There is no substitute for hard work

Most humans want to be successful. It's very hard to find someone who says - I just want to be a failure. Even those who claim to be wanting to fail are actually secretly wanting to succeed - just that they never come out and say that out loud for the fear that they might fail.

Success is not easy. Gordon Gekko says in the movie Wall Street "for a lack of better word, greed is good". You have got to be greedy to be successful and the only constructive way to act on your greed is to work hard. There are only 3 kinds of people who can be successful in life:

• People who are really really smart like John McEnroe.
• People who work hard at it like Ivan Lendl.
• People who are both smart and work hard like Roger Federer.

John McEnroe was one of the most if not the most intelligent tennis player who ever played. He was not a hard working guy but he compensated for that by being smart. Ivan Lendl was not not smart but he worked very hard without getting tired and achieved huge success in tennis. But it is Roger Federer who is both smart and worked very hard and became the dominant player for a long period of time winning the most grand slam events. All of these guys were successful but when you look at who was successful and numero uno for how long, you will realize that Roger followed by Ivan followed by John was the order in which they achieved and maintained success over a period of time.

What this shows is that smart and hard working attitude is better than hard working attitude which is better than just being smart. Even if you are smart, you have to work hard to achieve and maintain success. Smart people come and go, are flashy, appear on the scene for a short period of time but then fade away. They are like the shooting stars but smart and hard working people are like the real stars.

so when I say this that there is no substitute for hard work - please don't argue or try to reason out - because guess what - you can argue and try to reason out all you want - there is no way around hard work - that's just a law of life. Accept it, embrace it, don't fight it and keep working at whatever that you want to pursue.

Follow your passion, you are smart, continue being smart and work very very hard at whatever you want to achieve. There is just no shortcut through the jungle of life. Work at it, work hard, work smart and the success will be yours.