Hard work has been the most attributed factor to making successful people. Everyone wants you to know how much better they are than you because they work so much harder.

This is the main key to success according to everyone: that you have to work very hard. This level of conditioning has tricked so many people into living an unfulfilled life.

Of course, you do have to work at things to make them work, but most of what you’re being told isn’t true.

Hard work has diminishing returns, and the people selling you on “16 hour days” are really just counting the hours they are awake.

I’m reminded of Jordan Belfort’s podcast interview where he talks about how he watched his son work really hard all day and “kill it at work,” only to begin playing video games later in the day. He watched him do this for a couple of days until he had to pull him to the side and told him something along the lines of: “the people you want to be like, the successful people, aren’t playing video games, so if you want to be one of them, stop.”

This, of course, is the exact kind of content hustle culture wants. Except one thing Jordan forgets is that in his peak days, after a day of productively stealing money from innocent people, rather than play video games, what he did was party with cocaine-induced orgies with sex workers.

Another poster boy for hard work is Elon Musk, who says he doesn’t do anything outside of work, damns his folks to work 80 hours a week or more, and is said to work 100+ hour weeks himself.

Except he’s got a dozen kids and also happens to be a top 5 Diablo (video game) player in the world.

Someone do some basic math here, because we all know at least one of those is bullshit, right?

The reality is the efficiency of how you work is much more important than how long you do something. Human beings do not have an unlimited resource of mental stamina, and much like a muscle, you have to build that stamina up over time. You have to take breaks, you have to nourish your body, you have to play the long game.

Sure, you can take a bunch of drugs and numb your body and mind to your needs, but you’re robbing resources from your future self. There is a crash coming.

You don’t need to suffer at your desk for 16 hours because a billionaire said he works that much. These people giving these interviews aren’t telling you that they’re including their lunch and dinner meetings as “work.” They’re also not telling you that they’re getting their 8 hours of sleep, and that their breakfast, lunch, dinner, laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping, kid care, and every other aspect of normal life is already taken care of.

Stop worrying about the time that you spend on your work, and worry about how well you do the work.

When any one of us says we “don’t have enough time,” we’re really just saying “we don’t have enough energy” for it.

Study yourself, and how your energy fluctuates, and learn to do the important work during those times.

More so, learn to use your peak energy time to reflect on your work, and make sure you’re working on the right things. That these things will get you results.

The reality is, the guy working 3 minimum wage jobs to support his family is working much harder than your average billionaire, but he isn’t getting the same results.

A good example of this is Anthony Hamilton, who was the father of legendary Formula 1 champion Lewis Hamilton. His father Anthony was an immigrant who struggled to make ends meet, working multiple jobs as an IT manager, a dishwasher, and a salesman. Despite that, he would not only financially support Lewis and his dreams of racing, but also spend the time and effort necessary by practicing with him and taking him to events.

Anthony worked much harder than Lewis, but Lewis was awarded the opportunity to work on the right thing.

The real hero in the story is Anthony, and if he had the opportunity and interests that Lewis did, he most likely would have achieved the same level of global success.

It’s not just how much you work, but what you work on. More than effort, what’s important is decisions, and you can’t make good decisions if you’re burnt out, hungry, or just plain sleepy.

There are many entrepreneurs who decided to bootstrap their business rather than raise capital. They worked harder than the guy who spent his time raising funds, and made not even a quarter of the progress.

One of the contributors to the “hours put in” craze has intimately been Malcolm Gladwell. In his brilliant book Outliers he discussed the “10,000 hour rule.” It posits that being a world-class expert in any field requires 10,000 hours of practice.

This rule has been popularized and as a result misled many people into thinking all that mattered was time put in to achieve mastery.

Geoff Colvin’s book, Talent is Overrated, dives into this a bit deeper and states that more important than time of something done, is the time spent in “deliberate practice.”

For example:

Punching the bag is good exercise but it won’t make you a better boxer. Instead, deliberately perfecting each punch, isolating each motion, analyzing your training, your fights, and having a consistent feedback loop of doing, analyzing, and improving, is what brings you the results.

Most people equate hard work with just doing it.

In Seth Godin’s book The Practice: Shipping Creative Work, he discusses a study on swimmers that revealed a brilliant insight: the highest performers did not necessarily work harder than their peers, but they excelled because they had better technique.

High-performing swimmers focused on perfecting their strokes, turns, and overall form, which allowed them to swim faster and more efficiently. This principle applies universally. In any discipline, refining technique and working smarter can yield better results than simply working harder.

By honing in on improving specific skills and techniques, you can achieve higher levels of performance without necessarily increasing the amount of effort you put in. This reinforces the idea that deliberate, focused work is the key to achieving excellence.

“Hard work” is a misleading blanket statement.

If you grab a hammer to go beat on the sidewalk 12 hours a day, that’s hard work, but it won’t get you any closer to your goals in life.

You can work on something 1-2 hours a day that can bring you more results than your 12-16 hour days of working on something that is draining you.

The hard reality you have to accept is that hard work doesn’t pay off. Sometimes you work really hard at something and it won’t work. The worst is that nothing really will come out of it, other than you learning that this doesn’t work.

All you can do when this happens is take a day or two to mourn it, dust yourself off, and try working hard at something else.

At least you’ve built resilience.

Just remember, knowing what to work on is far more important than how hard you work on it.

Want to know how to do that? You need an entrepreneur coach.