The saying “you have got to work smart not hard to succeed” can be quite confusing. What does working smart mean? If you work smart, does that mean you don’t have to work as hard? Do smart people not work hard and do hard workers not work smart? Well, let’s try to dissect this saying.
Source: Smart Work
In a traditional sense, working hard was considered the pinnacle of human growth. It’s been said hundreds of times that “if you want to succeed, work hard” and “life is not easy, you have to work very hard to achieve something”. No matter what you’re trying to achieve, like a job, school, your PhD, it’s always been said that if you work hard, you’ll achieve it eventually. Yet that’s not always the case. Sometimes, no matter how much effort we put into something, we just fall short of our goal. This is where we ask ourselves what went wrong, whether we were working hard enough, and maybe, we weren’t working smart?
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Now when it comes to working smart, it’s all about making the right choice and the right decision. Smart people tend to climb up the ladder really fast. They earn lots of money, live in a big mansion, and have everything we want, and it seems like they earned it with little effort in the shortest amount of time, so it must mean that working smart should be the solution, right?
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WRONG. These people played smart and won big time, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t work hard to get where they are. They make it seem so easy, and they do things so fast, yet in reality, they had to work really hard and go through a lot of failures before finally learning how to do things fast, easy, and smart then reaching success. One of my favorite quotes on this is about a boss hiring an artist to do a design. The artist finishes his work in 10 minutes, so the boss asks “Why should I pay you so much for something you did in 10 minutes?” the artist replies with “because it took me 10 years to learn how to do it in 10 minutes.”
And that’s the truth. No matter what profession, engineering, music, art, everyone had to work hard to hone their skills and perfect their craft to reach the top. And the harder they work, and the more mistakes they make, the more experience they have. And the more experience they gain, the smarter their decisions will be, and the less mistakes they’ll make. And the less mistakes they make, the faster they can achieve their goals. They went from working hard to learning how to work hard AND smart.
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So we can’t just separate working hard from working smart. They go hand in hand together, and mixing these 2 together will help you reach success. Be smart with your choices and working hard towards reaching your dreams.
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