Originally written in 2011, minor edits in 2023

 If there is one secret of success known to all people since ancient times, that is hard work! This used to be one certain way of being successful. “Used to be?”, you may wonder! Yes, used to be. These days, in this ultra-competitive world, everyone knows the value of hard work. So, people who want to be successful don’t take chances by being lazy. Everyone is working hard. So just working hard alone is not enough these days. We need other secrets too. That’s wherein the value of this book lies.

However, hard work is the most fundamental of all the principles of success. Without hard work, success is unthinkable. You cannot expect me to be lazy who doesn’t want to work and also be successful in my endeavors. If you consider success to be a multi-story building, hard work is the ground floor. Without having the ground floor, there can be no building for sure. Having a ground floor is not enough though. We need to keep adding floors to it. But first we need the ground floor to add other floors onto it (I now realize I may have said the same thing in an earlier chapter but who cares, these statements are supposed to be figurative and not accurate. You can think of one as basement and the other as ground floor, if that matters).