Many people spend their lives being incredibly hard-working, they sweat for ten hours a day their whole lives yet remain on the minimum wage, why? Surely the harder you work the more reward you will get. Well no, you are not in school anymore so you don’t get bonus points for trying. Effort no longer equals reward so get rid of the misconception that it does. Simply working incredibly hard on any random things is not enough, it’s about what you are doing. Henry Thoreau put this more eloquently when he said “It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?”

The top richest people in the world are experts in making money, you could put them in the situation you are in now and with half the effort that you put in to earn minimum wage they could become millionaires. The key to success is not in your effort, it is in your knowledge. You would be better of being broke for a month if you spent that month gaining knowledge on becoming rich. As Francis Bacon said “Knowledge is power”, although I heard a different version which I prefer: “knowledge is the potential for power”, you still need to put your knowledge to use.

Lets use a simple example for this, you could spend a whole day trying to build a table with no carpentry experience. By the end of that day you will probably end up with a pretty shoddy table (if you managed to make one at all). That is because you approached it with the mind-set that effort equals reward, but that is not the case. You could put in a 15 hour day and not get anywhere. What you should have done is spent 30 minutes at the beginning of the day learning how to build a good table, then you could have built a professional table in a couple of hours. It is more effective to educate yourself on a task first before you start trying to complete it.

People don’t use this principle in their own lives and it is shocking. You hear people all the time saying how unhappy they are, but they haven’t educated themselves on how to be happy. They haven’t studied the happiest people in the world and found out their secret. People complain about being fat and unhealthy saying that whatever they do to get in shape doesn’t work, yet they haven’t spent the time learning how to eat healthy and exercise. People complain about being poor and having no money despite how hard they work. They say “I work ten hours a day, I deserve more than the minimum wage”. Well they don’t, they haven’t educated themselves on how to become rich, they haven’t picked up a book on how to become rich and studied it.

If you take away one thing from my website it should be that knowledge is more powerful than effort. Make a list right now of all the things that you want to be good at, list 5 major things. Now go study people who have become good at those things, read books or look online (preferably at my website). All the information is out their for you to achieve your desires. Don’t try to achieve something without first educating yourself on how to achieve it, you will be wasting you time