Our work ethic is too soft

Is your work ethic way too soft? Ask yourself, especially if you have dreams of reaching financial freedom and being a successful entrepreneur. I recently listened to a talk by Gary Vaynerchuk on the current state of entrepreneurship. Gary says that the current wave of entrepreneurs aren’t working hard enough. They aren’t trying hard enough and they don’t seem willing to grind away until they succeed. He said it amazes him how people say they’re trying to start their own business, yet they leave work somewhere between 5 pm-7 pm to get drinks with their friends. Wasting time and trying to be successful doesn’t mix together, especially if you are serious.

Gary has been working 18+ hour days, for over a decade, to get to where he is at now. Nothing came easy for him. He had to hustle his a$$ off to reach the levels he has reached. This is a very familiar story. I’ve read and heard of many successful people who worked insane hours to get to where they wanted to go. It seems like the one common trait successful people share is a great work ethic. They aren’t scared of sleepless nights.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak put in many sleepless nights to get the first computer up and running. From that time on Steve Jobs worked tremendous amounts of hours to launch the first Macintosh computer that stunned the world.

Albert Einstein was known to regularly stay up all night reading and discussing the various thoughts from the leading philosophers and physicists at the time. He would debate and discuss their ideas, over cups of coffee, with his philosophy and mathematician/ physicist buddies. Later in life he was known to spend hours upon hours working on his equations in order to get his theories working properly.

Elon Musk slept in his office during the launch and continual building of his first business. He told his first employees that when they arrived at the office to kick him (he slept on a huge bean bag) so that he could wake up and get straight to coding. He later put in 20 hour days before his second business was renamed to PayPal. Even to this day Elon is non-stop busy running his successful businesses. He is a man with a tremendous work ethic.

When Bill Gates was in high school he would sneak off at night, from 3 am-6 am, to the local University to practice computer coding at the computer lab. These were the only hours when the computers were not booked by University students and Professors. He would then come home and get ready for school.

I can’t help but realize that it takes a lot of hard work to make it. These stories are both eye opening and motivating.