Hardworking

Fewer people appreciate the thread of hardworking nowadays, are you are supposed to work smarter.

Most bosses appreciate people who work hard, as they feel better if you would stay back and work the extra hours. Perhaps they find it difficult to measure how much you are actually contributing to the company, so they measure by the hours you spend in the office. Rather than measuring your productivity, they measure your dedication (and sometimes pretended dedication).

I think I used to be a hardworking person, and today I am less hardworking than I used to be. Perhaps I underestimated the importance of hardwork by trying to work smarter, by squeezing more productivity per hour (increase output by being more efficient). I always think that most of the people are actually much lazier than me, thus giving me the excuse to slack by compensating with higher productivity. What I didn’t think about is that there are people who are smarter or much productive than I am, and they put in more hours than me as well. Wouldn’t that make them twice as good as me, or put me too far behind?

We as human always make comparison. We always rate ourselves by doing comparison with people around us, and it isn’t helpful if we take pride by being better than people who are “weaker”. So what if most people in this world are lazy or poor? Does it make us better by hitting the average line and beating Billions of people in this world and losing only to Millions?

I think we need to raise the bar. If we can’t help but to compare, we need to compare with the someone better. If we can be the best in class, we should try to be the best in school, or town, or district, or state, or country, or the world. If there is space to grow, we should try to fill that space. If you are the best in class or office, you should raise the bar and try to challenge something greater. You could earn an average of RM 63K annually as a programmer in Malaysia, while your US-counterpart might be taking in USD 80K annually. So how good you feel as compared to your colleagues? Does that comparison really matter once you see the bigger picture?

Sometimes I don’t think it is not so much about competition or trying to beat others. For us to progress, we need to raise the bar and be better if we could. We might succeed, or we might not; at least we shouldn’t be too comfortable with what we already achieve. How about the concept of we learn until the day we die, and we try to accomplish more whenever we could.

Others could choose to be lazy, but it doesn’t means we are hardworking if we are just not as lazy as they are. If we could be better, why not? Perhaps there are more hardworking people out there, and you know there are.

“Surround yourself with the people you would like to be, and you will be just like them”. Don’t let others hold you back.

I probably need to work harder as I know I can, just have to figure out how to turn it into a discipline. For everything we want, we have to figure out the ways to do it.

Though work smart is crucial, but work hard is equally important for success.