The Myth Of "Hard Work"

Most people are taught from a young age that hard work is the ultimate key to success.

We hear stories of entrepreneurs pulling all-nighters, athletes training until they collapse, and employees grinding away for promotions. The underlying message? Work harder than everyone else, and you’ll succeed.

But reality tells a different story. There are plenty of people working incredibly hard—sometimes to the point of burnout—who never reach financial success. Meanwhile, others seem to put in fewer hours yet achieve far more.

What separates them? It’s not just effort. It’s what they choose to work on.

The Difference Between Effort and Leverage

Some work has more impact than others. Two people can put in the same number of hours, but if one is focused on something high-leverage—something that scales, compounds, or creates long-term value—they’ll see way bigger results than someone pouring the same effort into low-value tasks.

Think about it like this:

• A YouTuber making evergreen content can build an audience and earn from videos years after they’re posted. Someone working a job that pays by the hour has to keep showing up to get paid.

• A musician who owns the rights to their songs continues earning from streams, licensing, and royalties, while a session musician only gets paid for each performance or recording session.

• A software engineer who builds a product once and sells it infinitely will almost always have more leverage than someone coding for an hourly wage.

It’s not that the second group isn’t working hard—it’s that the first group has chosen their work more strategically. (Or, if they’re like me, they found themselves in a high-leverage industry accidentally.)

Most people focus on effort. But the real skill is figuring out what’s actually worth working hard on.

This means asking yourself:

• Is this work building toward something bigger, or will I have to keep doing it forever to stay afloat?

• Does this have the potential to scale, or does my income stop the moment I stop working?

• Am I improving a skill that compounds over time, or just repeating the same work over and over?

The truth is, some work is just a treadmill—you can run as fast as you want, but you’re not going anywhere. Educated people figure out how to step off the treadmill and move forward.

None of this is to say that effort doesn’t matter. It absolutely does. Even the best opportunities won’t get you anywhere if you don’t put in the work. But effort alone isn’t enough.

So instead of just working harder, take a step back and ask:
Am I even working on the right thing?

Because if you figure that out—and work on improving your ability to answer that question more accurately—everything else gets much easier.

Book Chronicles #8

As promised, I’m here to give you updates on my upcoming novel, Fractured Worlds. (That name is not official yet, but I’ll probably end up going with it.)

Finished a really important chapter this week.

Plot reveal: The antagonist I created a few weeks back is someone the character has trusted for years. That makes it even more shocking—and isolating—for the main character when he realizes the antagonist isn’t trying to help him at all. Instead, he sees his fractured mind as nothing more than a test subject, a means to experiment and harness the power for himself.

The antagonist’s motives for doing so will make sense once I refine and explain his backstory a little later in the book. His first “experiment” on the protagonist happened in this most recent chapter, and it was really enjoyable writing that scene.

See you next week.

Quote of The Week

Thanks for reading, everyone. Hope you enjoy your weekend.

-Cole