In this post I'm collecting interesting ideas, thoughts, and insights related to the topic, which are discussed somewhere in the thread.
working hard without being smart is a waste of effort, you will just be on your work for the rest of your life.
The thing which everyone should learn while still in the cradle. Essentially, working hard is a waste of life.
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You have a point man. Actually I have been hearing this sort of argument even when I was still a child. My father will always tell us to work smart, and make money out of money. And when I grow up, I did work hard, but I later realized that I don't want to be worker that long. I need something to help me became financial stable in the future. So I decided to quit my job, put my offline business. Although I still need to wake up early and oversee everything, I did enjoy what I'm doing and the best thing, I'm the boss. LOL. But there's some kind of element in luck as well. I don't know but I felt that I'm just lucky because suddenly I gain financial freedom and then when I discovered bitcoin, it give me another leeway, more funds for me to channel to my business. So I say that you have to make the right decision + element of luck = success in your life. You have to be in the right place at the right time.
Informative post.
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Even when we have heard several talks about working smart, but a lot of people are still work hard thinking that someone will have to teach them to work smart or they are thinking they are working smart. Quite a number of times, I am always taken aback when I begin to imagine what people spend their time on to earn money, struggle, use their strength but nothing to show for it while they are left with no other option than to believe in miracles in other to come out of penury. However, working smart is not something that falls on you or easy to come by, rather its a conscious effort to break away from the shackles of poverty with constant research and education, you are sure to work smart and be financially independent.
Another informative post.
What do you mean by working smarter?
I will try to explain the difference between working hard and working smart using an example from software development. Let's assume you have a large set of data which you should sort (arrange elements of the dataset in a certain order). You can take a naive approach and use a bubble sort algorithm which is devastatingly slow. Or you can use something like the quicksort algo which is extremely fast. In the end you will get the same result but times spent will be strikingly different. Now you can try to apply this example to real life.
I don't think that relying on luck is smart. It is truly risky. I think that smart work is rather about thorough development of the ideas, high level of rational success predictability, not luck attraction.
I see your point and I don't particularly disagree with it. But I didn't mean you should rely on or hope for luck alone. You can continue to work hard for your boss as always and still be looking for an opportunity or chance to change your life dramatically to the better. Let's loosely call that working wise. Basically, all I wanted to say was to emphasize that you shouldn't discard or write off the importance of luck completely. Ignoring a stroke of luck when it happens all of a sudden against all odds would be the most foolish idea that you will likely regret for the rest of your life. In this manner, it makes sense to work toward increasing your chances of meeting Lady Fortune one day. For example, if you want to be romantically involved with someone, it means visiting places where your chances of starting a romantic acquaintance are the highest.
I also think you are wrong when you talk about luck. Because your boss (and those of very large companies) are perfectly aware that they are in such position thanks to their luck. So they tend to close their network, to make golden paths that lead to domination... and are completely unaccessible for anyone out of their private "leading sphere".
Frankly, I don't see where I'm wrong here when I mention luck and that you should not only take it into account as a possibility and be prepared to take advantage of it when it pops up, but in fact act toward increasing your chances of encountering it. If you mean that your boss is somehow depriving you of any chance of meeting luck in your life, I think this is simply impossible because it goes against the nature of luck. In other words, luck is something which is not supposed to happen but still happens, and whatever you or they do to close the doors to it, luck will overcome all the roadblocks in the end because it is in its very nature.
I agree that you will need both. Earning money in this world is easy once you have a good network of contacts and good capital, but at the beginning it's a nightmare.
Once we reach a certain point we can move towards passive income and work less, when we have a great amount of capital, and spend more time with family, travel and things like that. It all depends on what you want to do. If we worked hard and smart enough in some years we won't need to work anymore, you will then decide if you want to work for fun or do something else.
I know that the idea of working for fun sounds like crazy for a lot of people, but if you like what you do, then it's not so crazy.
No, it doesn't sound like crazy. Actually, you came up with an idea of a passive income, which I haven't yet seen coming up in this thread, well, not in the part that I was able to push through yet. If anything, working smart can be defined as an activity directed towards building more sources of passive income. That's an interesting idea anyway. It seems like this is the ultimate goal of working smart, that is doing more with less until you don't need to do anything in the end. And if you are a smart guy, you won't stop there, so I emphatically agree with your attitude and point of view.
A lot of people overestimate their importance.
Yeah, that's the point I want to emphasize massively and which I wholeheartedly agree with. Maybe, it is the first thing you should do before you start off on a working smart journey, I mean, correctly assess you abilities and whether you are actually as smart as you think you are as well as finding your smart spots and sticking around them. That idea should be definitely added to the piggy bank of ideas making your life easier and wealthier.
When you are only working smart, chances of success are high if you have enough luck to turn things under your favor and working hard may only make you stronger in that field and not rich. So, according to me both aspects of working hard and smart should be taken together. Success and fortune can't just ring you door bell, its like wining a lottery ticket where chances of wining are very low. So, for achieving success and fortune one should work hard with smart brains to stay ahead of everyone in their field.
