I want to talk to you — and to your adolescents, if they are in the area — about life.
To be precise, I want to expose and emphasise a grey, essential golden rule that you have already encountered some seventeen times, but have never seriously stopped to consider the real meaning of.
Today you will stop.
Here comes the cliché everyone knows, the queen of clichés, a piece of wisdom handed from generation to generation.
Success is hard work.
Disappointing, isn't it?
Allow me to be precise. Disappointing, but true.
I have been looking into people's careers for twenty-five years now, into their relationships, the successful and the failed.
And I am no bringer of good news. This cliché is correct all the way to the bank.
You have no idea how much success requires hard work.
And in terms of personality, success requires diligence.
And in dispiriting terms: if you are not diligent, there is almost no chance you will succeed.
And I have not finished. Here are three observations about success and diligence.
One. These people were diligent long before they became successful.
Many of the sceptics try to play it sophisticated. They say they have no problem investing enormous effort provided somebody guarantees the outcome. But that is not diligence. That is a transaction, and the world does not offer it. The diligence came first, unrewarded, for years, which is precisely why it selected for the people it did.
Two. Diligence is not the same as busyness, and the two are frequently confused by people who are exhausted and going nowhere.
Three. Nobody enjoys it at the time. This matters, because the modern assumption is that if you had found the right thing, the effort would feel effortless. It does not. It feels like effort. The successful people I have watched were not enjoying themselves more than you. They were simply continuing anyway, which is the entire and unremarkable secret.