The Value of Hard Work

“Hard work” is a term used for a person who spends countless hours perfecting or practicing their craft. It is spending time at the coalface where you’re interacting with the product directly.

Whether you’re making the art assets of a video game, an aspiring esports player, creating a Heads-Up Display for an esport event or an game administrator. You would have started from somewhere whether it’d be at a local LAN, playing with MS Paint or photoshopping poorly cropped memes.

Hard work is integral part of truly mastering and understanding your craft. It doesn’t matter if you have all the talent in the world. Hard work will eventually defeat talent.

Hard work should always be respected. It is easier to shout from the stands than to be in the arena itself. In the creative scene, you should always be respectful of somebody else’s work even if you dislike it.

The price of hard work is the initial embarassment. The rewards of hard work are so much more fulfilling.

What does Hard Work entail?

Well, where do we start? Let’s start with a big example to allow you to understand. Let’s say you wish to organise a premier LAN event for Counter-Strike 2. It sounds simple but it has so many working parts that you have to be aware of.

Now let’s overwhelm you as the reader deliberately as this will give you a deeper understanding on how crazy running an event can be!

Let’s consider EVERYTHING

1. You need funding for your event — where will you get that from? Entry Fees? Tickets? Sponsors?
2. You need a venue — how many people are you expecting? Is the venue close to hotels? Does the venue have the capabilities for an event to be produced online? Is it able to supply the internet speed required? If not, how can you resolve this problem?
3. You need teams to participate — how are these teams picked? Based on a rating system? Based on an online qualifier (which you need to organise to!)? Based being native to the country? A combination of all 3? What are the prizes for the event?
4. You need PCs for the competition as well as peripherals — how are the PCs picked? Can you get these PCs from a sponsor? Could players bring their own gear?
5. You need a crowd for the event — what are your ticket prices? how is it advertised? what sort of food/drinks that you wish to be available? what sort of things will be added to entertain the crowd?
6. You need production staff to produce the show — do you wish to make your own HUD? Who makes your art assets? Who makes your videos? Who writes the text in the ticker? How do you get the show to the online and offline space? How do you organise the lighting, player webcams and display to those at the venue and online? Who runs the camera in and out of game?
7. Do we need commentary for the event? How do we cast it? At the event or online?
8. Do you need security? How much? Do you need barriers?
9. Do we do it ourselves? Hire people to do it for us? Both?

Now by this point, you’re like either “That’s a lot!” or “Hang on, there is much more with that”. If you answered the first, you have acknowledged hard work. If you answered the second, you have experienced hard work.

Let me tell you that hard work isn’t just on a singular person, it is a collaborative effort especially for these big events.

This is why I state that Hard Work needs to be respected because it isn’t easy to make these magnificent spectacles. Hard Work doesn’t happen like montages in the Rocky movies.

Hard work provides Understanding of a Craft

Hard Work is key to truly understand the essence of a craft itself. It allows you to understand the smaller details to a person’s wants and allows you to be adaptive to those wants.

To stick to esports, one example could be being an game administrator or referee. At the start, you would be mostly sticking to the book as you don’t know any better.

Over time, you’ll quickly adapt the rulebook or even adjust/change the rulebook to suit the necessary needs of a client or to address flaws within the rules.

The understanding of the craft allows you stand out from the rest as you have developed your own theory, philosophy and style of it.

Compare this to a person who react to a decision and are critical of it. It is highly unlikely that they have any sort of strucuture/regiment and are simply going whether the wind blows. They have not immersed themselves in it therefore only have a cursory understanding.

People often counter with this argument stating that you don’t have to be a chef to say the food is bad. The food can be bad but you don’t have the understanding on why it is bad. It is the key difference.

Using Counter-Strike as an example, when a team is playing poorly. People often tell the team to disband or that they’re fixing games.

Most of the time, it is much different as Counter-Strike evolves more into a mental game than a mechanics game.

You spend a lot of your time studying other teams, watching demos, learning grenade setups and studying other players’ timings more than you do actually playing.

When you go back into that game, you may notice that Player A watched Player B’s style and noticed some patterns. He utilised those patterns to create a situation where he can nullify/eliminate Player B consistently. Player B may adapt and improvise his positioning which will confuse Player A

Understanding is a value that can only be attained via Hard Work and is a key part of it. It allows you to mold and perfect your craft (and take free headbands away from players, hi Wander).

