English Writing Practice: Topic 10 – The importance of hard work

English Writing Practice: Topic 10 – Sample 1

I fully agree with the claim that there is no correlation between success and luck. Moreover, I understand success to refer to one’s ability to achieve the predominant part of his goals in his lifetime, which in turn leads to a correlation between success and income since the accomplishment of such a natural goal as to provide a good future for your loved ones demands the means.

What is the simplest and most lawful way to earn enough to consider yourself a successful person? To receive a good education and to find a good job. Both receiving an education and making a career presuppose one’s readiness to work hard, and success without hard work is simply not possible for the vast majority of the world’s population. The reasons and examples listed below will strengthen my point of view.

First of all, considering an education and a career as key factors of success, one will choose to pursue a degree from a college or a university. One wishing to be admitted to the university will have to take several tests. It is doubtful that someone will be so lucky that knowing nothing, he could pass the test with a high score. A low score means failure, and that test taker will not likely be admitted. Therefore, in order to be successful, one should prepare for the tests and work hard, because a good education will provide him with a good job and an opportunity to accomplish some of his goals and dreams. In my lifetime, I have never met a person who could graduate from a college without working hard.

Secondly, it is impossible to make a career if one is indolent and lacking knowledge, at least in developed countries. Luck plays no role in achieving this success. Even if someone was unbelievably lucky enough to become a manager not being qualified enough, he will be asked to resign in the near future because of his inability due to lack of knowledge and experience to make right decisions. For instance, I used to work for a very small company owned by a friend. This company was later closed because of bankruptcy. The cause of bankruptcy was wrong strategies and decisions made by the owner. After the failure, he went to a university and worked for another company so that he could obtain experience and become a successful businessman.

Nowadays, he considers himself a successful person because he had turned into reality his two biggest dreams of producing consumer goods of high quality and making charitable donations to needy people.

In sum, as long as someone understands success as an ability to turn into reality some of his dreams and goals, he will have to work hard because he will need money. And his chances to earn that money will remarkably increase if he could graduate from a college and make a career. All of these things are simply not possible without hard work. Luck has no place in such a scheme of events.

English Writing Practice: Topic 10 – Sample 2

There is a humorous saying in English – “The grass is always greener on the other side of the valley”. The saying is used ironically to point out that there is a temptation in us all to insist that others are more fortunate than we are. This is nowhere more true than on the question of luck and hard work. When faced with the “bad times”, we often find comfort in the idea that we are special in our degree of misfortune.

I feel that such an attitude is negative, and that it can bring only further misfortune. Many famously successful people have begun from small origins. Mao was the son of a (modestly prosperous) peasant; the explorer Captain Cook was so poor that, as a child, he had to work by day and study by night; many of the affluent Americans of today are the children of the poor immigrants of yesterday. Beethoven, it should be remembered, became deaf before the end of his career. There are many, many more people who have also made genuine, though Jess spectacular, successes against the odds.

Within his own terms, a person who is born into poverty in India is a great success if he manages to own a house in later life. Poverty cannot be reduced by merely complaining and blaming others: no matter how guilty other people are, each individual must reach out to success for himself. Indeed, some economists believe that the world operates by what they call “the rule of the jungle”. They believe that in economics a person aways attempts to gain profit from his neighbor: that given the chance the poor man would quickly make himself rich by trading to his own advantage.

Also, it is presumptuous to judge another according to his or her apparent fortune. No man can ever truly understand the sufferings of his neighbor. A man who appears comfortably rich may have suffered elsewhere in his life – through the death of a loved one, for example. Retired businessmen have often worked long hours in their youth. Surely, it must be wiser to respect achievement than to deny that anyone has achieved good in the world.

To rely on notions of luck – to believe that life is a kind of lottery – is an attempt to escape reality. Paradoxically, the only time a person can claim that luck is more important than work is when he reflects on his own success. Because of that modesty, the great man then becomes even greater.