The age-old ideals of work hard and you’ll be successful may not hold true if you are using it incorrectly. Is it work hard or be busy?

Many of us are so busy yet we get nowhere. We wonder why? We are not yet successful or reaching our goals because we are busy all darn day!

Let’s look at the definitions of each:

Hard Work: A great deal of effort or endurance.
Busy: Having a great deal to do. Keep Occupied.

Hard work represents endurance, if we keep up the continued effort we will eventually see results and success.

Keeping up continued effort doesn’t say continued busyness!

You see being busy just means you are always doing something but is anything being accomplished? You can put your kid to work to clean their room and it will take them all day and very little to show for it. Yet if they put in some effort (hard work) they would have gotten that thing cleaned and organized within a few hours. (Depending on the size of the mess to begin with.)

It’s something the younger generation struggles most with when working with the older generation and I am going to guess this has been going on for generations!

With each generation, we have advancements in how things are done, manual labor used to be a large part of farming. Today, with tractors that drive themselves, it’s far less manual labor and it makes thing easier allowing for more downtime. This makes it easy for the younger generation to be looked at as lazy.

With these advancements, we also see the younger generation always thinking of ways to make things easier and throwing away the outdated ways. This change tends to be a struggle for the older generation, as sometimes they are so used to the day to day hustle that to change it would be out of the ordinary.

What some may not realize is this, yes we can go out about our day saying we are so busy but at the end of the day can you say it was productive? Can you truly say you were working hard and accomplished a lot in your day or are you looking back and noticing that the busy work really is not serving you more so being a distraction?

We need to recognize that busy does not create income.

Working smarter and more efficiently with steady effort creates income. Today’s farmers do not need to be on the farm 365 days a year to justify their worth. If they are done harvesting and want to take a week’s vacation they can do that.

It’s a luxury that has come with the advancements in Ag.