Hard Work

During my recent discussion in one of my learning behavior session with fresh graduates, this term "Hard work" intrigued me.

I heard myself asking a question "what do you mean by Hardwork?"

While I did not have the answer at that point in time when I asked this question, I still let this question hang in the air to explore what comes up.

"Putting more efforts on the task" came the answer. I was not completely satisfied with the answer so I explored more, and asked another question.

"There is a boy who is very consistently and daily spending 2 rigorous hours in practicing cricket, is he working hard?"

answer came "yes".  I further increased complexity and asked "There is another boy who is spending 6 hours with similar rigor daily, is he working hard?"

There was a silence for few seconds, however answer came

"yes.  he is also hardworking, but in case you can achieve the same thing by putting 2 hours then why spend 6 hours?"

That lead to another question "is it possible that both are working hard but for different objectives?" answer was obviously yes.

This enabled me to develop an understanding that while we say hard  work it may not have much meaning unless we have an objective associated with it.

With objective of seeking more clarity, I asked

What would you do differently when  somebody says you need to really do lot of Hardwork?

Assuming that I have an objective of learning something and today I am spending 2 hours on that activity, when someone says "you need to really need to do lot of hardwork", how does that impact on my activity? Should I increase my efforts by another 30 mins or 3 Hrs? How do I quantify to my increase of effort? And how do I validate?

This got the class thinking along with me, it was interesting to see my awareness increasing along with class,  after few minutes of thinking came the answer.

"We need to know how much effort is required to achieve an objective, and thereafter see how much efforts do we need to spend"

This answers included estimation and planning as well as part of the Hardwork and it made lot of sense.

This left me with last question of "How do I validate my Hardwork?" after some thinking came the answer that

"we need to set small achievement targets (milestones in corporate world), and see if we are able to meet those targets or do we need to make some tweaking to our efforts?"

This felt complete, but now I have started looking Hard Work in a very different light, to me now

Hardwork means "first define an objective for which you are working, have tentative estimates for the work and plan around it, also set smaller achievement targets, to allows us to tweak our efforts"