Hard Work Is an Ingredient, Not the Secret Ingredient

The business world has an addiction to the concept of “hard work.”

You hear the story about the aspirational startup founder who worked 18 hours a day and think “Wow all I have to do is work 24/7 and I too can be successful.” If only it was that simple.

You see, hard work is an irrefutable ingredient of success. It is very hard to become successful without working hard. But, the concept that hard work is the “secret ingredient” is misleading at best and sabotage at worst.

What do I mean by this?

Let’s say you are going to bake a cake.

To do so, you need a couple of ingredients; eggs, water, flour, vanilla, and a few others.

Let’s say in place of adding a mixture of all these ingredients you substitute it all with flour. So you just bake 3 cups of flour at 400º for 30 minutes. What are you going to get? I don’t know, but it sure as hell will not be cake, and it definitely will not taste good.

Let me be very clear. Hard work is an ingredient, but if we want to bake a cake, we need more than just flour.

Okay, so what do we need?

Undirected energy is wasted energy. For one, we need to ensure we are directing our energy towards the most valuable avenue. You need to focus almost exclusively on the things that are going to significantly impact your business. Don’t spend 12 hours a day checking emails and act like you are working hard. You are wasting your time.

Instead, spend your time driving your business forward, not spinning your tires or focusing on pointless vanity metrics that do little outside of impress your equally-as-insecure friends.

Your secret ingredient is going to do something so incredibly well that no one can compete with you. The answer will be different for every business, but you need to find the one thing that you can do exponentially better than everyone else and focus on becoming as good as possible at it.

That is your secret ingredient.