Why Simply WORKING, Beats Out Most Competition.

Can you outwork others, to create success? What does that even look like, and what determines whether you are working hard enough to outwork your competition.

This is what I want to discuss today, as it is something that has been so near and dear to me and my personal journey through the online world over the years.

Hard Work Started for Me at an Early Age...

Before I discuss the application of hard work in terms of how it will dictate your rate of success, I want to give you a bit of a back story. A story on how MY personal introduction to hard work started in my early life.

I started working when I was the young age of 14, during my summers off from school. My first job was very labor intensive, I worked for my uncle within the shellfish industry. Many days we would work 14 hours, between working on the beach picking up and packing oysters in a bag, to working in the open waters delivering oysters and working within open water rafts (where oysters grew up from seed).

Basically from before the sun came out and we would be coming back into shore on the skiff in the dark. I didn’t think anything of it, and I surely didn’t complain. I thought it was incredible that the more hours I worked for someone, the more money I made.

Then I learned about piece work, which was a competition against yourself to produce maximum volume…in exchange for more income. There was a job within the shellfish farm where you could dig clams and depending on how many you dug, you would get paid appropriately.

A 5 gallon bucket of clams was worth $35 to the digger, and if you were fast, you could dig 2 per hour (assuming the beach had good digging). For a 14/15 year old making $70 per hour, this was a big deal and it absolutely blew my mind.

This really helped me understand that my effort doing something, could be directly correlated to my financial achievement and this is something that wasn’t lost on me as I entered the business world several years later.

This hard work actually followed me through my first 4-5 years of jobs, and I always worked to be the best, the fastest, and the most efficient at what I did. I wasn’t overly analytical, I just took the approach that if I worked harder then the next person, I would either earn more through piece work or I would be more deserving of a raise because I was a “better” worker.

This leads me to a counterintuitive mindset…

Working the Hardest, Not the Smartest.

I know, I know. They say “work smart, not hard”. That is great, but how do you ever figure out how to work “smart” if you didn’t figure out how to work smart as the result of working hard. In other words, if you try to work smart before you know how to work smart, you are going to fail miserably.

Sometimes being exposed to hard work is critical for your ability to actually work hard. If you don’t know what hard work looks like, then it is hard to have a benchmark as to what you are doing compared to someone else.

Those that attempt to learn their way to success, are those over the years that end up in miserable failure. Being over analytical about the process, and instead of just DOING and taking action on what you think might work, is actually going to be a detriment.

So don’t learn, learn, learn, without action, action, action. The action is the “work” component that is the part that people fear, because it might lead to failure. You can’t fail when you are simply reading and consuming training, so it is safe. But the very thing that appears “unsafe” is the reason people around you are succeeding and I attribute it to most of, if not all of my real success over the years.

So as a rule, your ACTION is what leads to progress and success in business.

Becoming the Competition: Outwork First, Then Outlast.

Lastly, I want to discuss the idea of “persistence”. People tend to fail within the online world when they give up, naturally. In fact, that is the only way to fail at anything if you think about it.

You give up, you fail.

You keep going, you continue to learn and move closer to success.

There is no in between, you are either working towards success or giving up on it. That is something that I really want to resonate with you if you are having a tough period in business, or are not where you would like to be with your particular goals.

One thing that I have learned over the last 20 years being within the online business world (and actually in the corporate world) is that most people don’t work all that hard. They operate at a “status quo” level of effort. They do what they need to do, and what it takes to get by. They may think they are working hard, but they are using themselves and their own experience as the gauge, or oftentimes the lowest common denominator.

People that say “I work way harder than so and so”, likely are not hard workers, the fact that they need to announce that they are working hard indicates that they are needing a comparison to someone inferior to validate that they are actually doing something.

So the reality is if you are willing to work really hard in a sustained manner, you are going to have a HUGE competitive advantage within the online business world…and in life.

Work hard. Work hard with persistence. Reap the results.

That’s all for today, and for my mini brain dump…err rant. Now get out there and work your ass off, your business deserves it.

Now my question to you..and be honest. Do you feel you are working hard enough, and if so, with enough persistence to achieve success?