The chances of wining a lottery are really low but that's not the kind of luck I'm talking about in this thread. I'm talking about smaller luck which everyone has encountered in their life without exception at some point and most likely missed it many times throughout their lifetime. We all have opportunities which are presented to us on a rather casual or regular basis. We miss them for different reasons, for example, because we don't see them as genuine opportunities at the moment when we meet them. Or it could be that we just don't believe in our lucky star and discard luck right away as something completely impossible, which is as stupid, if not more. This is the point which I want to highlight here.
Working smart is applying the simplest ways to earn huge income while doing it in a less effort like you just only working for 3-5 hours but the return is 10x compared to working very hard but the salary is not big enough to the services that you rendered, but I think you need to combine these two to make your life easier work hard in a smart way.
It doesn't come down just to earning huge income while getting there with less effort. Rather, I'd say working smart can be conceptualized as achieving some desired outcome doing nothing altogether in the limit, likely even as an off-target effect of a series or even an avalanche of other off-target effects. On the other hand, working hard is the opposite of working smart (which is kinda obvious, huh), and in the limit means doing everything and still getting nothing. To me, this is where lies the great divide between working smart versus working hard.
I think it is better to work smart because life is all about resourcefulness, on how you finish the task smartly. for example, i saw a picture last week about working hard vs. working smart. a cube should be moved to the other side of the path and the other person pushed it towards the path, the other carved it into sphere so it will be easily pushed. In that way he reduced effort and time on doing the work. With that, you will have more time and energy to do many things.
That's a very interesting observation. It reminds me of a saying which is attributed to Abraham Lincoln who asked to give him six hours to chop down a tree and he would spend the first four sharpening the axe. The lesson to take home is that before fully engaging in your working activity, think first how you can make the job in the most efficient way so that you wouldn't waste hours or even days doing what can be done with less effort and in a shorter time span.
Hardworking is to enrich your boss. I think this idea is only true when you go to work for others, But if you do business for yourself, I think diligence is essential. About Intelligence, In my opinion, Do whatever you need to have the best analysis of the market, so if you are smart you will analyze the market more accurately, helping you minimize risk. Being smart and hardworking will help you succeed in your job.
With wage labor the negative aspects of hard working become clear and evident without further explanation, kind of obvious. But it doesn't mean that if you are working hard for yourself only, you will fare much better. The point is when you work for the boss, it is your boss who takes the smart work from you and does it himself. But when you are your own boss, then you have to work smart by default if you want to stay in the business.
Also, let us not over emphasize only on being smart alone, because opportunity, luck and hard work also have a part to play in your being smart. One thing I have come to understand in life is that we cannot all have equal opportunity which makes smart people sometimes to still end up being successful on different levels.
Luck and the opportunities it offers are what we should never forget of, the point which I specifically highlight in the OP. Sometimes, in fact, oftentimes, luck is what radically changes our life. Truth to be told, it is exactly because of luck that we as individual persons came into this world having been chosen by it from around a billion of other "candidates", so, in a sense, we were all born under a lucky star via our very existence. And if our life started with luck, we shouldn't discard it during our lifetime either. Discarding luck would be as stupid as relying just on it alone, but in the end (as well as in the beginning) it all comes down to luck.
You are 100% right. I completely agree that people should work smart everytime. Life is unfair and there is no way to refute that, that's why we all need to find a strategy or if not a loophole in the system to make our place in life a notch higher. One must use brains and adapt depending on the environment and factors around him or her. Sometimes even those with fewer resources came up to rise as they know how to play their cards and not just take life as a shotgun shot. Work smart and play hard and no drama, that's what I follow in work.
I really liked the way you put it: work smart and play hard. I also massively agree with your other point regarding people who may have fewer resources (brains, industry, dedication, propensity, whatever that might mean) but who still manage to rise higher in life simply because they know how to play their cards.
Between working hard and working smart; I will tell you that working smart is the best and it really pays. But most people don't know about this or don't believe in that ideology. They believe working day and night, leaving the office at late hour after everyone is gone is the way wealth. All that is just nothing but stress activators. When you do things the smart way; you stay healthy to enjoy the fruit of your labor but if the other way, the person might die even before the wealth start coming in.
That's another interesting point worthy of mentioning. I know that I may sound a bit arrogant here but such is life. We are able to work smart because someone else has chosen (or been chosen) to work hard. If people honestly believe that working all day long and leaving the office at late hour (and also working at weekends, why not, really) is good, such is their choice. Or rather someone else's (that would be their boss in this case) who was smart enough to successfully make them believe that they are doing the right thing for themselves, while, in reality, they are doing the right thing for their boss. This is a nice and revealing example how smart work differs from hard work.
It could be generalized in the following way. As much as you are aware of the circumstances, you work for yourself (circumstances work for you). On the flip side, as much as you are unaware of the circumstances, you work for someone else (circumstances work you). The evident conclusion is that working smart is working for yourself (in general terms), even if you are a typical office rat.
