Blog

If I had six hours to cut down a tree, I'd spend the first four sharpening the saw.  - Abraham Lincoln

Well, we have often heard that 'Work smart not hard' , but what really is smart work. Does only smart work brings you success, and if so then why are so many of us still busy putting our blood and sweat in working hard to reach our goals.

My take on hard work is that it's all about consistently working towards a particular goal irrespective of it's worth and not being worried about the result.

In today's era of technology, multitasking and fast moving times, smart work is the need of an hour. Smart work is planning and strategising based upon reality. When someone wants any work to be done fast he/she then finds the easiest way out. That's called smart work.

Being a smart worker saves a lot of time as you can find ways to complete your work in shorter period of time, but it also gives you enough time to learn a new task while completing the present one. Well to put it in a humorous way, we can take an example of a lazy person trying to complete any work as fast as possible and with minimum efforts.

Hard work is cutting down the leaves and branches of a tree, while smart work is taking out the tree from roots.

Let's understand this with some examples:

When NASA began to launch the astronauts into the space, they found out that pen wouldn't work at zero gravity. To solve this problem it took them one decade and $12 million. They developed a pen that works at zero gravity. But Russia used the pencils. (Because they used their mental skills and got the efficient and effective solution)

A Japanese company received a complaint that a consumer had bought a soap box that was empty. Then, engineers worked hard and came with an idea of attaching an X-ray machine with a monitor so that every soap box passes through machine before delivery to make sure that they were not empty. No doubt they worked hard, but they spent a huge amount to do so.

Same problem is faced by a small business but they did not get into the complications of using an expensive machine. Instead of that they found another solution and bought a strong industrial fan and pointed it to the assembly line. When every soap box pass the fan it simply blew the empty boxes out of line.

Hence, Effort is important but knowing where to make an effort makes all the difference.