Why Hard Work is Overrated (Podcast Episode 37)

Foreign podcast and Spotify. You guys are listening. And of course, Everybody who's on YouTube every week watching shout out to you guys. You guys aren't on podcast right now. Go ahead, do me a favor, leave a review. Let me know what you think. You have any suggestions, let me know in the review below. And if you guys are on YouTube, drop a like comment. Subscribe if you're new. New podcast coming every single Sunday, so be prepared for that. Like I always say, every week, the majority of my topics are really based on comments. I get DMs, I get questions, I get. So my Instagram is visiondrivenbasketball. So if you ever have any questions for me or anything like that, make sure you send me a dm. And again, a lot of my ideas come from this. So this is another one that, you know, when I see reoccurring questions or reoccurring themes, I should say, that's when I know, like, okay, I want to talk about that to get my 2 cents on it and to just be able to help out people who maybe have a view on something that I think is incorrect. Or I think maybe if you made a little bit of a shift in the way that you thought about this, maybe it would make your results even better. And ultimately, that's my goal with all this stuff. So that's what today is all about. Now, obviously you guys would have seen the. I actually, before I even get started, I got a couple other people in the studio today. My cousin, you guys all know, Cam Cam's in the studio today too, so we'll see. My cousin's currently. I don't even know what he's doing. Probably. Probably listening to Killer Roy. What? Something like that. I don't know. But so they'll be in and out today. Studio crew is growing. Be prepared for them in the future. But today you guys all saw the title of this episode. And before you guys, you know, freak out and say like, oh, what are you talking about? Hard work and all this stuff, well, just hear me out because I think I have a good point to make on all this stuff. You guys obviously see it. I'm calling hard work overrated. That is not to say that it's not necessary. Obviously, the person who is in the gym every day is going to get better results than the person who's sitting down, you know, playing 2K and watching Netflix all day every day. That's not the point I'm trying to make. My point is that hard work is put on a pedestal that it probably shouldn't be put on, okay, you need it. But only to a certain extent is it actually valuable because a lot of people can take things overboard and then at that point it becomes all about hard work and the other factors that actually go into getting better at something, being great at something. A lot of times people in every aspect of life but basketball specifically players will just kind of throw that stuff away. So that's, that's what I want to talk about today. If you ask anybody what's the most important key to being successful or to getting better at something, probably for most people, they're going to say hard work. That's the first thing that most people are probably going to tell you when they ask, hey, how did you get good at that? Or hey, how can I get better at this? They're going to say, hey, you got to show up every day, you got to work hard. And that off the bat is good advice. You have to work hard, you have to show up every single day and you have to put in the actual time and the effort to improve at that. Unfortunately, that's where basically all the focus goes to. So every player is so focused on working hard that they prioritize that over any other factor that also is going to be crucial in them getting where they want to get to. And definitely that's something that I've, that I've found fell into basketball related, non basketball related. Really. This is going to apply to anything that you do. But of course it's always meant well, right? You work hard because you want to be great at it, right? So you do what your people tell you to do because that's what you're supposed to do, right? But I think there's a better way to approach things. We're going to dive into that and talk about exactly what my view on this is. And let's first, let's talk about what does this hard work look like. So, you know, like I said before, hard work isn't bad. Hard work is obviously necessary. You need hard work. But there comes a point where people take hard work and then say that, oh, if I just work harder than everybody else, then that means that I'm going to be the best. And that's just not true at all. Not even close to being true. And we're going to talk about that even more. But a lot of times when players take this and they just take it at service value, they say, okay, you know, if I go work for 3, 4, 5, 6 hours straight every single day, I heard a player dm me say he wants to work out 16 hours a day. That is what I'm talking about right there. If that's you and you're saying, hey, you know, 5, 6, 7, 12, 24 hours a day, I want to be in the gym working. That's where I say hard work becomes overrated and oversold. And players say that just because they go and work at something, they're going to get good at it. And that's just not how it works. You know, typically this player is going to feel like if they didn't leave the gym, you know, dead tired, sore, injured, all this stuff, and they didn't work hard. I had another, I had a conversation with someone on one of my YouTube videos, my older YouTube videos this past week. He basically was saying like, you know, his point was that he felt like he needed to run himself into the ground with every workout. My, my basic point was that like, at the end of the day, like, you have to be focused on the process over the outcomes. And essentially what