The Real Meaning of Smart Work
In response to the various posts and videos on the internet emphasizing smart work, I started writing my thoughts about being smart in an attainable way.
It is acceptable that the world is full of challenges. We are told to face it. We are told to win it. And we are told to act SMART. But we should make a pause there and think for a moment if smartness alone can lead to success. Is smartness the only essence that ends in victory?
Before answering such questions, let’s think about smartness. Most of time, smartness is never an inborn quality that we have right from the beginning. Smartness is learned as a lesson which grows through our lifetime. But it is well noted that being smart is to be quick in achieving the tasks we do every day.
People in the era of technological development want to make everything quicker. Efficiency has become the principle mantra for success. We hear people say,” You got to be smart” and we also hear sentences like, “Smart people always win, smart people do this, smart people do that…” It seems like this generation is obsessed with being smart all the time. I am pretty sure an online course featuring-“How to be smart?” will undoubtedly bag a million bucks. People always want to be smart. Smart is the new sexy! Smartness is now seen as the inborn quality despite its real meaning.
Smartness: An Acquirable Quality:
Being smart can be regarded as a quality just like discipline or character and intelligence. Some of these qualities are fed to us by our parents. This is why we exhibit those few qualities without even knowing. For instance, consider a situation where you meet an individual you know and you reflexively wish him a good day. In the same way, smartness should be treated as a quality that has to be exhibited by us.
But how can a quality be exhibited? It is always done by learning throughout a lifetime. How can we learn smartness? If you ask a person who has constantly worked on deriving a scientific hypothesis, he will obviously say that you should work hard. Some say don’t work hard but work smart. To your thoughts, can you work smart even when you don’t know how to be smart? Phases of repetitive hard work will tell you the smartest way.
My Experience with Being Smart
I am a student pursuing an integrated masters in Bioinformatics. Once I had a problem with getting results from a software. Since it was the first time I was using it, I had to work hard to follow each and every step from a video tutorial. Even though I followed those steps exactly, I couldn’t get results. It was nearly four weeks of hard work. Finally, I found out where I made a mistake. I did not save all the input files in a separate directory. Due to this, the software couldn’t read the input files. After fixing the mistake, I was able to run the software flawlessly.
Here, the smart thing to do is to put all the input files in a separate directory. But that smartness was not inborn in me. I learned this smart way through the continuous hard work. From this, I learned an important lesson from life:
“Smartness is a quality that has to be acquired by constant hard work.”
I am not trying to imply that smart work is less important. All I am saying is that both hard work and smart work are important for success. But only hard work can yield the smartest way of achieving what we want to.
What do experts say?
Dr. Michael Brown is a Nobel Laureate who received the Nobel Prize in Medicine along with his colleague Dr. Joseph L. Goldstein for discovering Low-Density Lipoprotein (LDL). On speaking about nine tips to receive a Nobel Prize in a TEDx talk, he adds the tip:
“Work very hard” — Dr. Michael Brown
He says that he and his fellow scientist worked really hard to discover it. Finding it difficult to work simultaneously on both the clinical trials and laboratory, he says:
“If you are engaged to solve a scientific puzzle, you have to be totally consumed by it. It has to become something you never stop thinking about.”
Now we can get to know about the importance of hard work in every successful story. Only hard work can give rise to the smart ideas that humankind can apply in life.
One can also learn some smart ways by hearing from the people who are experienced in your area of interest. Yes, we can always learn smartness through brainstorming tips that are given by leading personalities. Advice from them is a great motivation that drives us toward success.
Dale Carnegie in his book Leadership Mastery says about determination:
“Leaders don’t give up without a fight. Successes do not always come easily, but leaders keep trying and trying again until they and their group succeed”
I think the fight he mentioned in these lines relates to the persistent hard work we spoke of earlier. Only hard work can teach life’s valuable lessons, of which smartness is one.
This brings us to the conclusion that both hard work and smart work are necessary. But to be smart, one should first work hard. Because there is no substitute for the hard work.
Hello guys, I am Jesu Castin — poet and motivational writer. Thanks for reading this. Follow me on Instagram for more updates.
