This Is Why Working Smart Alone Is So Wrong.

Oh, please give me a break

Too many people are chiming that “I work smart, not work hard”. I am not too sure if that ought to be celebrated. Something in my gut tells me this sounds wrong, and this isn’t from the message itself. It is from the tone in which it is delivered.

Many years ago, just years before my Dad was approaching his legislative retirement age, he told me that he had to work smart. So, he placed his parts of his money in the stock market because his financial planner told him to “work smart, not work hard”.

My Dad was smitten by the idea of “working smart” and “letting your money work for you”. Nothing wrong with investing money in the stock market. That was a smart thing to do, allowing the market to compound our earnings and accelerating his path towards retirement.

He entertained the idea of a round-the-world cruise in 200 days, sipping Martinis and basking under the Sun.

The stock market chewed him alive. He entered the stock markets in 2007. The global financial tsunami occurred just a year later.

You see, working smart alone can be dangerous. We have to put in the hard work.

We have to work hard to understand what we are buying (he didn’t), what the company is about (My Dad thought investing in companies never lose money), and how to protect ourselves when the markets head South (he couldn’t reach his financial planner to sell before the tumble).

I can’t say enough.

We need to put in the hard work. This is not just for investing. It is meant to be across all dimensions of our life.

We have to put in the hours when we are in the workplace to know what exactly is going on. The natural response to overloading work is to delegate and automate. Once we manage to secure the budget to do so, we pile our pressure on the expanded team, and we back it off to the café.

This is a bad idea.

Pure delegation might be about working smart. However, if we do not bother to understand the work that the team is handling, there will come a time where the team knows better than we do.

That means we will lose our control over the team. Look, no team members respect a team leader who doesn’t know what is going on.

I know this too well because I had a team leader like that many years ago. The clients eventually only wanted to speak to me, and my boss’s boss reached out straight to me for client account updates. Feeling insecure, my boss thought I was scheming to usurp his mini throne.

I left him alone to kick all the pebbles along his path.

It is the same case for automation. Automation is a business case in itself because it allows us to compete for 24/7/265 even when we are tired and in need of sleep.

That doesn’t mean we should just “work smart” and allow the systems of automation to go on auto-pilot while we skive off taking afternoon naps at our working desks.

We need to spend our time checking the engines of our automation systems, so we know if it is working to achieve the results we seek and whether identified defects are getting resolved. We have to work hard at it, on it, and with it.

In my humble opinion, working smart and working hard doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive. They are a part of a self-discovery process. We learned to work hard, and we will eventually be efficient and creative enough to work smart at the task on hand when we blow past the mystical 10,000 hours of commitment.

The buck doesn’t have to stop there.

What if we can combine working hard with working smart?

What if we can continue to work with our utmost commitment, working along with the delegates that we trust, and building systems of automation one after another?

We will prosper even further.

That is my view.

Working smart, in some sense, like working hard, is insufficient.

We have to work hard AND work smart.

Let’s Evolve to Work Harder and Smarter.

Aldric

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