Without hard work, nothing grows but weeds.
Gordon Hinckley
MEANING OF THIS QUOTE
Having a house with a beautiful little garden in the backyard is still a dream for most people. However, what very few of them realize is the amount of work that goes into maintaining the garden. If you do not constantly look after and nurture the garden, the plants you intended to grow in it will eventually wither and die. To make matters worse, the yard will be overrun with weeds without appropriate care and maintenance.
To keep your garden up and running, you need to maintain, water, and weed it on a regular basis. In other words, hard work is key to success. An individual who does not do anything productive with their time does not grow, let alone succeed.
BUT YOU COULD ALSO GET LUCKY WITHOUT HARD WORK, COULDN’T YOU?
Not really. As clichéd as it might sound, fortune only favors the brave. You cannot get lucky without putting in the hard yards – at least not in a lasting way. Sure, you might enjoy some short-term success without making any efforts. However, such success is impossible to sustain without any efforts to back it up.
AND WHAT ABOUT SMART WORK?
Well, you need to peg away, anyway. Smart work is not a substitute for hard work, but rather a way to make sure you aren’t slaving away mindlessly. All it means is that you should invest your time and efforts in things that really matter, instead of slogging away just for the sake of it. For instance, you could find an easier way to make a daunting presentation for work, but you would still need to do it the easy way. Smart work doesn’t mean the presentation is going to make itself!
CONCLUSION
To sum it up, just like a garden becomes infested with weeds and other unwanted grass without adequate care and maintenance, nothing good can come out of a life without hard work. You cannot expect to grow or succeed without making efforts for what you truly want. Gordon Bitner Hinckley was an American religious leader and author. Hinckley once commented: “Without hard work, nothing grows but weeds.”