I'm saying is that if you're just so focused on like, oh, I have to hit this goal, I have to score 20 points this game, I have to do this and do that. You don't are actually able to enjoy the process of going to the gym and working. And that's where your ultimate focus is at. Because you can control the process, you can control the work that you put in, you can control all that sort of stuff. The quality of work you put in, which we're going to talk about, you can control that because you don't control ultimately, if the ball is in the basket, you can shoot it perfectly and that ball might still not go in, right. It might roll in and out. So you have to be completely dedicated to that focus and you have to ultimately love doing it. And if you don't, you're going to have issues sticking with it. When you don't succeed, when the outcome is not good, or if you plateauing, you don't see that success right away. And so basically his point back to me was like, if, if I don't, if I'm not feeling injured, if I don't have shin splints, I'm not super sore when I get done, if I don't hate working out the entire time, then it probably wasn't good. That was basically what he was trying to tell me. And so of course, any of you who have listened to me before know that I completely would disagree with that. Ultimately, you work out to become as great as you can at actually playing basketball, right? We don't work out just for the sake of working out and feeling like, oh, you know, I went in the gym and I, you know, borderline injured myself because I was going so hard. Like, that's not. Like, that might feel good, but it's not really a medal of honor you want to wear because ultimately, who would. It doesn't really matter, right? It doesn't. No one really cares how hard you work. They care about the results that you give. So if you're injured, right? If you're injured, you probably aren't able to go as hard when you're working out. So there's one thing, meaning that your quality of your workouts aren't going to be as good. Also, if you're getting injured in workouts, chances are something worse. There's going to be a worse injury going along down the line. So that's not what we want. We want the results. We don't. The actual workouts. That's not what we're concerned with. So today I want to talk about a couple different principles that really will apply to this, and it's going to give you a better idea of what exactly I mean, when I'm going at. Because you guys are probably all like, well, if we're not supposed to work hard, what are we supposed to do? Again, that's not completely true, but I want to basically have you guys shift the way that you approach this. So the first thing I want to talk about something called the 8020 principle. And this is a really, really interesting rule that I'm sure a lot of you guys have heard of before. But basically what that means is that 80% of your results in something are going to come from 20% of your action, okay? So 80% of the. The results come from only 20% of what you actually do, okay? So a lot of people think, oh, everything that I do matters, but really, most of your results are going to come from a very small amount of the actual time that you put into it. So for a businessman, right, for a salesman, 80% of his profits are going to come from 20% of his customers. Some customers are going to spend more, some will spend less, but ultimately, most of his profit is going to come from a small minority of the people that. That are. That buy from him, okay? And that can go for really anything in business. That's really where this rule originated from, was economics. And if you go. Let's say you go to a hardware store, right? You have to fix something around the house. You have to fix a, you know, maybe you have to fix a pipe in your bathroom. And you have to get, let's say you have to get 10 tools, right? You have to get 10 different tools to be able to fix this. The 8020 rule would say that more than likely the top 20 or 20% of those tools are going to be responsible for 80% of the job that you do. So you're going to use two tools to do 80% of that job, right? You might end up using all ten. But really, two of them are going to do the majority. 20% of them are going to do the Majority, 80% of the work. Okay? And so, you know, just, you know, as a test, right? So let's say you're in school, you're taking the test. 20% of what you studied is going to be responsible for 80% of your test score, okay? You put in all that time studying for that test. 20% of the information that you actually were studying that's going to be responsible for 80% of your score. You're going to have a couple essay questions that were on topic that you study, then a couple other questions, and all of a sudden it's going to add up. And 20% of what you study is responsible for the majority of your test. Okay? And in the NBA, actually, because I wanted to get some hard, like some really, like, factual numbers with this rule too. In the NBA, it's last season, it's a fact that 80% of the points scored in the NBA last year were scored by 20% of the players. The top 20% of the players in the NBA scored 80% of the total points scored for the entire season. And sometimes with this rule, it's not always going to be exactly 80, 20. It might be, you know, 75, 25 or 9010 or 95, 5 even. But the, the essential principle of this is that most of your results are going to come from a small percentage of the actual work that you do. So I wanted to again get even more numbers with this. So this is what I went through a little deep dive on my channel yesterday just to see if it's the same with me, with my channel. So I looked at my top, the top 20% of my videos views wise, and I believe