What can mean diligence to modern people? Maybe readiness to perform work and take a responsibility for it. But it is also additional efforts and wasting of time. What for we must exert ourselves? Every person has own sense and purpose. Or doesn’t have.

There are a lot of examples of hard working people in history. People who took great efforts, who were ready to struggle against difficulties and achieved great result.

I can mention Chris Gardner. An American entrepreneur and stockbroker. He had not very pleasant childhood. Then he took up medicine and stockbrocking. He was jailedfor ten days, because he didn’t payed for parking tickets.

When he returned home, there was nothing left there. He worked a lot, slept with his small son in parks, at Chris’ work, at church shelter and in toilets… But his perseverance gave great results, when he made his own business. He wrote his autobiography. And later he became co-producer of film ‘The Pursuit of Happyness, film which tells story of his life.

And what we know about John Rockfeller? He was a millionaire. How? When he was seven, he grew turkeys for sale and worked to have some money because his family was absolutely poor. But later he established his own oil business and became very rich.

We can think that those two men were just lucky. But what an average person knows about life of homeless people? It is so easy to give up, to lost hope under such difficult conditions. Because it is the simplest way to live.
What I can say about modern people? I don’t think that now the all people are hard-working. To my mind there can be a lot of reasons. Some people are too infantile, just like children.

They wait for luck, wait for money, wait for fame, wait for everything. They think that everything they need will fall from the sky. Infantile believe that everybody must take care of him, help him and please him. But when such person faces difficult and cruel reality, he cannot bare with it. He take offense and give up. It happens because ‘adult child’ don’t want to take efforts and to fight for life. He is lazy and supine. There is no question about diligence.

Psychologists write about the reasons of infantilism. It happens because parents bring up children wrong, in the spirit of permissiveness. It means that children don’t know how much efforts take their parents to give them all they want, to give food, clothes, to pay much attention to children, to make pleasant conditions at home and so on.

The second type of lazy people is cheaters. They try to find profit, gravy due to cheating another people. For example dishonest wives and husbands, which marry for money; scammers, thieves, robbers and so on.
All these people don’t have enough diligence to build own full life.

Statistic says that diligence depends on national features of character. For instance rapid pace of life of Japanese people demands efficiency and speed actions. Japanese consider resting, lazy worker a black sheep and condemn him. Japanese chief is sitting in the common room, he usually doesn’t have his own room. Workers which are not very active and quick are condemned. Under such conditions everybody see all colleagues and there is no temptation to have a rest at work.

The ideal Japanese worker is hard working, serious and responsible. He can’t pay attention to personal affairs at work. He even spends more time at work with colleagues than at home with family. But it is not obligation of his boss. It is his will. It is his agreement to work extra hours.

South Korean economic is an indicator of Korean diligence and perseverance. Several decades ago South Korea was a poor country. But now the are developed and successful. It is a good example for countries which tries to fight poorness. Their success is due to people ready to work hard day and night and get a small salary. But Koreans have a share of masochism. They consider that fair man must have some difficulties to be happy. It can be called a ‘workaholism’.

Every person choose his own way in life, has own goals. But the most important is to know the balance between work and rest. When person spends too much time at work and give all energy to it it cause stress. But some people enjoy it! And nobody should condemn it. But when a person don’t want to work at all it is strange. As I already mentioned people are lazy mostly because of wrong upbringing.

But most important thing is to find a way to fight laziness and start normal full life.

First of all we live in the society, in the cities, flats and houses we don’t like. We get up every morning for doing unpleasant work and communicate with unpleasant people. What for? Maybe it is just a bad habit to live under common conditions? To live ‘as others do”? To my mind it is a form of laziness. We all have some abilities to change our lives, but we don’t do it. We just complain about our country, our work, our fate.

So the first important step is to make a decision to change something in life. We can start from something small and insignificant, something trivial.

The second step is to choose a purpose in life. A person should choose who he wants to be and what he wants to achieve in his life. Then it helps him to find a way and means to make his dream come true. When person has a real dream he wants to realize it, so that dream is the simplest way to “wake up” a desire to work.

We should help ourselves to become better every day. We can give ourselves or each others simple interesting tasks. The pleasure of performing tasks will help to find power and strength to set bigger and bigger goals.

The important thing is to develop the optimistic attitude to work. The results of work inspire and bring enjoyment. The process of work can be pleasant, interesting and enthralling. All these factors help to develop interest to work and diligence.

It is not words empty of meaning for bringing up workaholics. Every person should realize that he has one life. We will not have another chance! We will not have another chance to be smarter, richer, more intelligent, healthier…Now we all have time to improve once character, gain necessary skills and enjoy active life.