A great swimmer is known for their efficiency to cut through water effortlessly, not for splashing it around. But our neurotic culture has become addicted to splashing. Spending more hours in the water doesn't mean covering more miles.
Evolution doesn't work hard, it takes the easy route. It will decide to reach the smallest fastest route, with least resistance to reach its goals.
Humans on the other hand have crafted a culture to overly respect hard-work. We have moved away from hard-work as a by product of intelligent thinking to hard-work having a virtue of its own.
There is no virtue in working hard without understanding (before-hand or shortly into the process) if its the only route available, if it is the optimum route, the efficient route.
Part of the Japanese Metro rail system was designed using the intelligence of nature. A single-cell slime mold mapped / re-mapped the shortest most efficient ways to the railway stations. Nature likes to conserve energy to feed itself and propagate. It doesn't run into deserted spaces to affirm to its fellow beings that it has worked hard. Nature probably considers working hard as stupid.
We are addicted to hard-work like opium. A façade of effort is used as social proof to broadcast that we are worth existing. People who get things easily are often considered cheats by people who are using their muscle instead of their brains.
Inferior intelligence will always accuse the superior of cheating. - Alan Watts
The feeling of working hard should instead instigate a starting point of enquiry. It should assert clearly that something in this process is wrong, inefficient, unoptimized. How might this be made easy? How might evolution work in this case? What would it do instead of what is currently being done?
Things are not meant to be difficult. The universe is meant to be harmonious. Nature has no place for useless effort.
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