What exactly does it mean to work hard? What do you do in a situation where everyone works hard? By logic, it just seems like work is beyond just simply working hard when you factor in other variables like luck, personality, charm, talented innovation, and the competition variable. Analogously, it is the same with school, what if everyone does work hard and gets a letter grade of an A? I heard a rumor from one of my professors back in college that some professors will only give a set number of A's no matter how hard everybody works. She on the other hand believes that everybody can get an A (she was one of the easier professors with happy faces at ratemyprofessors.com). I just find it funny that some people accuse others of not working hard as if nobody wants to work hard but I actually think quite the opposite in that lots of people want to work hard. They are so invested in the hard-work variable as if it is the sole variable determining success and the reaping of rewards. Also, not to forget to mention mental disorders that may not be apparent to the naked eye (they themselves might not be able to recognize it as well as the fact that other people will keep telling them that they are normal) as it appears that certain people function just like everybody else.
I knew some people who could never have to do any homework or study for tests because they somehow "understood" what the assignment was about and without much trouble accomplished doing it and when tested they aced it every time. Then there's people like me who need to really do allot of reading and try to understand what to remember and what is important which took me hours before a test to cram it all in. I had to "work hard" in order to get what was needed into my mind so as to get good grades while the "brainiacs" always had little time involved with remembering things.
All any of us is really obliged to do is to give just a little bit more back to civilization than we take out. In other words, try to leave this place a little bit better than we found it. For some people that comes easy, and they can give more if they want to. In a wage-based society they will generally be rewarded by receiving more wealth, with which they can do as they please. For others it comes hard, and sometimes they're not able to come out even. As long as they're trying to do the best they can (given that this post-industrial economy is very productive and generates a lot of surplus wealth), it's up to the rest of us to reward them for simply being good citizens and trying. Under some forms of government, the state confiscates a certain portion of our wealth and uses it for collective projects, one of which is to redistribute some of it to the people who weren't able to earn their keep despite trying to do so. In other forms of government, the state does little to help the people so they have to pitch in and help each other. Since these types of governments seldom create strong economies, this is a real challenge because nobody has very much surplus wealth to share, so poverty is usually rampant. At this point the people in the more prosperous countries feel an obligation to help. It's just not easy to do because whatever they send over is confiscated by the governments and sold on the black market, so the people who need the help don't get it. The only other solution is to allow the people in the dysfunctional countries to emigrate to the prosperous countries. The educational and employment opportunities there lift them out of poverty rather quickly, increasing the gross domestic product of the entire planet and reducing the need for charity. Unfortunately many of the people in those prosperous countries believe that allowing the immigrants to enter will somehow make their own lives less prosperous, even though, historically, this is almost unheard-of. Only in places like Jordan, whose refugee population from Palestine, Iraq and Syria now outnumbers the natives, are immigrants truly a drain on the economy.
Hard work is relative. A big Strong man can carry his groceries easier than a Weak man, so the Weak man must work harder. The same can be applied mentally. A person educated in simpler methods may achieve the same result with less work than a person doing everything in a haphazard way.
One way to think of it is through the use of a "Learning Curvature". Such curvatures are usually depicted as curving from requiring limited concentration, wisdom or training, to move towards higher levels of concentration and requires more experience as a pre-requisite. When a person is educated following a learning curvature as a path, they shouldn't find learning a struggle, over time they should be able to achieve the same understanding as any peer. Some people however require more time than others, there is also the fact that we all live individual lives with different concerns and stresses that can arise from time to time, those occurrences can of course undermine concentration. The same understanding can be applied to any field of work, if you are poorly trained and scrapping around trying to fit a job, then your stress level is going to be far higher than someone that has spent years acquiring wisdom in that particular field of work through experience and training. Those work stresses can also be interchangeable with general living stress, in the sense a bad day at work can effect the life outside of work, and getting out the wrong side of the bed in the morning could effect work also. (although nobody keeps a chamberpot at the side of a bed any more do they?)
There's smart work as well. That's when you can figure out ways that can shortcut a job to finish it faster but with the same results as if you did it following the guidelines. As an example if one person uses 4 types of fittings to make a certain joint but another person can do it with ony two then they would be saving time and money therefore working smarter not harder to do the job. Not many can come up with shortcuts because they were trained to do it one way and always adhere to that way for their entire lives.
Working hard is all about the level of effort. A small child who rakes the yard may not be able to do as much work as his dad, but if he works along side his dad all afternoon, he is a hard worker. It is all about maximum effort at any level of capacity. Someone can lack skills but tries hard would also be a hard worker. The opposite of hard work is hardly working. The hardly worker is someone who is lazy, even if they ace the exam. If he was a hard worker he would do even more than what comes easy, pushing himself to new limits.
I had a professor with the opposite attitude. We were on a 5-point system at the time with 0 being failure and 5 being roughly an A-plus. This professor (oddly, I can't recall his name, though I did well in his class) gave out 1's and occasionally a 2 to a particularly bright student. It was almost the same as a pass-fail situation. I had a high school teacher who always graded on the curve beause, he said, he couldn't create a perfect exam. In effect, he was grading his own performance as well as ours. In "real life", though, the situation is quite different from academia. "Working hard" usually just means "hard enough" to satisfy your employer. If you're producing enough output to outweigh the cost of replacing you, you stay.
Certain sales companies don't really like it if you are not meeting quotas and while they might not explicitly fire you, they will say something like "maybe this job isn't for you" or "give you that talk." I am sure people try and even then it still might not be good enough. This also includes not making the 90 day probationary period. Look at it another way, as Donald Trump once said, "only one can be my apprentice." By factoring in the competition variable, the weakest links gets cut-off or fired. Being the weakest link is like a burden to the company right? I believe there was even a game show on that.
