>I liked this alot. Its a great way to throw new light on a
>situation. Did your four year old buddy earn that stripe?

He sure did!

>Are unearned results just the same?

No, but I've always found this to be perception based. If someone feels like they've earned something they respond differently than if they feel like it was handed to them. As a martial arts teacher I often put this knowledge to use.

In the case of my little buddy his green stripe was for learning two sparring techniques. Now are the sparring techniques really what I'm trying to teach this boy? No way, I'm teaching him about perserverance, discipline and self confidence. Those lessons are going to stick with him for the rest of life, and honestly it will be a lot more useful to him than his little sparring technique. So it becomes a question of what result you are after - if my little buddy were to work VERY hard but not get the sparring technique right, that's okay as long as he's learned the discipline, perserverance and earned the self confidence. Interestingly enough, the more of those things I give him over the next few years, the better he'll be able to learn the sparring techniques.

I think I have that
>problem... I don't work very hard, but have enjoyed no small
>amount of success in my life. It feels like some things
>aren't earned, so the reward isn't as sweat as if I had really
>worked hard for it. It is a matter of perspective? Like
>something was easy for me/required little work because I had
>already put in the work elsewhere?

This is something that I hear a lot, actually. It is absolutely perspective based. To outside eyes only have you had success, because success comes from some amount of effort earning some amount of positive result. Internally you know that the effort:success ratio was off, and therefore you haven't actually had any real success.

Here's the remedy: You aren't done yet. Sometimes life gives you "gimmees" that are edges for you to accomplish more. I think you'll find that if you didn't work very hard for something, earned it, and then continued to work hard for more you'd reach a point where you HAD to work hard. Once you reached that point and achieved success it would change how you felt about your initial (less hard-earned) accomplishment.

This gives you two great things 1) success over and above what you would ever have had w/o the hard work and 2) the ability to enjoy the success you had without hard work.