Stop trying to work harder

I was ask what to do to motivate yourself to work harder. I was wondering why on earth you want to work hard. But obviously that is what most people tell others on their quest to success. When I was 28, somebody told me a bout Confucius’ saying:

“Seek an activity you wholeheartedly love and you will never work a day in your live“. Confucius

It changed my attitude to work for the rest of my life in two ways:
1) I understood that hard work is only hard if you don’t like what you do which is almost automatically leading to failure.
2) The only thing that is hard – or better said – not easy is to determine what you actually love to do.

If you don’t know WHAT YOU WANT: buy yourself a shovel, get out into a desert and dig a hole as deep and as wide as you can. Make sure you do not do that on property that is owned by anybody and that you are not endangering anybody. You may exhaust yourself over and over again. People may come and watch you doing it. The hole may have a diameter of maybe 500 yard. And you dig deeper and deeper – wider and wider. While you do that you have time to think about what you rally want. More and more people may come by and watch you. You may get interviewed by local television. You may become famous for the man that single-handedly dug the widest and deepest hole ever. You may get advertising contracts and get more interviews. But most likely at that stage you know:
a) you really enjoyed digging this unbelievable hole – or
b) you know what you really want to do instead
c) if none is true, go to the poorest country on earth and help people survive and thrive. Do this until you know how you could create more value for our society. Once you know, you help those who can’t figure it out – where to start and ask them to dig a hole.

In other words make every effort to find out what you really want to do – instead of just doing something because you don’t know.