Self Help

You have been told the hard and simple truth: if you aren’t getting much out of life emotionally and financially, then you must look at what you bring into life. Clearly, to get more out of this world, you must make some changes in your life.

Now for the pleasant truth; success has little to do with hard work. The natural order of the world doesn’t dictate that you have to work hard to earn a good living and get more out of life. On the contrary, working fewer hours than most people, and at a more leisurely pace, may in fact help you to get a lot more out of life - financially and emotionally.

Most people over-dramatize the value of hard work for acquiring wealth and happiness. The late Joe Karbo, author of The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches, coined the saying, “Most people are too busy earning a living to make any money.” What Karbo meant was that most people are too preoccupied with their demanding and unfulfilling jobs, as well as with frivolous after-hour activities, to devote some creative effort toward generating alternative, less demanding means of income.

In truth, the most difficult way to make a good living is to work hard for it. Hard work is no match for relaxed, creative action. Unlike people who preach the virtues of hard work, the relaxed achiever knows that important, imaginative projects lead to a lot more impressive financial results and personal satisfaction than does working long and hard. By choosing this route, you become a peak performer. You don’t have to work hard to make a decent living; you have to work smart, however.

Poet W H. Auden wisely expressed his views on work: “In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it: they must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of success in it.” The second of Auden’s three ingredients is the one that most people in the modern world overlook and violate. Most people in Western societies today put way too much time into their work lives and not enough into their personal lives.

With all the modern technology at our disposal, none of us need slave away to the extent that people did twenty or fifty years ago. Greater opportunity to seek a balanced and wholesome lifestyle exists now more than ever in the history of humankind; unfortunately, most people are too uncreative or too afraid of freedom to benefit, however. Today’s prosperous times should be able to support millions of people seeking their true selves through creative pursuits and self-expression while working only a few hours a day.