Hard Work

It happens to all of us at one point and time in our lives or another...we encounter the nay-sayers, the goal-stealers, the dream-bashers, the critics. Those people who, for one reason or another, just don't buy into your inspired vision for your life. Let's be clear, not all of these people fall into this role for malevolent reasons. Maybe they're worried about you, they want you to play it safe, or they simply don't understand your plan. In short, they don't get it.

When Mary and I decided to step off of the beaten path to safety and security and chase this dream we love, we encountered our share of critics. Every now and then, we still do. Whenever this happens, we pull out an article we found a while back in Seth Godin's, Small is the New Big. It always helps us to get our hearts straight, and to remind us that those who would wish us to play it safe may not have any idea what they would be asking of us. Here is an excerpt from the article. Feel free to come back to it anytime the critics are at your door.

"Sure, you're working long, but today working "long" and working "hard" mean two different things...Our future in the workplace is not about time at all. The future is about work that's really and truly hard, not just time-consuming. It's about the kind of work that requires us to push ourselvews, not just punch the clock...

As the economy plods along, many of us are choosing to take the easy way out. We're going to work for the Man, letting him do all the hard work while we put in the long hours. We're going back to the future, to a definition of work that embraces the grindstone...

Hard work is about RISK. It begins when you deal with the things that you'd rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under this barrier, drive through the other barrier and, after you've done that, to do it again the next day. The big insight: the riskier your hard work appears to be, the safer it really is."