What if looking for actionable things related to working harder is a useless waste of time?
It might be better then to look into medical, genetic and environmental aspects, and focus on that instead of trying to find tricks to work harder.
For example, trying to change your environment might help more than busting your a$$. Can you move to a place with better access to education, books, or people with expertise? Can you find places that support some of your needs that enable you to focus on taking a course or other? Can you find programs that can fast track you into a new discipline that's paid for? Etc.
Another example is that if genetics plays a big role, than working hard is counterproductive, instead you'd want to find something that plays to your genetic, whatever that is. Find something that is easy to you, and focus on doing that. Don't waste time trying something you find really hard that you don't have the genetics for.
Now the medical aspects I would say is more in terms of where we invest, instead of paying for self-help pseudo science books and talks. Should we invest in ways to medically address deficiencies in motivation, intelligence, judgement, perception, sleep, etc. This might be a long shot, but I think better understanding the role of genetic, the brain, and all that with regards to accomplishment will help us find actual mechanism that might really work, unlike "hard work".
Personally, I tell people to focus on "easy work". Forget hard work, your goal is to make it so the work you do is as easy as possible. You can achieve that by finding something you have a natural aptitude for, or for which you have the right environment to succeed at. Focus on choosing the right people and place to surround yourself in for whatever the work is you are trying to do. Focus on something that motivates you, and feeds into your reward mechanisms.
Finally, don't consider yourself a failure if you fail, because if you think hard work has nothing to do with it, its just bad luck, so don't be too hard on yourself ;)
All what you describe requires the precursor of you throwing the dice to see what happens.
>You can achieve that by finding something you have a natural aptitude for, or for which you have the right environment to succeed at.
Again to explore this requires you to throw the dice and you will stumble upon it. Also aptitudes change with time and to explore the next aptitude requires you to throw the dice. You should also be lucky that you will get to throw the dice.
Yes, luck plays a big part of it, so it's important to redefine your perspective so you don't value dominance over others or class or such things, because that can be a lost cause. You were given a hand of card at random, and while there is some wiggle room in terms of how far you can make it given the cards you were given, a bad hand is still a bad hand, and can only let you do so much.
Focus on your personal growth, but understand your circumstances and where you start from, and recognize how much you managed to optimize and accomplish relative to that.
And in my opinion, there's no place for hard work within this framework. The feeling of hardship is your body telling you your circumstances ain't cut out for this thing. You also have the ability to reason, so you can reason that some hard things are worth pushing through the pain, like say for a life saving surgery. But sometimes I think people reason that they will be able to push through something, yet fail consistently to be motivated to do so. That's when you need to realize, hold on, ok, this ain't gonna work for me, I need to find something else that's easier. And no, the people who made it where you failed didn't do so because they just pushed through that same hardship, generally it just wasn't as hard for them to find the motivation to push through.
>a bad hand is still a bad hand, and can only let you do so much.
Very true. I had realized this during and after graduation some 15 years back. Exposed to the internet I saw people doing amazing things on open source and wanted to do the same but simply didn't have the infrastructure in my country to do it. I spent all my life struggling to be the best but my environment simply isn't conducive enough to recognize my effort. Now I think it was just a waste of time and I should have just lived and enjoyed the moment. There was also a talk by Linus Torvalds who said he is incredibly lucky to get to do what he is doing which really started the questioning process as I was always told to put hardwork when I was young and achieve things discounting the support for it.
>And no, the people who made it where you failed didn't do so because they just pushed through that same hardship, generally it just wasn't as hard for them to find the motivation to push through.
This sentence makes a lot of sense. Thanks! I have been exposed to a lot of wrong signals saying "I have done the hard work to achieve it and you should be doing it too or you are just lazy" without them not acknowledging the circumstances.
It might be better then to look into medical, genetic and environmental aspects, and focus on that instead of trying to find tricks to work harder.
For example, trying to change your environment might help more than busting your a$$. Can you move to a place with better access to education, books, or people with expertise? Can you find places that support some of your needs that enable you to focus on taking a course or other? Can you find programs that can fast track you into a new discipline that's paid for? Etc.
Another example is that if genetics plays a big role, than working hard is counterproductive, instead you'd want to find something that plays to your genetic, whatever that is. Find something that is easy to you, and focus on doing that. Don't waste time trying something you find really hard that you don't have the genetics for.
Now the medical aspects I would say is more in terms of where we invest, instead of paying for self-help pseudo science books and talks. Should we invest in ways to medically address deficiencies in motivation, intelligence, judgement, perception, sleep, etc. This might be a long shot, but I think better understanding the role of genetic, the brain, and all that with regards to accomplishment will help us find actual mechanism that might really work, unlike "hard work".
Personally, I tell people to focus on "easy work". Forget hard work, your goal is to make it so the work you do is as easy as possible. You can achieve that by finding something you have a natural aptitude for, or for which you have the right environment to succeed at. Focus on choosing the right people and place to surround yourself in for whatever the work is you are trying to do. Focus on something that motivates you, and feeds into your reward mechanisms.
Finally, don't consider yourself a failure if you fail, because if you think hard work has nothing to do with it, its just bad luck, so don't be too hard on yourself ;)