Many of the world’s most accomplished people have had to work excruciatingly hard and have endured monumental sacrifices to achieve the heights of success. Winston Churchill said, “The heights achieved by men and kept were not achieved by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward through the night.”
More recently, Steve Jobs of Apple Computer at one time had no dorm room so he slept on the floor in friends’ rooms. He returned Coke bottles for 5 cent deposits to buy food with. (Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones said the band members did the same thing to buy guitar strings and other essential musical equipment in their early years.) Steve Jobs would walk 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.
In a commencement speech delivered in 2007, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg extolled the virtues of hard work. “If you’re the first one in the morning and the last one to leave at night and you take fewer vacation days and never take a sick day, you will do better than the people who don’t do that. It is very simple,” Mayor Bloomberg praised his father, William H. Bloomberg, “who worked seven days a week his entire life until he checked himself into the hospital to die.”
