The Myth of Hard Work

"Work Hard and you will succeed"

"Only if you work hard can you be rich and successful like Mr. So So"

"He didn't get promoted - he clearly didn't work hard enough"

"Sachin worked hard on his batting as a child - that's why he is the number one batsman today"

Statements like these we've all heard growing up from our parents, relatives, friends and colleagues. "Hard Work" while still a virtuous trait, has however been lionized to an extent that it is considered the key and often the sole ingredient to success. Success, of course, can be defined in many ways. For the purpose of this discussion, I would limit the definition to "achievement of one's objective". 

In the Indian context, parents still continue to feed the "hard work" version of success to their children. Bollywood flicks of the 70's and 80's (the generation to which most parents of today belong to) idolized the "Hard-Working Hero" who labored hard in spite of adversity to emerge triumphant (ie. kill villain, get girl, get rich, etc etc). Bollywood one-dimensionalized success to large extent. And being THE popular medium of entertainment for the masses & classes, this imagery left an indelible impact on "success psyche" of the Indian mind.

Don't get me wrong. Hard work is correlated to success. But in my opinion, the degree of correlation varies based on the complexity involved in getting to that success. For example, consider that my objective is push a 20 kg box from point A to point B and success will be achieved in meeting this objective. The complexity to achieve this objective is low. Hence, the harder I push, the likelier I will be able to achieve my objective. However, if my objective is to be a billionaire by age 40, I'm not sure how "hard work" correlates to getting there. I can assure you that many a worthy man have tried to be a millionaire/billionaire in their lifetime and failed - and not for lack of "hard work". In fact, there are many who have become billionaire's by age 40 - without really trying. I would even go to the extent of arguing that "hard work" is often negatively correlated to success. 

Let me give an example: Person A and Person B join a firm and both are given equal responsibilities. Both intend to make it to a senior position in a year's time. A works diligently all day at executing his responsibilities and exceeds his targets. B spends about 80% of this day executing his responsibilities and meets his targets. He spends the rest of this time aimlessly browsing the internet. At this moment, most of us would put our money on A to make it to the senior position. However, during one such casual browsing session B comes across an article that gives him unique information to do this job atleast 10 times better with the same effort. He immediately informs his manager about the same and get his manager's approval to share this information among all his colleagues thereby increasing the entire company's output significantly. A worked "hard" and delivered X. B worked 0.8 times "hard" and delivered 10X. Remember that B browsing the internet was not considered work by him. However, doing so allowed him to remove the blinders and go beyond accepted norms of work. Some may think that the previous example is a little too convenient to prove my point. But most billionaires of the world today (assuming being a billionaire equates to success) have had similar such "random" situations in their life which gave them the success, but which the world erroneously equated to "hard work".

"So do I just sit there and do nothing and wait to get successful?" I was asked, when I shared my point of view with my friend. I say it depends. Nassim Nicholas Taleb was one the world's top hedge fund managers and his strategy was simple. Bet against the tide and wait. Do nothing but wait. He waited for years. But at the right opportunity (market crashes), he made millions (maybe billions). So in a way he worked hard at not working hard! But if success to you means writing best-selling novels, work hard on your writing skills. But de-focus occasionally to do whatever you like doing or maybe do nothing(in order to get those creative juices flowing). And if success to you means creating a website - then work hard at learning HTML. As the complexity of the objective (and often scale) increases, the interplay between what I call Controllables (things you can work hard on which directly influences outcome) and  Uncontrollables ( things over which you have no control over ie. pure dumb luck) increases exponentially.

The graph above tries to capture a few my empirical observations. The relation betwen the Objective complexity and the impact of the Controllable in achieving that objective, is non-linear. At some stage of the Objective complexity, the impact of Controllables on the outcome of the objective drops sharply. Also, there are objectives which are entirely impacted by uncontrollables but the converse is not true. One can think of several situations to justify these observations.

One can of course, discuss this topic to no end. And for those inclined towards closure ("so what's the solution to tackle the uncontrollable?") I offer no solution but say - recognize the role of the uncontrollable in your life's successes (and failures) and stop living in the "hard work" illusion. That to my mind is the only solution.