We hear all the time that hard work is the key to success. Just work hard on your goal and you’ll achieve it.

Let me make something clear though. You DO need to work hard in order to succeed in whatever goal you are trying to achieve. Hard work is required, but here’s the catch.

It’s all relative.

Hence, the quotes around the phrase “hard work”.

There’s two ways of looking at “hard work”.

Looking at hard work from the outside and looking at hard work from the inside, namely from the point of view of the person that’s actually doing the “hard work”.

Looking at hard work from the outside.

When you look at hard work from the outside, well, it looks just like that. Hard work. Hard, painful, backbreaking, stay up till sunrise hard work. This view is what the majority of people hold and what gets seared into their mind like a red hot poker is the association of pain with hard work. That kind of thinking is dangerous as it prevents people from pursuing their dreams because they want to avoid the pain that they link up to hard work. But like I said before, it’s all relative.

For example, the majority of people who look at what a student goes through in order to become a doctor construe that journey has “hard work”. He has to study for hours on end, intern at the hospital, make grades, etc. It’s a TON of hard work, when you look at it from the outside.

Look at it from the inside, namely from the student’s point of view.

Sure it’s hard work, but not like the kind of hard work that’s viewed on the outside. That student has something within him that drives him to do the hard work. Maybe it’s a genuine love for helping people. Maybe it’s because he thinks he’s destined to become a doctor or maybe it’s because of family pressure. Whatever the drive is, positive or negative, that drive within him gets him to do the hard work, so that it’s not hard work to him all, just plain old work, and if he loves what he does, then it's not even work at all to him.

If you stick two people in a room with two totally different jobs, you’ll get the same reaction. Say for example, one is a lawyer and another is a computer programmer. The lawyer will look at the programmer and conclude that what the programmer does is hard work. Why? Because it would be hard work for the lawyer to do what the computer programmer does. Chances are the lawyer has no idea whatsoever on how to write subroutines, modules, functions, etc.

The computer programmer will look at the lawyer and think the same thing. Why? The computer programmer knows nothing about writing briefs, arguing a case, jury selection, etc.

What’s happening is that each person is creating their own meaning of “hard work” based on their own range of knowledge and experience, and since everyone’s knowledge and experience is limited, anything outside of their scope of that is construed as “hard work.”

If the lawyer asks the programmer if his work is hard, the programmer will shrug it off, saying that “It’s just work”. The same thing with the lawyer.

So whenever you hear somebody harping about how “hard work” is the key to success, don’t let that faze you. Yes, you do need to work hard in order to succeed in achieving your goal, but it’s all in the eye of the worker. It’s all relative. If you have that drive within you, you’ll do the things that people on the outside will view as “hard work”, but to you, it’ll just be "work".