Hard Work

The Web Does Wonderful Things, But…

Garth Beyer

The web is like a shortcut, a way to streamline any process, a method of simplifying the complex, leaving the hard work still needing to be done.

Anyone can now do anything with the web. I can collect programmers to mimic nearly any site available which makes that site less valuable. It’s a crumbling collection of incredible infrastructure and design.

If a blog, a website, an online service is all that you have to offer, there’s a very low life expectancy for you.

Remember that the hard work can’t be accomplished online. You can get by for a time, but with how swift laypeople are at creating online content, it won’t be long until someone mimics your original idea and adds their human, offline, personal touch to it.

 

Stay Positive & The Web Gives You Freedom, But There’s Still Competition

Garth E. Beyer

My Friend Makes The 80/20 Rule Look Weak

Garth Beyer

Hard work, and a lot of it, is what it takes to reach any worthy goal.

Smart work is when you put the hard work into the 20 percent of actions that produce 80 percent of results.

The best work is when you can balance everything.

 

I have a friend that nearly invalidates all of these concepts. For the sake of explanation and relativity, I’m going to use weight lifting as an example, but you can exchange it with any line of work.

I’ve been lifting weights for over a year: building muscle, toning it, shaping my body the way I want it. I put in the hard work by lifting until I’m sore, I put in the smart work by following a program, and I put in the best work by making sure that my body is balanced. I was once skinny and scrawny and now I am more filled in and toned. Yet, I have a long way to go until I reach the muscle ratio I want. (Don’t worry, I’m not looking to become freakishly beefy, just extremely fit. To put it in perspective, I plan to do the Iron Man in a few years.)

Now, I have a friend. This friend was in the same situation as me, skinny and scrawny, if not even more skinny and scrawny than I started out being. About three weeks ago he began working out and is catching up to me – fast. No, he won’t be caught up to me in a week or even two, but I can guarantee it won’t take him over a year to get as far as I am now. (Remember, I’ve been going at it for over a year to get where I am!).

My friend, Brett, defies the 80/20 rule, he seems to – before taking any action – figure out how to do 5% of the work that creates 95% of the results. My friend makes the 80/20 rule look weak. He does the hardest work, the genius work, and doesn’t care about balance, he cares about progress. There’s nothing wrong with that right?

Brett has always been this way, not just with lifting weights but with everything else that sparks his interest. What he has taught me – and hopefully, through this post, can teach you – is that there are always ways that you can shorten your invested time and simultaneously strengthen the results. The 80/20 rule is a great place to start, but not the place to stay.

 

Stay Positive & Try The 5/95 Rule, Also Known As Hohler’s Law (as opposed to Pareto’s law of 80/20)

Garth E. Beyer

What You Deserve

Garth Beyer

Life is not centered at giving you what you need, you’re on your own with that.

It is however, very much focused on giving you what you deserve. And so am I.

Sure it’s smart to separate your wants and needs, but for this particular case, let’s put them all in one and just call them needs. After all, everyone gets them confused anyway.

Is it safe for me to say that you have never received anything you needed for no reason? As much as we, as humans, fight the assumption, every choice we make is made on the justification that it somehow benefits us. While some people lean towards selflessness like Mother Teresa and others are predominately selfish like Hitler, it is never one or the other, both made the choices they made because it benefited them.

If prodded long enough as to why someone did what they did, it is inevitable to get a response which states that.

Typically unbeknownst, when you receive something you need, you receive it because you have worked for it – except, that you actually never worked for it, you worked for the person to give you it. Again, you are usually unaware that you have worked or will work in a way that will benefit the person who is giving you what you need. Obviously then, the bigger the need, want, desire, hope, and so on that you have, the harder you have to work.

Want to be on the ballot for the next presidential election? You have to work hard for an extremely long time and the hard work you do has to benefit as many people as possible in the largest of ways. The same goes if you want to be a successful businessperson. The same goes if you want to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Anything major in life requires major work. None of it will be given to you unless you provide the gift bearer ways that it would benefit them.

Then, while you are working hard, working smart, working more efficiently through the good and bad times in order to get what you need, life – and all it’s magic – steps in and gives you exactly what you deserve.

However, what most people fail to understand is that you can go through life working hard and never get what you deserve because to get what you deserve, you have to work on your character. What builds character? I think you can figure that one out by yourself.

In my opinion, and I am curious if you agree, I would rather go through life getting what I deserve than what I need/want/desire.

 

Stay Positive & Work On Yourself And Everything Else Will Come To You

Garth E. Beyer

The Moment Your Work Becomes Easy

Garth Beyer

It means that you are playing it safe, that you have gotten comfortable.

