LIVING LIFE : Work Smart

If you are one of those people who respect a good effort in pursuit of a goal of any sort, then you should be well in the mould that believes in ‘working hard.’ That, comes form the school of thought which believes in ‘hard work pays.’ The Lazy Way, a blog makes worrying reading. It says that ‘Instead of success resulting from hard work, the opposite is true, that success is inversely proportional to hard work. In other words, more success comes the less you work. The catch is in finding the proper way of avoiding work. When you find that proper way, you are able to do less and accomplish more.” That, if you in the mould that I have suggested above, sounds scandalous and at best an incitement for hardworking people to become lazy, but wait till you here the lazy way of doing things. Do something you are passionate about, so it is not only enjoyable, but satisfying and at the end of ceases to be hard work! It becomes fun, like say a hobby. Think about how Lionel Messi works hard and you see that above all, it is just fun – for all those hundreds of thousands of dollars. One way of working smart is the simple art of prioritizing. If you have twenty tasks to do in one day, you can choose to do all of them and be effective at none of them. But if you chose three important tasks that will deliver the most productive results in a day, you might have just his the gold, which to one in the ,mould of ‘hard work pays’ will look like typical do as little as possible type of laziness. It is true that hard work pays, but not all the time. In fact nothing can be achieved without hard work, BUT, if some specific strategies are followed, we might start working smarter by lessening the amount of energy we put on to accomplish each task, and there is no better way of focusing your energy on specific productive tasks than prioritizing. The extremism aside, when we look clearly at the 21st century world, working hard is becoming the fodder for those who cannot work smart. Innovators, work smart, they do something because they know what result they want. They work aggressively towards a goal. Indeed, they work hard, but work more ‘smart’ and less ‘hard.’ (Forgive the grammar crimes but for the sake of demonstrating what I mean). In fact, most hard workers have a much higher incidence of non-success than they have success. The Lazy Way, has more bad news for us; Financial strain, stress-related disease, and lack personal fulfilment are at epidemic proportions, while wealth, health, and happiness are rare in comparison. So are these the result of hard or smart work? How would I know, anyway? To sum it up, Harvard Business School, defines working smart simply as, “getting the same results in less time.” I wish you a well-prioritized Sunday! kelviod@yahoo.com