Work hard

Table of Contents

I am to blame and I can’t complain, from this point on, from what happens from that movie. Because for me, what a success is is, I mean the only time that i’m alive and living and expressing and feeling and and relating is when i’m on set and that time between action and cut. And so that’s the only thing that’s really important is how that experience is. And and how that experience will affect my life and what i have to give from my life to that experience. And everything that happens after that is just irrelevant. You know it’s kind of if it’s a success, great. If it’s not great, fine. You know. It affects you or it doesn’t. But that shouldn’t, in my mind, it shouldn’t kind of dictate what your choices. I just want to enjoy myself, I want to learn more, I want to work with good people, creatively and and as people and really just good people. And I think the movie is going to be awesome. I’m very excited for it. I haven’t seen anything, nothing. Just from what I hear, I think it’s going to be good.

  • Heath Ledger talks about playing The Joker

We are all called to carry our crosses. If you don’t pick up and carry your cross, you will be crushed by the weight of it.

You gotta be willing to crash and burn - Steve Jobs

I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work - Plato

I realized we must stride on — for it’s not how far we have come but how much further still we have to go. - Serena Williams

Farmer’s work ethic: Go to bed early, rise at dawn, and get right to work without fanfare. Gotta milk the cows and Gonna plow the north forty before noon.

Greek Mythology >> Greek Gods >> Ponos >> PONOS was the personified spirit (daimon) of hard labour and toil. He presided over extreme physical labour rather than just hard work–e.g. the toil required of subsistence farmers just to survive.

Take your work seriously, but don’t take yourself so seriously. (Lessons learned from Charlie Munger)

Hephaestus

Hephaestus is the Greek god of artisans, blacksmiths, carpenters, craftsmen, fire, metallurgy, metalworking, sculpture and volcanoes. Hephaestus’s Roman counterpart is Vulcan. In Greek mythology, Hephaestus was either the son of Zeus and Hera or he was Hera’s parthenogenous child. He was cast off Mount Olympus by his mother Hera because of his lameness, the result of a congenital impairment; or in another account, by Zeus for protecting Hera from his advances (in which case his lameness would have been the result of his fall rather than the reason for it).

As a smithing god, Hephaestus made all the weapons of the gods in Olympus. He served as the blacksmith of the gods, and was worshipped in the manufacturing and industrial centres of Greece, particularly Athens. The cult of Hephaestus was based in Lemnos. Hephaestus’s symbols are a smith’s hammer, anvil, and a pair of tongs.

It’s what you do in the dark, that gets you into the light.

Nobody cares about your excuses

Khabib Nurmagomedov speaks about excuses, and specifically how nobody cares about them. Nobody cares about the countless hours of hard work, they only care about results.

Stop giving yourself excuses for why you aren’t moving forward in life, nobody cares.

Everybody complains about being tired. If you don’t want to, go back to Dagestan and stay with your mom. She is going to give you good breakfast everyday and you don’t do nothing. Stay there. But if you come here, don’t complain. You want to become the best. You want to become the champion. And now you want to say you are tired? Who cares if you are tired or not? Nobody cares about you.

You want to become world champion. You want to call yourself world champion. Who cares who is going to be your opponent? Bring king kong if he can make 155, I am going to fight with him.

If you gonna watch fight, you just watch fight. They walk out, enter the cage, they fight and they leave. You don’t know what happened behind the scenes. That is not your business. Nobody cares about it. He was tired, he has personal problem, family problem, nobody cares. You don’t know. You just see how he fights and how he goes.

The fighter has to train so hard. If you don’t want, you can go. Nobody is going to ask about you.

Without you or with you, there is always going to be champions.

With your name, this is your choice. You want to put your name there? Ok, work hard. No? Bye bye.

A lot of people ask me, are you proud of something? I am proud about how I never give up.

Choose hard - handle hard better

https://tegacaysun.com/2024/02/13/in-health-with-dr-brian-handling-hard-better/

In a video, the women’s basketball coach at Duke talks about being someone that “handles hard better”.

She talks about how people are always wishing something got easier.

  1. “After I finish college, things will be easier”
  2. “After my kids are older, it will be easier”
  3. “Once I get the new job, it’ll be easier”
  4. “Once I get the money, it’ll be easier”

But once they get what they expected, the problem is that it doesn’t get easier.

Hint: It never does.

It’s always going to be something. Always.

She went on to say that people need to learn to handling hard better vs. waiting for it get easier.

It’s a mindset shift.

  1. Getting up to go to the gym is hard.
  2. Not overeating delicious food is hard.
  3. Making the choice not to snack often is hard.
  4. Choosing not to drink soda is hard.
  5. Choosing the gym over sleep or Netflix is hard.

It never gets easy.

Because not being able to do what you want because of your health is hard.

Taking a fistful of medications is hard.

Not being able to help yourself or others because you were waiting for it to get easy is hard.

Choose hard. You’ll be glad you did.

My own thoughts on the importance of hard work and the idea of “Just keep working”

(This document is called work hard - not hard work.)

Stop panicking and keep working on the stuff that you want to work on in a steady fashion. Do not get pulled around into multiple things. Have faith in your own ability to learn and work hard. If you keep working on things at your own steady pace, and focus on doing a good job on the things at hand, everything will sort out and things will achieve balance. Learn to gracefully accept that not everything can be accomplished in one single day.

Take notes about the ideas/thoughts that pop into the mind. Note them down so that they would stop distracting you. After noting them down, get back to whatever you were doing before and focus on it.

The Roman Emperor Hadrian once said while building the Roman Empire, Brick by brick, my citizens, brick by brick.

