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Hard work is the noun form of the adjective hard working. It was first used in1772. It is being industrious and diligent. Hard working according to

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Webster‘s dictionary is using a lot of time and energy to do work. Hard work is the process of changing both the world and yourself so that at the end you and the world have become more connected: you've become more real to other observers in the world and they have become more real to you (Github, 2013). How much work is to be found in an activity is at least partly caused by the attitude people bring to it. The effect works both individually and collectively. Individually, if people think that something is hard then they won't find the pleasure in it. Collectively, if society at large thinks something is hard then the few individuals who attempt it will find it harder going.

Hard Work, for Sievers (2014),

is more of a mental effort than literal heavy lifting . In our business context, hard work is doing work consistently and with quality, and continuing that cycle until a real and advantageous result is produced. Hard work is about doing something that may not directly inspire you but that is necessary for you to achieve your goal. It is this mental perseverance-putting your mind to a task and seeing it through, no matter how mind-numbing or blatantly unexciting that we tend to think of as hard work in business. (p. 1).

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There is also a correlation between work and time that compounds to be hard work. Often it is not just mental perseverance through one major task, but through a significant enough of a time frame that a real and lasting result is generated. There is also an element of believing in yourself, and the work you are doing, to achieve your goal that is a driver for you to do the work necessary to see a project through. At times it is said that hard work pays off and it does so in a number of ways, but primarily through the demonstration of a result that has come to be due to a consistent application of effort. Akin to testing a hypothesis, other observers can see the results of the effort that was applied first-hand and correlate it to the demonstrated success as a proof of a concept.

The most important aspect of the concept of hard work is that it cannot easily be faked. The work is necessary and cannot be circumvented, skipped, or artificially accelerated. This does not mean that an alternate solution is not available. But, even that requires dedicated effort to understand the body of work that needs to be done and devising a new solution, method, or approach. That dedicated effort is the very essence of hard work.

In Nigeria, the work ethics of some Nigerian workers is nothing to write home about. The maxim ‗Work hard and you can achieve anything‘ has turned out to be a bit of advice that has been repeated to us so many times

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that it has sort of lost its meaning. The problem is that some already feel like they are working hard, but for many of it seems like they are not getting anywhere. But the problem with above conception of hard work is that it is not what all those successful people meant when they gave the advice ‗work hard and you can achieve anything.‘ Most of what people in Nigeria do on a day-to-day basis is simply what they have to do to survive namely; their job, their chores, their obligations to their family and the favours to their friends, etc. That is not hard work but regular work. That is their routine, the stuff that they and every other human being do every single day. Hard work is going the extra mile of taking ones work as if his or her life depends on it. It is doing that for which one is being paid for whether the boss or the supervisor is there or not. This has an economic input as it ensures greater efficiency, proper management of time and eventual maximization of profit.

As to whether an average Nigerian worker does his work diligently without coercion, monitoring or supervision, this will be a matter for further research.