What could I possibly say about hard work that you don’t already know?
Actually, what do you most need to hear about hard work?
It’s worth it?
We’re all in this together?
When you fail, get up and try, try again?
Even to my ears, those sound pithy and uninspired.
We all know hard work is hard. We know resurrecting our dreams and awakening our hearts will take a certain level of hard work. We know we need to move from thinking about those dreams and all that’s possible to actually doing something about them. We know we need to start small but dream big. We know we need to lay some foundations before we get to the meat of our work.
But now it’s time to start the work. Lay aside the excuses, ignore the timetables we’ve created for ourselves and just do it. (Apologies for sounding like a bad Nike commercial.)
My example is yoga. For a couple weeks, I thought “I’ll start small!” but all I really did was set the bar too low to try.
I need to get fired up, recommit, and do the hard work.
For me, that means waking up very early, writing for 30 minutes, and setting an alarm to stop writing and start yoga-ing. I set that alarm because otherwise, I get carried away and write for so long I have time for nothing else before having to get ready for the day.
Why do I do it that way? Both things are important for me to have a full, balanced, healthy life. I need to give both writing and physical activity primacy, and make them both priorities. Writing is my “natural work”—it’s easy for me, I love it, and it doesn’t take a lot of effort. I do it first thing in the morning. I make it important, and I do it.
Physical activity is another thing entirely. I know I need to do it. I know it’s important for a lot of reasons. I know I feel AWESOME when I do it, like I’ve accomplished something huge. But I don’t wake up early every day pumped to do it again. I have to really convince myself and practice great discipline to get it done.
Although I enjoy writing far more than physical activity, both things require hard work. They require me to do them, no matter how motivated I feel in that particular moment. And it’s important that I don’t do one to the exclusion of the other. Both are important. Both deserve my time and attention. I deserve to give both my time and attention.
Believing in ourselves again, or maybe for the first time, is 86% of the battle. The rest of it is actually doing something, getting a fire lit under us (or inside us), and being convicted that today, I will do something to make these dreams realities.
It’ll take hard work, but we knew that all along, didn’t we?
P.S.: Happy Thanksgiving!
