Work Hard

So let me tell you something, if you want to be taken seriously you need to get up and make it happen, because you can’t do nothing if you don’t make a move. There’s work to do…Work. Oh, you gotta work. — The Washington Projects

Every once in a while, a genius, a prodigy is born. I am neither. I may be intelligent. I may be a good writer. I may even be a decent artist. I am not any of those things because innate ability oozes from my pores. I am those things because I work hard, hone my craft, develop my gifts and talents.

I recall a recent conversation with a software developer. We were discussing what goes into making our work seem effortless. The answer? A lot of hard work, most of which the audience never sees. It’s smoke and mirrors. We are magicians amazing audiences with audacious and splendid feats. They don’t know the hours spent at a computer, the time taken to test a solution. They see the end product, and it’s beautiful.

It should be that way. The audience should never be aware of the wires and contraptions, i.e., the hard work. The point of working hard is not to trumpet how hard I work. The point is to do a good job, to pursue excellence. Working hard is done because it’s the right thing to do. It honors God and others.

Hard work also is the only way to get to the easy work, the work that feels like some sort of magic trick. Where did these words come from? The lines of code? Why the sudden ease? The developer and the writer look at the course taken. It’s involved some missteps and some hard knocks, but, most of all, it’s taken work, a lot of it.

It’s what Richard Hugo says: Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don’t work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.

Exactly. So get to work, and work hard.

Image: J.D. Hancock (Creative Commons)