People pay you for solving their problems and not for how hard you work
Hard-working is something that is misunderstood. There were times when people work really hard during their young age to reap the fruit during the old age. This can be a suitable quote for the farmers probably because they work really hard during the sowing season and chill a little bit during the harvest season. This cannot be applicable to every nature of work. Especially when you are someone solving the problems of others.
People working in IT are the ones who solve a lot of real-world problems in the form of automation. I'm going to be talking from that perspective. If we want to make money by solving problems for others, projecting how hard we work is not going to help at all. We have to do smart work and let the work we do project our quality. People get paid only based on the quality of work and not based on the quantity of work.
In some cases, people who are capable of solving the more complex problems will be evaluated high and they also get a chance to get paid heavily. Demand and supply work here too. If the people available to solve complex problems are very less, they can demand a high pay to work. This is how it works. Smart working is something like choosing a nature of work that is equally difficult as well as high paying. In that case, people can work fewer hours per week and get paid enough to run their life.
Many people find it very hard to understand the truth that we get paid more only if we make a huge difference to others. The more value we can provide others, the more valuable we become and indeed wealthier as well. This applies only to people who work for others and the ones who satisfy the needs of others.
Hard work sometimes keeps us fully occupied all the time and there will not be any "me" time or any family time. This keeps increasing the stress factor and we will not even know that we are stressed out. Sometimes people interacting with us might find it out but it is usually not realizable. Earning a lot of money with too much stress is not going to help us unless we still find a way to enjoy our life and live our lives by having 100 different things with us to keep us calm and composed.
Some people strongly believe that hard work really pays off. If not immediately it definitely pays off in the long term. That is not entirely true I would say. I would say that it also depends on where we put the hard work and efforts. Sometimes hard work put in the wrong place may not give anything in return. This also doesn't mean that we shouldn't be doing hard work at all. We can do hard work but we have to make sure the hard work we do is equally valued or not. If hard work is going to be creating too much stress, it is definitely not a good way to earn but instead a harmful way to earn money.
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Sometimes people don't understand the concept of quality 😂