Remember famous adage “There is no substitute for hard work”. Myriad businessman, celebrity, sportsman can be heard saying this precious line. But even after doing a lot of hard-work when we fail then a thing always comes in mind that endangers the veracity of hard-work. We always think that “Does a labor-man, a hawker or a sabjiwala does less hard work than a Govt. officers, Businessman, Sportsman etc.?”  Answer to this question is that some if not all are equally industrious like others. So Why they are living so pity life? This implies that Hard-work alone is not sufficient, there must be something that differentiates between these two groups of people.

If we try to understand this problem than we can solve various problems in our life. Students often feel depressed when their result is not upto the mark even if they had studied through-out night is last days of their exams, working people do not get proper incentives even if they have work much harder that those who’ve got more that expected. The problem with them is that they efforts were more concentrated on hard-work, they did not use a homogenous combination of hard-work and its substitutes.

Before describing this “beyond hard-work”, we need to understand meaning of word “Diligent”. This word succeeds as it includes timely hard-work with perfect proportion of smart work done with care and passion along with something ineffable. These are substitutes of hard-work and can take to your path of success.

If we throw a light into the life of various businessman, celebrities, sportsman we find that they did all correct things at right time, they moved smartly in their life and achieved the success. Smart working does not mean that you becomes a shirk and start avoiding hard-work because again same adage comes “There is no substitute for hard work”.

Smart work means hard-work in right direction. A sportsman identified his weight pulling capacity and did work to become a sportsman since his childhood, on the other hand a second person failed to identify this capacity timely or did not worked in right direction thus blame his life. True that this does not goes for every-one, but than that ineffable thing comes into play that perforce you to go in that in particular direction deciding the importance of your hard work. People often say it Luck, Divine intervention etc. but it is something which you cannot express in words. Saying it Luck etc takes us away from diligence and make us more dependent on it.

So let’s say “There is no substitute of Diligence”.

October 12, 2008

Mohit Talwar is a final year student of Computer Engineering in Gwalior.

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