it was my top 47 videos. So 47, that's 20% sold in my top 47 videos views wise. And they accounted for, I believe it was 933,000 views or some number like that. And it was 80.25% of my views came from 20% of my videos. So there's that principle showing up again. The top 20%. I put out a lot of videos, but the top 20% of them are responsible for the majority of my channel views subscribers, all that stuff. Okay, so there's that principle again in action here. So we're gonna kind of relate that back. Being able to recognize this, you can see that the amount of work that you do really isn't as important as the quality that you do. Because ultimately your success is gonna be determined by 20% of things that you do, right? The majority of your success will be determined by that 20% of things that you do. So you have to make sure that the work that you put in is going to be very high quality, right? 20% of the time that you spend working out is going to be more important and productive than the rest of that time. That small minority of time that you spend and 80% of your in game results is going to come from 20% of your training. And that's that rule showing up again. So what does that mean for you ultimately? Means you need to prioritize quality over quantity. You don't want that, that 20% to have, you know that that's gonna make all the difference for you if that workout in general is low quality. If you have a five hour workout and you're only going, you know, ranging between 40% and 80% the whole time, because no one's going, no one's going 100% for a five hour workout, right? If you're only going on average 65%, then that top 20% of your workout is not going to be high quality. It's not going to translate well for you when you need to be at 100% quality. When you want to play in games, right? When you get real defense on you, you want to be at your best. 65% quality for a workout is not going to cut it for you. Okay? So let's keep that in mind. So part of that means you need to prioritize what you work on. So that might mean that if you're a guard, you should be working on skills that you need to do that the majority of the time in games you're going to be, you're going to be doing, right? So you don't need to work extensively on post moves. If you're a 5, 10 point guard, right? That's not what you're going to be doing most time in games. You should work on your shooting, your ball handling, your ability to score out of game situations and your ability to make plays in those situations. And that way you truly maximize that time and you make sure that 20% of your action can actually lead to 80% of your results. And most importantly, that 20% of your action was all high quality work. Therefore, that 80% is also going to be high quality. Okay? So you can see how these two things can start to relate. And ultimately this leads me to my biggest point, which is the whole idea of this episode, which is the fallacy of hard work. You know, a lot of players think that the key to success is hard work. Like the key. People think this in everything. You know, they. The key to, you know, growing on YouTube is just about hard work. Or the thing that the key to making a lot of money is just about hard work or the key to, you know, being a great student is just about hard work. Hard work, again, plays a piece in all that. Hard work is. Hard work is like the entry fee that you pay, right? You have to do that. It's not negotiable. Okay, But a lot of players think that the players who work the hardest are the ones who are the best. Right? They think that Kobe was the best because he worked the hardest or Michael Jordan was the best because he worked the hardest. But if you look at this from a logical perspective, this is really a bad point to try and make and base your own actions on what these other guys did. Right. Kobe and Mike are praised and documented for their hard work, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they worked harder than every other basketball player who's ever played basketball before. Right? We can't just make that assumption. Again, they may be documented doing it more, and maybe they have, maybe that is true. But again, there's no way to really document that. So it's not really fair to be able to say that. And you know, that. All being said, again, we got to get into this. Let's say that Kobe Bryant is the hardest ring player of all time, which he may well be. He may well be the. Ultimately, he doesn't have the most MVPs. Where he doesn't have the most finals wins or most Finals MVPs. He isn't the all time leader in points. Like, there's. There's a lot of players who all have done more than he has. So does that mean that they worked harder than he did? Not necessarily. Maybe it does, maybe doesn't. Right? So that's why just looking at hard work is not a good metric to use when we talk about who, like how to become the best or better. At something, right? It's not the, not the metric you should be using. So if we look at this in a more general sense, right? There's 450 players in the NBA. Okay? Are those 450 players the 450 hardest working basketball players on earth? There's no way that they are, right? Because maybe the guy who, the, who's the 453rd best player in the world who's not making an NBA roster, he might work harder than some other guy who's in the NBA. And there can be a couple reasons for that. So there's other factors that play into this, right? It's not just about the hard work. The work that you put in. I could work as hard as Kobe Bryant did. I could put in as many hours, work on the same shots he did from a young age. And guess what? It would not matter because Kobe Bryant is six foot six and a freak athlete, right? Same with