerate your learning and mastery.

I think most people are familiar with playing chess, draught, or other board games. I think this is a good parallel. When you are standing next to the board and looking at someone playing very often, you can see moves that are apparently invisible to the player – somehow, they develop tunnel vision. In addition, when you play, you know it's a different perspective. Of course, when you are coaching the player, you have different perspectives and, hopefully, can see more clearly.

Quote from a dear friend who wishes to remain anonymous 🌞

Along the same lines is a TEDtalk by Dr Atul Gawande who shares how getting a coach can make you better.

The foregoing experiences underline the importance of being systematic, obtaining feedback, reviewing, and reflecting, coupled with having a clear objective that you are working towards. These goals can be vastly different! In the case of Edison, it was a technological breakthrough and commercial success. For an athlete, depending on the sport, the goals could include greater physiological endurance, shots that are more consistent, jumping higher, moving faster, or throwing farther. For the surgeon, it might be minimizing a patient’s blood loss and pain or the amount of malignant tissue that needs to be removed. As we will see in the next section, by understanding our goal and the factors that influence it, we can direct our efforts to high-value and high-leverage actions.

1.3. Prioritizing and the law of focus

Given that time is in short supply, prioritization and focus are essential. This follows on from what we mentioned about having a goal that drives you.

Stephen R. Covey, in his best-seller, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change,” used a 2x2 matrix to look at how we should use our time:

The 4 TIME MANAGEMENT QUADRANTS

URGENT

NOT URGENT

IMPORTANT

Do these tasks

Plan and prepare for these tasks

NOT IMPORTANT

Delegate these tasks

Avoid and/or Eliminate these tasks

Figure 1 – A 2x2 Time Management Matrix

As shown in Figure 1, activities are grouped by their urgency and importance. Our hard work and efforts should focus on the most important activities. Our aim should be to first clear all urgent and important tasks. Once that is accomplished, our next priority should be to plan and prepare for the tasks that are important but not urgent. Taking care of these important tasks early reduces the likelihood of them becoming urgent. This will help us avoid the stress as well as the heavy time and resource investments that may then become necessary. On the other hand, tasks that are not important should be either delegated, avoided or eliminated.

Work by a 17th-century researcher, Vilfredo Pareto, provides some fascinating insights commonly referred to as the Pareto Principle. In his study of land ownership across Italy, he found that about 80% of the land was owned by just 20% of the population. To his surprise, he found similar results when he looked at patterns of wealth distribution in other countries.

In his book, The 80/20 Principle: The secret to achieving more with less, Richard Koch applies Pareto’s principle in a new way:  

“a minority of causes, inputs or efforts usually lead to a majority of the results, outputs or rewards… 80 percent of what you achieve in your job comes from 20 percent of the time spent...for all practical purposes, four-fifths of the effort is largely irrelevant.

Richard Koch has been a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group as well as at Bain & Company. He is also an entrepreneur and the author of several books on how to apply the Pareto Principle. The Pareto Principle is what mathematicians refer to as a Power Law Distribution. In statistics, a power law is a functional relationship between two quantities, where one quantity varies as a power of another. For example, doubling the length of the sides of a square leads to a four times increase in its area. Power laws are a universal phenomenon and appear in fields such as astronomy, biology, economics, weather systems, and others.

In some cases, the types of imbalances predicted by the Pareto Principle can be 95/5 or even greater. For example, Ms. Kerry A. Dolan, author of the Forbes’ 35th Annual World’s Billionaires List: Facts And Figures 2021, mentions that as of mid-March 2021, there are 2,755 billionaires in the world with a net worth of US$13.1 Trillion. This group, which represents just 0.0000003 % of the earth’s population of 7.8 billion people, accounts for an incredible 6.5% of global wealth!

Normally, we expect that, on average, different factors will more or less contribute equally to an outcome. So, perhaps the most useful insight that we can gain from the Pareto Principle is something that may go against our sense of equity and equality – some things simply matter more than others.

