Is hard work really the key?

I'm not gonna talk about hard work being the key to success, since I didn't achieve the ultimate success to actually be able to talk about it. However, something I want to discuss is if hard work is the key to learning something, or if there's another way.

Some of you know that lately I've been really interested in 3D, and I started learning Blender in order to create all kind of things. After watching a few tutorials and working on two scenes, I was able to learn just enough to then move to creating abstract things for Graphic River and Creative Market.

While I've been doing that for a few months now, I don't think I had a day in which I had to spend 12 hours straight focused only on working. Sure, I invested a lot of time into all kind of secondary projects in order to improve my skills, but I didn't really work "hard", at least not as hard as some people are.

But, I managed to somehow improve. I can clearly see how easy it is for me to do a lot of things nowadays, despite the fact that I wasn't obsessed with Blender and I wasn't spending crazy amounts of time working.

The reason I think that happened is because while I didn't work really hard, I worked in a smart way, and I tried to focus on the things I didn't know from the start. That's why the first secondary project I started working on after I finished watching the tutorials involved a cabin, nature, interior, and all kind of elements.

It's not finished yet, because I started working on something different, but it taught me so much, that I was able to start working on another scene, applying all the things I learned from the previous one, while learning even more new methods and techniques to improve my work.

Then, last week, I started working on something really small for a competition (I'll talk about that in another article) and to my surprise, I was able to create a pretty decent scene in less than 3 days, using all the methods I learned from previous works.

That, combined with a lot of time spent thinking about how I could've worked better and how I should approach something when I'll work again helped me figure things out while I was working, while I was playing games, even while I was showering.

I didn't need to work for hours and hours every single day in order to get better, I just needed to focus on the things I didn't know, constantly challenge myself with building things I had no idea how to build and, overall, improve where I lacked improvement.

I'm not saying that hard work isn't the way to go. I'm also not saying that if you work really hard you won't improve enough. Working for long periods of time is great. If you feel like spending 12 hours or more creating something, go for it!

What I'm saying is that not working really hard, but trying to be smart about the way you approach things and about what you focus on the most can also produce great results and help you make progress.