Yes, you can be painting 25 portraits a week, writing 11 hours a day, starting a new business every 13 months and that is A LOT to do. But if it’s easy, if it has become habit, a routine that you know you have to do and you do it half-consciously, then it loses its meaning.

The saying goes that if you aren’t getting better, you are getting worse. There are millions of artists, writers and entrepreneurs painting one more portrait than you, writing for one more hour than you, and starting one more business than you. The experience they get from doing just a bit more trumps you considerably. 

By being “trumped”, I mean, you’re fired and they’re hired. All because you quit pushing yourself and increasing the difficulty level.

— I’ve written every day, typically winding up publishing what I write. I also have a steady writing/editing job. On the side, I write in every category of writing words will stay and force the words where they wont stay just for experience. But it’s gotten easy. It’s natural for me to type anywhere from 300 – 3,000 words a day whether they are worth a damn or not. I think I may be standing still. —

And when that happens, when you stand still, when it becomes easy, there are two choices: settle a stay comfortable or do more, work harder, experience extra, invite challenges, and not go one mile further but aim for 10, 20, 30 miles ahead.

By the way, if you aren’t willing to run/paint/write/create/etc. more than you are now, drop out and find what will never be easy for you. Being comfortable and having your routine means that you are standing still.

And if you click the link, you know what I say: People die standing still.

 

Stay Positive & Aggrandize Your Passion

Garth E. Beyer

Every Expert Has It Easy. You Can Too

Garth Beyer

Let me put something out of assumption right away. I am in no way deploying a statement that says becoming an expert does not take hard work because it does – a lot of it.

Yet, math geniuses have it easy, famous writers have it easy, exceptional artists have it easy and every profession alike has it easy. They have it easy because they decide what they are going to be, long before they become so.

Experts make the decision whether they realize it or not that they will become experts when they follow their passion, their intuition,  and their dreams. In doing so, they pass all the screening processes put on through life to make it difficult for them to be the expert mathematician, the expert engineer, the expert artist.

Hard work will always be hard work, but when you make that decision and have that passion, it’s easy to do the hard work because you accept it, are aware of it, acknowledge it and believe it or not, you are sure as hell prepared for it.

And when I say you are prepared for it, it means you can get through every set-back, every road bump, every push that the action of “hard work” promotes. As you can expect, there is a lot of it.

You got this, but what do I know? You’re the expert.

 

Stay Positive & In The End, Easy Or Hard, You’re Still An Expert

Garth E. Beyer

The Imagination Generation

Garth Beyer

Previous generations had it easy didn’t they? Much easier than us anyway.

They didn’t have electronics to take them to a new world. They didn’t have the ability to Google all the things they love, the items they didn’t have or even focus on working hard to get them. They had a simple life. Hard, yes. But simple.

Our generation and any hereafter can Google more and further than our imaginations could previously take us. We Google surreal images, pictures representative of predictive futuristic consumerism. We now Google thinking it will help, yet we do very little or nothing that blogs suggest, that articles advise, that pictures inspire, that the world needs. We waste our time Googling for two reasons.

1. We seek safety, security and the knowledge that “everything is alright”. The same reason, in fact, as why you check Twitter and Facebook 20 times a day to see that everything is okay, nothing serious has happened. We never think that maybe, if something serious were to happen, if our security was breached, if we felt unsafe, that we may just feel it and know? Do we really think Googling, checking News, Twitter feed and Facebook will really be the primary acknowledgment that we are in trouble? No.

(It does good to take a moment to realize that this process is what has put us in trouble)

2. Our imaginations have been released, but not far enough. We search and stretch our minds as far as the web will let us extend them and then we feel like we got there ourselves, accomplished. We feel that since we imagined it, that it is real, attainable and easily reached. The ability to see and understand that which would not be attainable without the web is creating a surge of jobs not filled, inventions not made, and ideas not created. It is as though whatever is on the web is as far as the mind can reach, but this is false.

What you can Google, discover on Twitter, view and share on Facebook can well be used as a bridge to a further discovery. They are not your destinations, they are someone else’s and this means that there is a calling upon you to take what you view and learn to improve it, make it better, and most importantly add your imagination to it.

Or you can simply avoid this roadblock and let your imagination run as wild as possible. Of course, by doing this you will only find out that you can actually go further than what is proposed on the web, what can be dreamt of, created and achieved by another.

 

Stay Positive & It’s Sort Of A Win-Win

Garth E. Beyer

Overdosing

Garth Beyer

Get good at it.

Nothing will get you to where you want to go quicker, than being quick and overdoing all you currently have.

Do more than is asked, more than expected, and more than you thought was possible.

 

Stay Positive & Overdose On Your Success

Garth E. Beyer