Hard Work provides Mastery

Hard Work also provides mastery over a particular area. Whether it is playing the game, spectating the game or providing the logistics for the game.

An example is content creator where at the start, it would be hard as you don’t know what to record, how to record or even how to edit.

However, over time (and plenty of youtube videos later), you’ll be able to refine on how to record, how to edit and even what to record. The rewards aren’t just in the production quality but how quickly and efficiently you are able to do them.

Your first video may take forever to create but your subsequent videos would take less effort and time than your previous videos (if they were of the same standard).

Your first video would likely be terrible but follow-up videos are likely to better than your first video. I know mine definitely are!

This is what you call a mastery where you are achieving a sense on how to record, how to edit and what to record. There will come a choice just like in most RPGs where you can only specialise in one of them.

So some choose to operate in the how to record mastery to help other content creators out with their ideas.

Others choose on editing to provide other content creators with editing skills to save their time on editing.

Others choose what to record to give specific content creators ideas on future content.

This is the gift of mastery and it overlaps with understanding substantially as understanding brings the same reward that mastery does.

Hard Work builds confidence within yourself

Hard Work entails a sort of philosophy or world view within yourself. This breeds self-confidence and achievement. You gain experience and self-fulfilment through hard work.

As you plough through the slog in the coal face, you may think why am I doing this? And then many months later, you are sitting there handling a similar situation easily and you’ll state to yourself, “Thank god, I did it”.

From the experience and achievement breeds confidence to tackle bigger and better projects or prevents you from making mistakes that occurred in previous projects.

It breeds confidence to adapt or adjust to different circumstances as they arise.

One example was mentioned earlier where a Game Administrator wouldn’t normally deviate from the rulebook in the first instance. However, through experience and time, they’ll develop the confidence to deviate from it within the understanding of the rule.

Hard work builds character

Hard Work is a true test of character, it goes deep to your core to define who you are. It isn’t an exclusive choice and you can change over time via ironically enough hard work. To build character, you will have to put yourself at risk.

Hard Workis a large indicator on what you are deep down beyond the facade that you portray. Through hard work, the inside and outside will merge where your words will match your actions.

Hard Work are always action-based whether it is commentating on a game, reporting on a local LAN or helping an old lady across the street. It is key aspect of building the core person that you are or building that core person that you want to be.

It is incredible what Hard Work can do when it lines your own words with your own actions. It is integral to your own mental stability that these lineup otherwise living a facade is incredibly exhausting.

Skipping Hard Work is detrimental

The greatest risk to anyone is skipping the hard work. I know some people who are very overbearing to make sure that a person isn’t at risk when trying something for their first time.

This could be beneficial but in the long term, to their detriment as they would be more dependant on others rather than to themselves. They don’t develop the confidence, the mastery or understanding of a craft.

Plagiarists are prime example of this where they skip the hard work by copying other people’s stuff. They actually never develop any of the above and are constantly living a lie.

They are playing a game of Cat and Mouse until somebody notices that they’ve stolen someone else’s work and the fella below pops up with a new Youtube Video about them.

Now when they get caught, they literally have to disappear? Why? They never actually learnt anything and would have to start from scratch.

They don’t understand the work that they are copying either, they’re just repeating it like a parrot.

They could never put themselves at risk to pay the price of Hard Work (which is embarassment).

People have the fear of looking bad so that they always want to be good and perfect. To maintain that notion, they may get desperate enough to steal content from others to always look good. Plagiarists are a good example of this.

Theft is the ultimate disrespect in any creative endeavour. A person who values hard work will always ask the owner of that art if they can use it. A person who doesn’t understand it will try to utilise any reason or excuse under the sun to avoid it.

There are a few examples where they’ll try to hide behind mental health, fair use or any other aspects to protect their facade on looking good.

A few extra excuses can be harvested from reactors who essentially say that they provide advertisement for your video, more subscribers and other benefits that can’t be accurately measured.

Skipping the hard work is effectively like eating junk food. It tastes good and feels good at the time. In the long-term, it is terrible for you and it catches up with you.

Hard Work — Food for the Soul

In conclusion, Hard Work is essential for long-term success and respect in life. Hard Work provides:

1. Confidence
2. Understanding
3. Mastery
4. Character

Avoiding or skipping Hard Work is effectively wasted time and you never actually truly understand something, have the confidence to make something, have the mastery to create something or have the character to be something.

So dive in and get hands on with whatever you want to master!