Is Hard Work the Way to Fame and Fortune?

IS HARD WORK THE WAY TO FAME AND FORTUNE?

If you want to be successful and rewarded, what is required in order to achieve such ambitions?

For many people, the answer is ‘work hard’. It is not too difficult to find Steemit posts encouraging this as the way to fame and fortune. But is it really the route to success it is made out to be?

I think the answer is, ‘not necessarily’.

I do believe there are occasions in which working hard is a prerequisite for success. When it comes to physical skills, anyone whose ambition is to reach the top really does have to work hard to achieve this aim.

What do the likes of Tiger Woods, Serena Williams and Usain Bolt share in common that enabled them to stand out so in their chosen professions? Is it some kind of genetic advantage that makes these people superb athletes? Do they have gifts of nature most are not born with? Studies into what makes sportspeople such as these so successful has found it has less to do with any inherent physical makeup and more to do with their determination to keep on trying long past the moment where most people give up.

(You have to work hard to be this good at sport. Image from wikimedia commons)

Whenever you develop a physical skill, such as learning to play tennis or a musical instrument, progress will follow an S-curve. In other words, you will see rising ability for a time but after a while it takes more and more effort to push the envelope further, and the line of increasing progress begins to flatten out. It is at this point where geniuses and the rest of us diverge, because they have the determination and dedication required to keep at it, to practice practice practice so as to inch that progress further. This really does entail a lot of hard work, more than most of us are prepared to put up with or even have the opportunity to do.

Now, I did say at the beginning that hard work is ‘not necessarily’ the way to success. I think there are various reasons to believe working hard won’t guarantee fame and fortune. If it were true that hard work leads to reward, anyone who went looking for the world’s hardest working people should expect to find themselves among the world’s wealthiest. But I would suggest that the opposite would, in fact, be the case. In other words, if you went looking for the hardest working people, you would find yourself amongst the world’s poorest. Hands up all those who believe a premiership footballer’s job is more strenuous than those impoverished Indian men who risk their lives breaking apart ships using crude tools, or the African children kidnapped by militia to go dig out blood diamonds under the merciless desert sun?

The world of creative arts is also one where hard work is no guarantee of success. Take YouTube videos for example. If hard work were what lead to reward you would expect to see those videos that obviously took time and skill to produce gaining more reward compared to those knocked up with little effort. The people who did pre-production, making up scripts and storyboards; who took care during production to incorporate the language of cinema into their choice of camera angles and whose post-production editing, musical scores etc showed real care and effort should, if hard work always lead to reward, be the viral videos.

Instead it’s ‘Fenton, Fenton’, ‘Charlie bit my finger’ and ‘Star Wars Kid’ that are viral videos, where no effort at all has gone into them. ‘Right place right time’ seems to be as much a determinant of success in the world of You Tubing as hard work, if not more so.

Even the creators of Steemit advise that hard work is no guarantee of success:

“Some people get pissed because they work hard on a piece of content and then get very low payout...How much you work has very little to do about how much you are going to be paid...how valuable your content is, is in the eyes of the voters, not you”.

(A famous work of art, believe it or not. Much more work went into stuff that was far less rewarded than this. Image from Apollo Magazine)

Maybe this perception of hard work being the way to success versus the reality explains that reticence people sometimes have in broadcasting their earnings?

I experienced this reticence quite recently on a consumer programme. A ‘YouTube Star’ was being interviewed and when asked ‘how much are you earning?’, he absolutely refused to say. He would not even give a ballpark figure.

The question is, ‘why not?’ I think it is down to embarrassment. All our lives we are told we have to work hard if we are to gain reward, and yet here is this guy who just mugs in front of a web-cam for a bit and makes more money than a minimum-wage employee makes in...a week? A month? A whole year? We cannot know in this instance because he would not say, but I have heard that the uploaders of ‘Charlie bit my finger’ earned hundreds of thousands of pounds. So the YouTube stars who regularly get millions of hits (not to mention sponsorship deals) probably do earn at least a year’s minimum wage per video. Wouldn’t you feel a little uncomfortable about gaining so much reward just for having a bit of fun on the Internet, when there are all those other guys working their asses off and yet barely making enough to keep their heads above water? How does that happen, when hard work is the route to fame and fortune? As I said the answer is that hard work is not the route to success, at least not necessarily.

So, next time you somebody tells you working hard is a prerequisite to success, you now know this is not always the case. Having said that, those who give up trying to succeed do guarantee failure so maybe there is something to be said for determination after all.

REFERENCES

Steemit 101 by Tom Janowicz, Renault Gagne, Leah Stephens and Richard Kaplan

BBC Radio 4 ‘You And Yours’.