The Prospect of Hard Work

Yesterday, exams proper end. A sigh of relief would have been a disrespectful underestimate of the 2 months of effort I have put in. The number of hours I have spent perusing material repeatedly; the health I have forgone to ensure maiximum time for study and minimum time waste; the lack of a good sleep every night as my heart beat relentlessly like a horse galloping in a race - all the hard work.

Will hard work always be repayed with success? That is the question to be answered.

I am sure you remember what your mum or your priest have told you, when you are young, that good begets good and evil begets evil. Translated to the present ideology, the height of your success should be equal to the amount of hard work you fork out. Could such a belief be just material made for nursery rhymes and fairy tales? Why does the beautiful girl sometimes hold hands with the beast, and why does the soup sometimes taste different when the same ingredients are used?

Hard work does not necessarily mean success. But it certainly means a spark plug to success. The route to success is one shaped by luck and timing of circumstances that lead to an event. With the right knowledge, the right questions and the right sequence, success will be ensured.

Perhaps it also boils down to being able to create answers or solutions by power of logic, and doing something another way when it has been done wrongly all the time. Do you think Einstein would have got to the equation of E=MC^2 just by being a historian of physics? He knows the theory; but the theory leads him to success only because he has exercised the power of logic and possessed a lucky spark of genius.

Then this may explain why some exam-toppers fair so badly in the real worklife. Knowledge is dead; application of knowledge with logic is the determinant of survival in the real world.

Hard work, hence, in the context of exams, is almost equivalent to success in results; in the context of the real world, hard work is only one of the many determinants of success.

Will hard work always be repayed with success? It shall be answered maybe tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then one day in the future when success is judged differently.