Hard work is the currency of success in business

The name Okello has been trending on social media for the past three weeks. This is after he captured the hearts of President Uhuru Kenyatta and Kenyans thanks to his stroke of genius.

He did a portrait of the President that earned him praise from Kenyans on social media and from State House Digital Director, Dennis Itumbi. Dennis expressed interest in the portrait which led to the President calling Okello. The rest is history.

You see, a century ago, Thomas Edison came up with one of his famous sayings: “Genius is one per cent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”

Edison knew from experience that the systematic hard work of trial-and-error pays off. His inventions, like the light bulb and the phonograph, emerged through thousands of attempts as he refined.

Coming up with an idea is the easy part. Anything in the world can inspire you to come up with what you think is the greatest idea in the history of mankind.

Something can pop in your head when you least expect it, but then how do you go about executing and turning that idea into a business?

It’s all about putting in the stress-inducing, hair-pulling, nerve-racking work. Plain and simple.

You have to be willing to throw this idea over your shoulders, onto your back and carry it to wherever it needs to go to be successful. You cannot be afraid to get your hands dirty.

From my experience and observation, success is much less the product of one brilliant idea than of a great deal of hard work, well-executed and sustained over a long period of time.

Even in the best of times, no one will just hand you a position of great value for nothing. If your goal is to be a partner or managing director, no one can guarantee you’ll attain it.

But if hard work is the currency of success, there are things you can do to make that effort work as hard as possible for your up-and-coming career.

As with many apparently spontaneous workplace triumphs, good innovation is the result of well-planned project management, or, more specifically, “process management.”

It’s not always clear where the process will end up, so it’s best for team leaders to lead from behind, giving the team frequent feedback and building in feedback loops, encouraging them to stay positive and keep moving, and testing and refining their ideas as they gradually develop an outcome.

Okello narrated how pupils used to be ordered to take an afternoon nap and he would stay up drawing the teacher who would be too busy marking classwork.

Weight of vision

The teacher did not notice him but it was not long before the class monitor did and Okello was in trouble.

“The class monitor reported me to the teacher for making noise with a pencil,” Okello told a local newspaper. The teacher summoned him to the staff room and Okello thought he would be punished. Instead, the teacher directed him to a colleague who teaches Art and Craft.

Everyone would have a successful business if it were a simple task to achieve. Those doing it are the ones who are running the marathon with the weight of their vision on their shoulders.

You’ve already put in so much work; it would be a shame to let all that perspiration go to waste.

In the end of course, occupational success is preordained for no one. Many talented people compete for relatively few coveted positions. But you can take certain actions to improve your odds.

Blue-collar work

And if you do, regardless of how things turn out in a particular instance, at the very least you’ll have the benefit of broadening your skills and the satisfaction of knowing you gave your best effort.

To achieve white-collar success, you need to put in blue-collar work. So grab your lunch pail and a change of shirt, because you are about to put in more work than you ever dreamed possible.

Mr Waswa is management and HR specialist and managing director of Outdoors Africa. E-mail: [email protected].