Also, months of hard work can be lost with only one or two cases of perceived lack of productivity. People have trouble evaluating long term performance, they only remember recent incidents. Thousands of hours of hard work can be lost with one big mistake or even perceived mistake.

Probably even more important that hard work is social skills. Your friendship and connection with management will take you a lot further than hard work ever will. Everyone loves charismatic, positive slackers. We also universally hate hardworking, but grumpy complainers. Spend your time being nice and you probably won’t have to work as hard.

I was at a seminar for work a couple months ago and they were talking about the attributes of successful people. The speaker for this particular session was talking about the old phrase “work smarter, not harder.” He spoke about the fact that these are two things that should not be exclusive of each other. Successful people work, and when they do it is smart AND hard.

Also, I’d add to your list that hard work comes in different forms. Some people are capable of giving 85% effort throughout the course of an entire day. Others can work really hard for 2 hours, but then need 30 minutes to rest and rejuvenate. Some work best in the morning, some work best in the middle of the night – like 2 people in the world work best right after lunch. The point: we’re different. So is hard work.