There is a popular belief that hard work leads to success. We think there’s a direct correlation between how hard we work and how successful we are. We have all heard stories with the moral that becoming successful requires pain and suffering. Self-help experts, motivational videos on YouTube, and success “wisdom” floating on social media reinforce the belief that by suffering today, we will be worthy of success tomorrow--that one day our hard work will pay off and shower us with good fortune, and until that day, we take pride in signaling how hard we work. 

I think the reality is very different. The belief that hard work leads to success is not only based on flawed assumptions, it also sets us on a cycle of failure and misery.   

Let me first clarify what I mean by the terms ‘Success’ and ‘Hard Work’. By ‘Success,’ I mean achieving the goals that you are aiming at. If your goal is to make $1M or move to a better career role, and if you’re able to do so, that’s an instance of success. By ‘Hard Work,’ I mean a focused strenuous painful effort made to achieve a given goal. 

I’m defending two claims in this article: (1) Hard Work does not cause Success, and (2) Hard Work does cause a cycle of failure and misery.

Success often involves conditions that are not in our control. For instance, if you’re an expert developer and the company you’re working for goes bankrupt, hard work is not going to prevent you from losing your job. Similarly, if you are a small hardware-based startup and one of your key component manufacturers discontinues the production of a key part, you can not work hard to get that key component made, and are now forced to search for alternatives or change your offering. The point being: no matter how hard you work, it would not yield success. We do not always control the choices that are available to us. Hard work can only influence things that are in our control. Consequently, if the goal that we are trying to achieve involves factors beyond our control, then we can still fail to achieve success even if we work hard.

What we work on--our goals--and our ability to see clearly the factors that influence whether we achieve those goals have a much greater impact on our chances of achieving success than hard work. Thus if our goals are not clearly defined, then the conditions for successfully achieving those goals are not clear. And since many of those conditions might be beyond our control, then no amount of effort can secure them, and any effort aimed at achieving success, in this case, will be a waste. 

Similarly, if we are not clear why we want to achieve a goal and how the outcome matters to us, we’ll slowly lose interest in the goal and our motivation to pursue it will gradually wear off. If you encounter difficulties in your way of achieving a goal, you’ll have no resources to motivate yourself because you won’t be clear why the goal is worth pursuing in the first place. The worthiness of a goal provides a strong motivator for our continued effort to achieve it. That worthiness is able to push us through hardships in pursuing that goal. 

Having unclear goals explains why people fall into the habit of dropping their pursuit of one goal in favor of another. This is why you might have dropped a side project that you started a week back, to chase another goal, and then the next. Because we can’t push through the hardships, we are unable to reach the finish line. Having unclear goals thus leads to a continuous cycle of failure. Constant failure and the inability to achieve our goals take a mental toll and cause psychological issues such as self-doubt, lack of self-worth, and anxiety to name a few, and these push us into a state of constant misery. 

Our focus on hard work distracts us from the more fundamental task of examining our goals--from asking: What is it that we are trying to achieve? What factors influence the outcome? And why do we want to achieve it in the first place?