The road to success is hard work! Have you made it a habit?

The road to success is hard work! Have you made it a habit?

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The long road to success. What do you think has the biggest impact on your success? Great intellect and an above average IQ are both things that we tend to believe is crucial to have to achieve success. That only the ones blessed with a greater mind than others have what it takes to win. It’s time to think again!

Keep doing the grind

Remember the old tale about the rabbit and the turtle? Where the rabbit challenges a turtle to a race. The rabbit is so sure he will win due to his speed that he takes nap mid race. The slower turtle kept walking step by step by step. He never quit no matter tired he got. He just kept going. We all know the ending of this story, where the rabbits sleep for too long, and the turtle passes him and win the race.

A very interesting study, made by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, is that students with high level of willpower are more likely to gain higher grades and gain access to more selective schools that the ones who only relied on their intellectual talent. They could predict a student academic performance depending on the level of willpower he or she had.

This means that hard work and self-discipline has a bigger effect on our success than only having a high IQ does. The ones who keep grinding, spending their days doing the works and perfecting their craft always wins in the end. “kept walking step by step by step. He never quit no matter tired he got. He just kept going.”

A common misleading

By media, press and pretty much everyone, the big icons such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Elon Musk, are praised like geniuses. Don’t misunderstand me, they are! But, what we see and often are told is how they revolutionized their field of work and created devices and products that we didn’t even knew we wanted, by simple brilliance. 

And that my friends, are not true!

The story that we are not told is all the hours and hours of hard work and grinding to perfect their craft, they put in before they became successful. Before they had all the knowledge, experience and craftmanship to come up with the ideas that later became Apple, Microsoft and Tesla – the long road to success!

Did you know that Bill Gates started coding when he was in eighth grade, back in 1968? When he started Microsoft in 1975, he had already more than 7 years of experience of the field he was starting his business in. 

Steve Jobs has a similar backstory. He used to attend evening talks by Hewlett-Packard scientist to learn about the latest advances in technology. He used to go to flea markets to buy computer spare parts and he also called Bill Hewlett, one of Hewlett-Packard founders, asking for spare parts. This landed him a summer job at said company where he worked at an assembly line – building computers. Long before the idea of building his own computer brand, Steve Jobs did the works in the field he later was going to be a superstar in.

There is no overnight success. Just the long road to success. There is a reason it’s called 10-year-overnight-success. Because successful people work harder than everyone else and put in the time needed for them to succeed. They are willing to do the work needed.

“… He never quit no matter tired he got. He just kept going.”

Read more about creative habits here and here!

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