
Which One to Choose Between Work Hard or Work Smart
“you have got to work smart not hard to succeed”.
This sentence sound pretty familiar, don’t it?
We hear people talking about tools and how it makes us work smarter. It makes it seems like working hard isn’t something we should do that it as not how we should climb up. But wait, what does it mean to work “hard” and work “smart”?
Let’s break these down. Working hard is the foundation of achievements. People work hard to reach their goal. We put effort to attain our goal. Wether we go to school to learn and get good scores or do our job in a company we love. The smallest component of working is simply the effort. Working hard means giving our full effort to do something.
Trying to to figure out how we can scale up our business, how many budget we can cut off and allocate to somewhere else and so on is also an effort. Knowing what to do and what to avoid, our main priorities and what to expect is the output we’ve got. The result of working smart is also having the self-awareness.
Meanwhile, we’re working more and more hours, but our salaries don’t reflect this. German workers are #1 in productivity even though their government has a policy encouraging shorter working hours so that work can be spread around to more people. Enjoying long annual vacations and life’s less laborious pleasures is French which come in #2 and next one are American workers
Our culture values being busy so much that we almost shun the idea of finding easier ways to do things, considering it laziness. The problem is most of the time we are framed to thinking we can only choose one, either working “hard” or working “smart.” But finding easier ways to do things are smart and doing it requires working hard. So why not both?
It is no doubt that technology seem to make everything easier and look better, too. Conference call, chats, mobile banking, you name it. Using this tools will definitely boost up your productivity.
This gives us the fact that working smart is part of the equation, not all of it. There will be no leader that would tell you working smart is the substitute of putting in the maximum effort to your goal. Climbing up the career ladder needs consistency and persistency, being the first one to come in and the last one to come out of the office and so on.
If we want to be successful, we shouldn’t be content to simply work smarter. The most successful people work smart, but they also work exceptionally hard. Give anything your best shot and work towards your goals like there is no tomorrow.

