"Working hard" is the act of putting in more time or effort than you are comfortable with. It is unsustainable. People will call you a "hard worker" if they are admirable of the effort you are putting forth but if you think of yourself as a "hard worker" you will look for opportunities to take it easy. Thinking of yourself as "working hard" puts you on one side of a divide where everyone who is "taking it easy" is resented by you. This is not a productive mental state.

A long, long time ago

There was an old man with his children

Living in a mountain village

They lived a very happy life

With only one big problem

They had to climb over a big mountain to go to the field every day

So one day, the old man decided to move the mountain

With his children they began chipping away pieces of rocks

Every day at the foot of the mountain

Wise men passed by and asked him

How can you possibly think you can move the mountain?

The old man said, "Probably I won't

But you see, I have children

My children will have children

And they will continue

And the mountain will be moved"

You will never improve yourself, your situation, or your future by "working hard." You must work consistently,, you must work persistently, and you must work efficiently. It is not about beating yourself up or forcing more from yourself, it is about establishing a rewarding and easy to follow routine that builds upon incremental improvement.

I will second Holiday's The Obstacle is the Way primarily because it's digestible. I suspect every generation needs their version of What Color is Your Parachute and of the various and sundry pop psychology pieces pretending profundity it's the least offensive. One of Holiday's tricks is to write a list of goals for tomorrow in big letters on a post-it note before bed. The size of font and size of paper limits the task to the achievable.

But primarily, you need to break things down into what can be managed. Give yourself a list of goals, then assign a REASONABLE timeframe to each one. Then break down what each goal will take individually ("get hired" breaks down into "write a killer resume" "achieve a few new skills" "get three letters of recommendation") and those goals until you have something concrete and actionable you can take care of. Arrange those in order and put a REASONABLE timeframe on each one of those.

You'll notice that you have tasks and subtasks and subtasks of subtasks - turtles all the way down. You'll notice you have a schedule for each one of these things, and that there are interdependencies. But you'll also notice that big, unapproachable tasks like "get a job" now have a to-do list that you can work on, every single day, until they're done.

I got out of New Mexico, got into college and built a car from the framerails up using this process. My method was a notebook full of checklists. Lo and behold I became an engineer and realized that I had independently discovered the Gannt chart, the process by which large organizations complete large projects. As a teenager, I improved my life and built a car using redneck Gannt charts. As an adult, I helped redesign an airport, helped build three courthouses and helped construct a two billion dollar wastewater treatment system using real Gannt charts.

It's the granularity.

You set yourself a timeline (2 months) and a goal (turn your life around). That's insurmountable. Your approach - "work harder" - is nebulous. Boringly enough, you major problem is project management, the least appreciated task in the history of employment. But the pyramids were not built by someone saying "we need to push more rocks." The Great Wall of China is not there because they wanted to "keep the Mongols out more." Dividing a large task into smaller tasks and arranging them in such a way that they can be accomplished without heroic effort is the core competency of... civilization. It is the root of all planning. And it is entirely within your abilities.

Do what you can do. Do it every day. Do it with the intent to be that much closer to your goal tomorrow. And judge yourself by whether or not you accomplished today what you set out to accomplish today.

Turn your life around NOW. Recognize that future self is tomorrow self to the nth power and that compound interest isn't just for banking. We're all "just guys" (even the girls among us!) but if you raise the bar just a tiniest fraction every day you will find yourself high-jumping skyscrapers.