This article is written by Ramanuj Mukherjee, CEO, iPleaders.

“Hard work” is the biggest reason most people never reach their goals.

Shocking, isn’t it? Given all the work-hard-and-you-will-succeed lectures you have gotten since you were a little kid, how can you accept that hard work is the biggest barrier to success?

Consider that the concept of “work hard” itself is poisonous to success.

You ask every fool who do not bother to plan things out, do not prepare ahead, do not start early and waste time procrastinating as to what makes them comfortable in their lack of initiative today, and all answers will lead to the same thing. If you dig deep.

They think one day they are going to work hard and make up for everything.

There is this huge myth that if you wake up tomorrow morning and work hard you will become successful, rich, famous or what not.

Sometimes these same people do put in some “hard work”. When they do not get desired results, they turn bitter and disillusioned and start blaming their luck instead.

It is a vicious circle.

A lot of unsuccessful folks remain stuck and never make progress because they are not ready to do the hard work. They keep dealing with the fear of hard work in their mind, when all they had to do was create good habits, take small steps towards their goals systematically over time.

Are you one of the people who think that hard work is the secret to getting rich? Research shows that people with good saving and investment habits are far more likely to become rich over time and keep their wealth rather than people who think hard work is the secret of wealth!

People who learn a little bit every day, easily, comfortably through a routine or habit, end up learning more, retain more and produce more than people who make heroic efforts for one or two days, or even a few weeks and then fall off the rails.

If I practice singing, or hockey, or contract drafting, or public speaking once a day for one hour for one whole year, and you practice day and night for 3 weeks and then stop, who do you think is going to be better at the end of 1 year, if we started from the exact same level?

Now imagine where I will get if I keep practicing for the next 10 years. You probably cannot practice day and night even for 6 months, but I can keep at it at my rather slow pace for the rest of my life.

Long-term goals are better achieved when you race like the tortoise rather than the rabbit. Slow, steady, certain and systematic usually wins easily over the heroic and irregular.

Still, our culture and our society celebrate the hero-on-a-white-horse so much that we come to romanticize the idea of ‘heroic effort’ – more popularly known as hard work.

The problem with hard work is that it is rarely sustainable, and meaningful success and outsized results come when you sustain for a long, long time.

I learned this the hard way.

When I started iPleaders, I used to count on hard work. I thought I need to work hard, day and night, as much as I can by pushing my boundaries. Over the next 4 years, as I kept this up, ignoring everything else in my life. The result?

I got burnt out time and again. Several times through that period I was depressed. I fell ill. I almost gave up and quit. Things were horrible, and I made little progress. It seemed almost impossible to carry on.

Then one day I found a wise mentor. He showed me that in my tearing hurry to succeed, I am ignoring everything else in my life. I am compromising my health, well-being, relationships, social life, finance everything.

When I looked deeper, I saw there was short-term thinking behind it. I was working as hard as I could because I wanted it to be over soon. I wanted to get rich, get famous, get successful very soon.

And in that hurry, I was ignoring my life, my skills, my learning and development, and even my passion.

My mentor made me think long term. He asked me, how long do you think it takes to make a world class cricketer, or tennis player, or even a piano master? 2 years? 5 years? 10 years?

He suggested it takes at least 15 years of continuous pursuit to get that good at something.

Are you ready to do what you are doing for 15 years?

That question really shook me. I wasn’t. Somewhere in the corner of my mind, all I wanted was to get rich quickly by building up the startup as fast as possible. I wanted quick success. All my decisions were made from that place.

When I accepted that I am running a marathon and not a sprint, it changed my life.

Instead of working hard, I started to look for creating efficiency. Systems win, hard work doesn’t. I took actions to ensure good physical and mental health because I have to last 15 years!

I focussed on building good habits! For example, one of my financial habit is to save every piece of bill I ever get and photograph them. I then send these to my finance manager. It helps to keep my and even the company’s tax bills low! I probably save thousands in tax through this one single good habit.

Another habit I created was to begin investing a minimum of 10% of my income in financial assets. No matter what money I earn, a minimum 10% of that goes into my long-term investments, never to be touched. I try to put in more, sometimes up to 30-40% even.

I used to have no savings, but thanks to this simple habit, in the last 3 years I have saved much more than I could have ever imagined. I can live off my savings for at least a year or two now if I live a simple enough life, without even earning anything!

Rather than running after a mirage of startup success, I took simple small steps about my finance, and it has been making all the difference.

Even better than habits, are systems that work automatically. I have set up automated instructions that take away a small amount from my account every month and invest into long-term blue chip shares. Even in months when I am low on cash, or financially in trouble as it happened last year, the instructions stand and money is taken from my account without fail. I cannot touch this money for the next 20 years.

This simple system has ensured that if I live another 17 years, I will be very comfortable financially. This is far better than wishing, hoping or “working hard” at it.

The same goes for learning new skills, making a successful youtube channel, or creating a successful blog.

How can you create a blog that is used by over a million people every month? Ask me, I have built iPleaders blog into that in the last 10 years. And I have no great traffic or SEO secrets to offer!

The only secret was regular publication. When we started publishing at least one article every week, no matter what, the blog finally started to take off. Then we went for 1 article a day, and the traffic jumped up massively. Eventually, we went for 3-4 articles a day, and we are growing 300% year on year.

We had to put systems in place to do things like clockwork. But once we did, it’s not about hard work anymore. It is simple work. It is a to-do list. Just get it done.

A few months back I realized I am addicted to social media. I am spending too much time arguing on feeds of random people. What should I do? The quick answer people give is something like “strengthen your willpower!” And lord knows who are the people for whom this works, it certainly is not going to work for me. I am not going to use my finite willpower for such trivial things.

Over the next week, I built a complex system of apps, extensions, and safeguards that ensure that I do not use social media for more than an hour in a day. No trying hard. No trying at all. My phones and computers block me out of facebook, LinkedIn and such other things at designated times of the day, and I have no choice but to stop getting distracted by social media.

Systems work. Every time. If they don’t, your system is flawed and you need to work on it.

I have found myself a professional coach. It forces me to reassess my schedule, priorities, and perspectives every once in a while. It is my system to stay real, grounded and focussed.

Every single thing I have done regularly in my life, as a discipline or routine, or put into a system has worked well. Everything that I left for heroic efforts someday, never fructified.

This is why our law courses also reflect this same philosophy. We emphasize on regular practice through weekly exercises, feedback and repeated corrections. Every week, spend 7-8 hours learning something you will not learn otherwise, and do it for a year at least, and you will beat your peers massively.

If you want to pick up solid knowledge on an area of law, and require knowledge more than skills, it is even possible to make good progress in just 3 months rather than 1 year! Which is why we offer some courses like that too, but there is no substitute to regular practice.

This strategy, very simple on the face, produces incredible results. People find it unbelievable when they look back and see the progress they have made, one small step at a time that all eventually added up. This helped us to dominate our niche and build a very strong reputation. We are able to charge more than 10 times of what our competitors do because our results justify such premium! However, its just the beginning and we are in it for the long haul!

Heroic efforts are heroic because they are rare. But rare and good doesn’t cut it as much as consistency and perseverance do.

So I gave up on hard work and stopped using it as a smokescreen to set myself up for failure.

What about you? Do you believe in heroic efforts or in systems and tiny but inexorable progress towards success?

Hit reply and let me know. I will read every reply!

Click here to know more about real estate law course!