Shabda's Home

What can you be more proud of? Being very hardworking? Or being very intelligent?
Notice the question is not which is more important for success.(Intelligence most would agree).
What can you take more pride in? The fact that you put in 120% of your effort into whatever you do. Or the fact that you have a IQ rating of 150. I guess most would agree its hardwork. After all intelligence was what God gave you. Hardwork is what you bring to the party. In fact, I would go a step further and claim that hardwork is only thing for which you can be proud. You look better than Tom Cruise or are smarter than Einstein. I guess that is God’s handicraft.
So, I always wonder, what is with people always trying to prove that they did not have to work hard for what they had achieved.

Me: Hey congrats on your success in examination.
Other Guy: Oh! That is nothing. That is nothing. I really did not work hard for that.
(Implied: Oh I am better than Einstein. Its just that I do not have the time or could have Unified Field Theory tomorrow.)
Well I never claim that I am any different. It’s just that I always wonder.

Another loosely related question which I always grapple with is how do you define intelligence? And how do you define hardwork?
Hopefully most people would consider me reasonably intelligent. I am OK at studies. Can read complex tomes, understand huge mathematical formulae and even solve an occasional Sudoku. But go back a thousand years. The skills which make me intelligent today wouldn’t be of any help. Intelligence then would have been the ability to make tools, maybe to find the paths deer take and to predict if it would rain tomorrow. I guess I would be classified as pretty dumb then.
Hardwork, on the other hand, would be defined the same way now or a thousand years back. It is now, as it was then, the ability to put in your best. Every time.