3 Important Points to Understand Smart Work & Hard work
  1. Mix them up:

You cannot succeed only with hard work or with just smart work. Both require efforts, knowledge, and work from you. One has to work harder where it is needed and work smarter where it is needed.

Smart work will complement your hard work and vice versa. Ex: With smart planning and scheduling you can channel your hard work towards achieving goals in less-time with excellent results.

Bottom-line is, Work Harder and Work Smarter. Success needs both.

2. Smart work is:

Consider smart work as something that:

  • Saves your time.
  • Smart work is an “On-The-Spot” judging and decision making. Ex: Students attending an entrance exam will know what to write first, which part saves time and which part will give them an advantage. For all that, they should have put hard work on their exam preparation. Success here is smart-work and hard work.
  • Saves your resources or makes you optimally use any resources.
  • Rightly identifying where you went wrong and correcting it.
  • Finding agreeable solutions and taking the right decisions in less time.
  • Seeing what others don’t see or can’t see is another way of being smart.
  • Find innovative solutions that save time and effort.

The list can go.

The point here is, smart work is, "hard work along with ideas and techniques that save time, efforts, money," etc.

3. Gain Expertise in your Work.

Only then you can work smarter. To gain that expertise, you need hard work.

Hardwork is not giving everything and surrendering your happiness. People misunderstand it. Hardwork is the willpower to do more, learn more, and perform more in studies, business/work, etc.

If you start working on gaining more expertise in your field, it will enrich your mind with more knowledge and information to process. Eventually, you will think and execute works smarter.