Do you work smart or hard?

Working hard versus Working smart is always debatable. However, I have a different opinion over considering them as two workstyles. There must be an amalgamation of the two. Hard work is necessary to grow and with some tiny act of smartness, one can do wonders.

To explain this let's hear a story of 3 friends. In a town named Stone Town, there are three friends Adam, Larry and Steve.
Adam and Larry, are working hard, but not smart enough. Steve(on the left side) is working smart maybe, not hard enough.

Adam and Larry are best cart pullers of the town. They put huge efforts in pulling the cart, but still make around 5 rounds only in the day. That is a lot of hard work still low on results. On the contrary, Steve has developed a smart way to pull the cart, but he is not working hard enough to get his idea implemented.

When Steve showed Adam and Larry that this idea could increase up the productivity by making a new cart by himself. So he did the hard work smartly and build his own company named ‘Rolling Stone’ to ship stones. Steve approached Adam and Larry to join him and together they were able to make 10 rounds a day and sometime later Rolling Stone was the most profit making company of Stone Town.

In the context of business, there can be an example of Customer Acquisition. Suppose you are targeting some random 100 potential customers with a conversion rate of 5%, and to scale up the business you need to target more customer and adding up in the marketing cost. This is working hard but not smart. However, if you have segmented those 100 customers and communicated the right personalised message to each segment, you could have made 30% of them to pay for your product or service, this is working smart and hard.

Hard work is the only way to move up the ladder, however, you should keep the smartness inline with it, in order to move to the right place on the ladder.

Good Luck!