Michael Jordan. Six was six freak athlete. That's not to say the hard work didn't play a part in what they did. But also the genetics part of it also plays a big role in what is. And that's why, going back to my point before that, there might be a player out there who's the 463rd best player in the world and he works super, super hard. But there's a guy, you know, maybe he's only, you know, six foot two and can't jump that high, so he's in the G League now. But there's another guy who's the, you know, 175th best player who's in the NBA, but he's 6 foot 10 and jumps 40 inches. So he might not have. He might not even have worked as hard as that other guy is. But he has those natural abilities that aid him affording that. So there's immediately we can throw the idea that hard work is the most important thing out the window because it's not the only thing right there. And it's not the only factor that we're going to talk about. Obviously genetics. There's not much you can do about it, but. But we're going to talk about what exactly you can do moving forward. You know, not everybody is built the way Kobe Bryant is. You know, a lot of times another big thing is like people be like, oh, you know, NBA players do this. So it means I should do this. Kobe Bryant is. There are some people who are just built to withstand what he did, right? The first of all, if you're Kobe Bryant, you have access to World class training, right? World class trainers, world class recovery nutrition around the clock. So you, you can afford to put in a little bit extra time because you're going to have access to a lot of, a lot of technology, a lot of things that most players don't have access to. You have access to, you know, a billion dollar organization that's going to help you and pay for everything that you need. So there's that right there. He also was able to build it over years and years of work. So it's not like he just decided one day he was going to work for four hours a day. That was something he built his way up to. And also again, there are some guys who just naturally can do more. And you put, you piece all, all that stuff together and you have Kobe Bryant, okay? But you know, there's one Kobe Bryant, right? There's, there's a reason that he's so different and it's because that, so trying to be somebody, in my opinion is not the best way to maximize what you can actually do. So for, for him it worked. That doesn't mean that that's the same for everybody, trust me. Like there's some Division 3 basketball player out there who is working harder than a lot of D1 guys, but that, you know, some of those D1 guys he's working harder than are going to go to the NBA and that Division 3 guys not going to. And the, the again that comes down to a lot of things, a lot of times natural talent. So let's also consider this though, inputs versus outputs. So what this means essentially is that the, the input or what you put in and then the return the results. So the outputs, right. A lot of times the, the general thought is that, okay, the more work that I put in, the more, the more work that I have as my input, the better my output or my results will be. So more work means better results. And you know, sometimes that's true, right? To an extent that is true. If you, if you don't put in any work and you start to put in a little bit of work, your, your output's going to be better, right? To an extent that, that, that works. But let's think about this. There's a bricklayer out there, right? There's somebody who lays bricks for a living and he works 16 hour shifts, right? And let's say he makes $25 an hour, okay? That's hard work. Back breaking work. You're doing, you know, a lot of hard labor right there. You're working very, very hard for Long hours. You make $25 an hour. Okay? Meanwhile, you take some. An investor, a billionaire like Warren Buffett, who doesn't work 16 hours a day, you know, he might still work 12 or 14. Like, he might still work a lot of hours, but he's not working that 16 hour day. Maybe he is. Let's say he is working 16 hours a day. Maybe. Let's say he is. Well, he still makes $1.54 million an hour. Okay? And he's doing work that is not backbreaking. It's easier work in general, right? There's a lot of stuff that goes into it. But when you just compare the two, being a bricklayer versus being an investor. Being an investor is much easier work than the guys are bricklayer. So the guy who works harder doesn't actually get a better output. The guy who's inputting more hard work doesn't necessarily get a better return on that. The guy who is putting in less work is getting a significantly better output. So just because he works harder doesn't mean he's going to get a better result. And what's the difference there, right? The difference is that Warren Buffett's work is worth more, plain and simple. It's just more valuable work. It's more valuable stuff that he's doing. And it's not the amount of work that you do. It's. And it's not the. It's not how hard you do that work. It's ultimately how valuable that work is that ultimately is going to determine how good your result is. So knowing that this means that as important as it is to, to, you know, to work hard, it's as important, if not more important, to make sure that the work you do is actually valuable. And valuable work is basically just smart work. Right? It's the same thing. So working smart is the same thing as working, you know, working valuable. And the questions that you can ask yourself, is the work that you put in the highest quality work you can possibly be putting in? Right. Is the quality of your workouts as high as it can be, or are you just trying to get a number? Are you just trying to hit three hours for your