I want to share something that influenced my thinking around “working hard”. It’s from a scholarly article on study skills, and really it’s just the first paragraph copied below that I found to be profound: “A common explanation for failing in educational settings is based on the “just-world hypothesis” a cognitive bias according to which “people get what they deserve,” and that the reason for failing a course is that not enough effort was put into studying, and therefore by studying more, the problem will be solved. However, time-on-task is not a sufficient condition for learning, merely a necessary condition, and if lack of time was not the real cause, then providing more time will not help. Indeed, time-on-task can in some cases be directly harmful since it can lead to surface learning strategies. Instead of using time as a measure, productive time is a better measure, described as the factor of the time that a student spends on appropriate learning activities, and focusing on increasing productive time is often better than on in- creasing time-on-task in general.” So, consider the implications: 1) hard work (whatever that means) does not guarantee results, whereas 2) productive time (How you approach a task) is more important. You still need to spend time, but how you work is more important than how long you work. Or at least that’s my interpretation. Curious how others here interpret this idea! Here’s a link to the article if you’re interested: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lTcoe3Y5XVHdQzDuvzMF6CYueki0gPwJ/view?usp=drivesdk