Another helpful suggestion by Charlie Munger when asked “What is the secret to a happy life?”. His answer is “Keep your expectations low”. Which is not to say, do not work hard or do not be too optimistic. Keep your expectations low but keep working hard and good things will come your way.

Hard work, lessons to learn and level up as a man

The life of men is essentially made up of two components

  1. hard work
  2. the lessons you learn from that hard work

In today’s society, neither of these things are a given. As a result, men have gotten weaker, less masculine and more distracted than ever. Here is the bitter reality. A man that chases hard work will live a much happier life than a man who chases comfort. The reason is, the first man will be hard-wired to receive a sense of purpose from that hard work. You remove hard, meaningful work from a man’s life, and all he is left with is a depressed, empty boy. If you look around, you will see a whole generation of men that avoids meaningful hard work. Where has it gotten them? Look at their relationships, their businesses, their morals and values. Here are some lessons that men learn too late in life.

  1. Romanticism will break you. The women and the relationships that you choose to associate yourself with are very very important. That choice can make you or break you. Romanticism is an invention of the modern era. It is far from useful or ideal.
  2. You need to think hard about the meaning of success. Is it working a job that you feel stuck in? Don’t put all your trust in someone else’s belief. The definition of success is different for each and every human. This definition is your purpose. Live by it. Cherish it. And don’t let anyone force their definition on you. Definitely learn from others but don’t fall into their frame unless it benefits you directly.
  3. Any and all actions have consequences. Imagine spending the best years of your life stuck in a job, ignoring your health, wasting life, living a casual life. Life will begin to spiral down into chaos. Uncertainty and mediocrity is what you will get from “going with the flow”. A man is a ruler, a conquerer. Don’t go with the flow. Create your own flow. Your day to day life is made up of actions. Your future is constructed by the consequences of these actions. The things you do today can bring you blessing or be your downfall in the years down the line. The only way to escape a bleak future is to learn how to think critically. Develop your brain to think and make big, life-changing decisions effectively and without uncertainty. Your destiny will be in your hands.
  4. Obedience is often the wrong choice. It is a great virtue. But it comes down to who you are obeying and why you are doing it. Obeying your commander in a war is different from obeying someone in today’s manipulative world. You have to learn to say no. Don’t stay obedient to wrong causes, wrong bosses, wrong women, wrong crowds. How to know whether to be obedient or not? Ask yourself if the actions benefits you? Don’t let your own self to be crushed. Think about all the times when you let people, organizations or systems take control of you without giving anything back. Keep yourself above anything or anyone else. Don’t be selfish. But focus on self preservation. Value your time and your decisions.
  5. It is better to be alone than to be with the wrong people. Choose your friends carefully. Men who take monk mode seriously end up ravaging the world around them and dominating everything they desire. Being on the path to self improvement is difficult and lonely. Become unstoppable even if some people dislike you for it. Have the courage to detach yourself from discouraging people. Face the world on your own.

How to do hard things

TODO

https://www.drmaciver.com/2019/05/how-to-do-hard-things/

How do you learn complex, dense technical information?

TODO

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22325975

The pain of regret hurts more than the pain of hard work

One of my mentors is a 71-year-old entrepreneur. He started working since he was 12 years. The thought of retiring has never crossed his mind. He wants to die working — he loves it that much.

He says: “People will try to tell you that hard work is bad for you. And that you should work less. Don’t listen to them. Those people don’t enjoy their work, and they try to convince you of their fallacy.”

Have you ever heard someone who loves their work, say that you shouldn’t work hard? No way. It’s always the lazy ones that make these statements.

When I first met my mentor, I didn’t understand why he worked seven days a week at his age. Why? Is it money, reputation, escapism?

Like many others that ask “why would you work hard?” I just didn’t get it back then.

A few years later, when I was watching a documentary about the Boston Celtics, I noticed a quote they had in their gym.

“What hurts more. The pain of hard work or the pain of regret?”

The dots finally connected. You don’t work hard because of external motivation.

People who think that hard work is about ego, escapism or money, do not understand the value of hard work.

That quote remains stuck in my brain forever. And whenever I struggle or want to give up, I think of that question. Because work is not always fun. I choose the pain of hard work every single time.

That’s why I work hard on my:

  1. Relationships
  2. Education
  3. Business
  4. Health
  5. Skills
  6. Brain

Not because I want to get rich or anything. I do it because it gives me pleasure. I never want to look back, and regret that I wasted my time doing meaningless shit.

What’s your alternative? Sit on the floor all day, alone with your thoughts? Come on.

“Work harder.” - Casey Neistat

There’s only one caveat to hard work. My mentor told me: Rest before you’re tired because there’s a long road ahead of you.

That’s what most people don’t get. Life is long. They have a go hard or go home mentality. They grind it out until the bone. That’s self-deception. You burn yourself out and start resenting hard work.

Resting is not that complicated: Chill out every now and then, don’t take life too seriously, and have fun every day.

Just understand that you’re not a ‘work robot’. And don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Mental fatigue is more of a threat than the physical strain of modern day work.

What if you hate your job? Find different work. But don’t hate hard work because you had a bad experience or other people tell you so.

If you play it right, hard work can be one of the most fulfilling things in life. Don’t shy away from it.

When my mentor turned 65, his family tried very hard to make him stop working. He said: “They’re just a little selfish, and that’s ok. It’s my job to explain to them why I want to keep working. They’ll understand.”

Now let me ask you: “What hurts more? The pain of hard work or the pain of regret?”

Tags

  1. Boredom
  2. Dopamine
  3. How to Work Hard - by Paul Graham
  4. Success

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