workout, or are you making sure that, listen, I'm going to be in here for an hour, hour and a half, two hours, and make sure that every rep I do is going to be as, as, as great a rep as possible. And that's how I actually measure how good my workouts are. Are you spending your time wisely, right. Working on things that you're actually going to be doing in games? Are you trying to do every single thing? Are you trying to work on your post moves? You're trying to work on, you know, a bunch of stuff that maybe you don't need to work on or maybe you are a post player, you're trying to work on, you know, your pull up threes. Maybe you don't ever shoot pull up threes, right? Maybe that's not what's going to be your bread and butter ultimately. So is the entire hour or two hours you spent working out, was that valuable work, was that high quality work? And if it is, you're going to make a lot more progress and your output is going to be significantly better than the player who's just trying to outwork people or work harder than people by, you know, hitting some arbitrary number, right? If all that they care about is, oh, work hard, work hard, work hard, I'm going to get in the gym, I'm going to run a million sprints, I'm going to beat myself into the ground and that's it. Maybe that's that that's their entire focus and maybe they don't take any, you know, pay attention to, oh, how valuable is this? Like, how is this going to translate for me in games, right? Am I going to, did I work on situations that I'm going to be in that I'm going to be good at? And maybe they didn't, but maybe you, you know, you aren't the one out there trying to, you know, prove something. You're just out there saying, listen, I'm going to go work for an hour and a half and I'm going to work on this skill or these couple skills. And I know this is going to translate because I do this in games, I need to be good at this. So, so now I'm just going to make sure that every rep that I do is game speed, high quality. And while you may not be putting as much in right compared to that other player, you might not be putting as as much time in and ultimately your workouts might not be as difficult physically as his might be, but your output is going to be better because the value you put in to that is going to be, is going to, is going to return to you with that output. Meanwhile, the value he puts in is also going to return to him and it's not going to be as valuable as yours was. So if you want to truly start improving, then let's change things. Instead of thinking that you have to put in more work or more time to get a better results, let's look at the actual quality of work and say, hey, you know what, if I put in more quality into my work, then the value, the return that I get is going to be much higher and that's where I'm going to start to see the results. Okay? So if that becomes your biggest focus, then your outputs are going to start to become much better and ultimately you'll become a much better player or really again at anything. This could go for school, this could go for a business, this could go for literally anything. It's all about the quality that you're putting into it. And this is my whole entire point. This is why I say that hard work is overrated because everybody thinks that it's just hard work, hard work, hard work. If I work harder than that guy, then I'm gonna do better than him. And that's not how it is. There's other factors that are involved. So if we can have that hard work, right, if we can have the sense like, you know, I'm gonna work hard, but also I'm gonna make sure that the work I put in is also smart and it's valuable work and it's high quality work, then ultimately that's where you get the best of both worlds and, and you see the return on investment with your inputs and then your output. So this is a very popular talking point that again I've seen twice this week just in DMS comments, all this sort of stuff. So I like to just give my my sense on it. And ultimately, like I said guys, corporate questions for me, send me a DM on Instagram @vision4basketball. I get a lot of comments on YouTube so I might miss stuff at times. So if I do, just send me a DM and again I'll probably be doing a Q and A at some point soon again because I had a lot of questions on my last one that I didn't get to. So I'll probably be doing another one soon. And by the way, hope you guys all had a great Christmas. This is dropping a couple days after. I think it'll drop on the 27th of December. So hopefully you guys all had a great Christmas. And thanks to all you guys who tuned into the live stream. The ball handling workout. Got a quick 25 minute session. Good work, you guys carved out some time of your day. Obviously Christmas is a very busy day for a lot of you guys so you caught up some time. So shout out to you guys for that. If you missed that. It's on my channel now so if you want to go through that workout you can. That's all I have for you guys. Like I said if you guys are on Apple podcasts go ahead and leave the review. Let me know what you think. Any questions, comments, suggestions, drop them down below in that review and I'll of course see that. And honestly probably one of the easy reasons for me to see it is because you know I have less reviews than I have comments or DMS so you know you want to stand out. There's one way for you YouTube make sure you guys like and subscribe if you are new and also make sure you guys put notifications because again if I ever go live or if I ever post something or I ever you know make a post on my community tab you guys will get notified about it. So just go ahead and do that for me. You get everything first and I'll talk to you guys soon. Peace Sam.