Are You A 'Hard Worker'?

Wait! Before you answer YES, have a second look at the question. Hard worker there is in quotation mark which my sense tells me something could be fishy right there. Ha ha ha!

In the real sense of it, one who works hard is assumed industrious, right? But,
I think someone can work hard and still be far from being industrious. How?


Now get this. I think you are in the group of ‘hard workers’ if you have the habit of waiting till the last minute before you do anything required of you. Then, you would work tirelessly just so you meet up with the deadline when your counterparts have already gotten theirs ready.


For instance:


You are given an assignment to submit in seven days. You wait till the sixth day before you start doing a research on it. Now, you have less than twelve hours left. You deprive yourself of sleep for the night just to make sure you beat the deadline. Your eyes are swollen the following day as a result of that. Your friends and colleagues wonder what happened to your eyes and you tell them you stayed up late studying. They applaud you for being one of the serious students around. And your mind doesn’t tell you you are fooling no one but yourself?


You have an exam to write and you have ten days to prepare for it. You occupy yourself the whole of the ten days with the television, computer games, friends and what have you, only to realise on the night of the tenth day that you have an exam the next day. Now, just to ensure you stay awake all night to read for the exam, you drink all the coffee in the world. Not even the feet you have sunk in a bowl of cold water could save the constant drooping of your eyelids. Now, the exam day. You are the first to get to the venue all because you want to seize the opportunity and see if you could make it up. You read until the exam papers arrive. You take permission to go ease your bowl only to go read some more. You think you will remember any of the things you read in that rush in the exam hall?


Generally, if you are in the habit of waiting till the last minute to do a task, then you are only working hard at being lazy. A ‘hard worker’ in that sense is only a lazy person.


You need to work hard every day and not wait for some accumulated time before doing so. Now, that is being industrious!