If we look at our day-to-day life through the lens of the Pareto Principle, we will see that a small number of activities contribute in a bigger way to our success. So, what this means then is that it's not just enough to work hard. We need to really drill down to identify the specific areas where applying our best efforts yield the greatest return. We need to identify the activities that produce the biggest payoffs and focus on doing them rather than trying to do everything.

So, let us look at a practical example. You are at the office and are making a list of the tasks you should complete today. From your list, you see you have 15 tasks. In this scenario, the Pareto Principle in its 80/20 form suggests that three tasks will give you the most value for the day. How did we arrive at three? Let look at the math. If 20% of the tasks will give 80% of the value, then we do as follows:

●      20% of 15 = 15 * 0.20 = 3

Now that we know how many items we should focus on, we can look at the list and identify metrics for determining the urgency and importance of each task. We will then use the metrics to cut down our list to those top three high-value tasks. We would then work our way through these tasks from highest value to least value. We can then use the Urgency-Importance matrix to identify the remaining tasks that should be delegated or avoided. Once we have completed our top three tasks, we can then work our way through the remaining tasks. This approach not only helps you to get more done but it also greatly increases the impact and the effectiveness of your effort. Because you you know you are working effectively you are not stressed. So, we are not just working hard but working deliberately, working with focus. And again, we can see a clear link between what you're doing and your overarching goal.

1.4. Embracing your desirable disadvantage – it’s all about mindset

There is one remaining area that I'd like to look into in this chapter which explains why hard work alone doesn't translate into success. Here, we look at what are paradoxically “desirable disadvantages”.

Many people face challenging life circumstances that can make it far more difficult to achieve their goals. However, rather than acknowledging, facing, and embracing these challenges, they often try not to let them show. They try to pass themselves off as just like everyone else. Rather than boldly creating and blazing a unique path for themselves, they try to do things the same way as others who do not have these challenges. They live in denial, working hard, trying to be like the others. However, because they have failed to adapt and embrace their desirable disadvantages, they miss out. They are not as effective as they could be, so they fall behind.

So, what is a desirable disadvantage? A perfect explanation is one given by Malcolm Gladwell in his book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. According to Malcolm, desirable disadvantages are attributes that are widely perceived to be negative factors but which (counter-intuitively) can actually become sources of significant, strong, and enduring advantage. Desirable disadvantages can contribute to building personal qualities like tenacity, perseverance, resilience, and resourcefulness. This allows persons perceived to be at a disadvantage to actually come out on top against seemingly stronger and superior competitors.

Aesop’s fable of the Tortoise and the Hare is one age-old example. No one expected or even imagined that a tortoise would beat a hare in a race. However, the hare’s speed and inconsistency turned out to be no match for the tortoise’s slow, steady and consistent effort. As you will see, there are a large number of contemporary examples where individuals, by embracing their desirable disadvantages, have developed ingenious ways to blaze unique paths to their goals.

Malcolm Gladwell quotes a 2011 research study by Elizabeth and Robert Bjork, “Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning” that has profound real world impact. For example, Malcolm points out that around 30% of successful entrepreneurs have learning disorders like dyslexia. Billionaire founder of Virgin, Richard Branson, credits dyslexia as a contributing factor to his success! In an interview with CNBC’s Chloe Taylor titled “Billionaire Richard Branson: Dyslexia helped me to become successful,” Branson explained that dyslexia helped him develop a vivid imagination, which he translated into business success:

"My dyslexia has shaped Virgin right from the very beginning, and imagination has been the key to many of our successes... while the details and data are important, the ability to dream, conceptualize and innovate is what sets the successful and the unsuccessful apart.”

 Richard Branson, Billionaire and Founder of Virgin

Branson indicates that he found school very challenging. Realizing he couldn’t make headway with traditional learning, he decided to focus on areas like sports, where he gave it his all. When he left school and entered the real world, he found that the other skills he had developed mattered more. Richard is also convinced that the propensity that dyslexics have for imagination, problem-solving, and creativity will lead to increased employability in the workplace in light of the trends toward the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence and automation. A number of other outstanding luminaries in various fields have also been diagnosed with dyslexia.

