"All Hard Work Bears Fruit"

Hello and welcome to a Piece of Peace your weekly dose of motivation and inspiration. This week I would like to share with you on the topic, “All Hard Work Bears Fruit.” I gave a talk this week to a group of young girls at the Girls Education Initiative of Ghana, started by the inspirational Vlisco woman of the year winner Elizabeth Patterson. Her initiative supports girls, including those with special needs to get access to Education.

I was invited to give a talk about my struggles with dyslexia and during my talk, a 13-year-old girl made an interesting comment. She told me it was her dream to become a TV presenter and a journalist, but she thinks it will be too much hard work so she would rather stick to one and become a journalist instead. Not wanting to depress the poor girl with one of my long motivational epilogues, I told her she could be whatever she wanted to be so long as she had the passion for it. If she doesn’t want to do both, that means she has more passion for one career path than the other. The answer is simple. Follow what you cannot live a day without doing.

I think that was a safe enough answer and I was confident she understood every single word until Elizabeth highlighted to me later on that the young girls mostly struggle to understand her American accent so she hopes they could grasp my British one. In hindsight I think the little girl nodded a lot more than she should have. Anyway, that question made me think. How much hard work is enough to achieve your dreams. The concept of hard work is one that is elusive.

Firstly, what constitutes hard work? Secondly, how do you know you are working hard or how much of it you are doing? Finally, what level of reward do you need at the end of that hard work to make it worth doing it all over again? The simple answer is, any productive venture that you work around the clock to achieve and dedicate a significant amount of the working day towards achieving constitutes hard work. The salient point here is any productive venture.

A productive venture is an activity that aids you in your goal of achieving positive results towards things that will push you towards your God given purpose. That means, hard work never stops. It needs to be fed every single waking moment of your life and carried on through out the day until you sleep only to be repeated all over again. At the point where you feel like you have given absolutely everything there is to give and you want to take it easy, that is usually the point where you need to keep going to achieve your breakthrough. Most often when we go to church, and we hear prophecies of God’s miracles and God’s breakthrough being manifested in our lives, we tend to get complacent and think that all we need to do is to wait on God to show us his mercies.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. Many individuals miss God’s blessings in their lives because they are fixated on the wait instead of focusing on the Grind. Nothing worth having comes easily. It requires persistent struggle, fighting and resilience to get the rewards that he has promised in your life. So next time you feel like nothing positive is happening in your life, ask yourself, How much hard work are you putting in your grind. If you are putting in enough, then you will most likely see results. If the opposite is true, then roll up your sleeves and get on your grind. It will pay off. Trust the process, And always remember, be yourself, because everyone else is taken.