Research by the Founders Institute, the world's largest pre-seed startup accelerator, led to the development of a psychometric tool they call the Entrepreneur’s DNA. One of the findings from the application of this tool is that persons who succeed as entrepreneurs often grew up in families with less than ideal circumstances, such as hostile parents.

So, why is it that such persons succeed when others don't? By embracing the difficulties they faced rather than running away from them, they were able to develop and master talents, find new skills, or work harder to overcome these difficulties. Different challenges require different approaches. Persons with reading challenges might need to put in more effort to overcome these difficulties. Likewise, someone who has problems with being a great leader may need to enhance their ability to lead and delegate to others. Say they had homework to be done, they could develop the art of convincing their friends to do this work on their behalf.

Most people who lived in hostile home environments became skilled in empathy. They were more attuned to the emotions of others and so could manage the emotions and expectations of others. By facing the challenges in their own unique ways, they could deliver the result that is required. This enabled them to develop a range of soft skills such as perseverance, grit, and resilience that also translate to success in other areas.

Robert Hunter has been deaf since he was 15 years old, but this did not stop him from developing a career as a successful lawyer in London. As he explained, no one wanted to hire him as a lawyer just because he was deaf, so he had to compete against non-disabled lawyers for cases, clients, and jobs. This meant he had to develop skills, some specific to his disability and others with broader applications. For example, straining to hear all day can become exhausting. Therefore, instinctively, he developed tenacity, perseverance, and resourcefulness over time. He also had to figure out how to solve his own unique problems, like not being able to hear the judge. Experiences like these made him accustomed to being an outsider and helped reduce his need to fit in. This has made it easier for him to advance novel arguments and points of view that challenge the conventional norms. This has given him a first-mover advantage over other persons who feel more attached to the orthodoxy.

Managing expectations and recognizing early that sometimes, trying hard may not yield the desired result, but still moving consistently and doggedly towards the goal builds up a certain type of resilience that makes it easier to persevere. I believe the most successful people, while focusing on the target of where they want to go, also recognize that the journey is equally important. They grow to enjoy the difficulty and incorporate this experience as part of their identity and how they see themselves.

For example, take someone who wants to lose weight. They decide to get up early each morning to work out as part of their weight loss plan. While others are still in bed sleeping, they go out and go through the grind of pushing through and doing something that others are not willing to do. They know and accept that they will see results only if they are consistent and follow the process. As they develop this habit, their identity begins to shift to that of someone who exercises regularly and wakes up early. They gain the identity of an athlete, the identity of someone who is training, the identity of someone who is goal-oriented. This identity shift allows them to keep practicing and executing these steps and moving towards their goal. By embracing the challenge of getting up early and working out consistently, they can shift the trajectory of their life.

The importance of consistence and mindset are echoed in the words of Deshauna Barber, a Captain in the United States Army Reserve and former Miss USA who says “giving up is the birthplace of regret”. Watch Desahuana tell her story in her address to the graduating class at the University of Maryland University College.

1.5 Chapter Summary

In this chapter, we learned that hard work is one of the building blocks of sustainable success. However, while a necessary condition, it is not sufficient to guarantee success. To be successful, we need to ensure that we are practicing deliberately in addition to our hard work. We need to have a clear goal that we are moving towards. We need to be decisive, even brutally focused, in terms of where we place our efforts. So, prioritizing important and crucial tasks while knowing those we should totally avoid or delegate is incredibly important. And, of course, we need to embrace the desirable disadvantages we face and see them as an integral part of the whole process that helps us move towards where we want to be. By doing this, we will find ourselves adopting a new identity. This mind shift transforms us and allows us to know and see ourselves differently, squarely putting us on the path to the goal we desire.

The successful warrior is the average man with laser-like focus – Bruce Lee

Happiness is the real sense of fulfillment that comes from hard work – Joseph Barbara