Smart Work or Hard Work? 🙄

Extreme approach:

• If you worked hard but had no knowledge, you'd basically be doing this every project:
  https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toaster_from_scratch/discussion
• If you worked smart but really lazy, you'd do something like one call a year, but make sure that call would actually generate the income to support you for the entire year. (selling some kind of idea / solutions / consulting that's super valuable, like inventing the light bulb just by thought kind level 🤷) (there are a few crazy copywriters that don't do anything less than 200k$ per one page of work for an actual example)

Pragmatic approach, table for when it's worth to do the same thing smarter
https://xkcd.com/1205/
or more visually explained:
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/aq5J6HWhuYxN7uCEkxIs2bAiRYFyQm9ZRtg7uZHRvMsoRKUBIVS5Ds0oWatZ2i2-NhFdcU7r5FX7GEKTeRdihzy6G0UpvFre12mXDOcVuHBDN4-W5sQetEIz9UwfDMfZfwq2
https://insights-images.thoughtworks.com/04_XKCD_49224e6faaff4668748fd5dfb2767993.jpg

I was recently listening to startups for the rest of us. Rob talked about how you need 3 things for a successful startup.

Talent
Hard work
Luck

You need some combination of all 3. A lot of hard work can make up for having little luck.

I thought that was a great way to put it.

I find the persona of the very smart and lazy guy particularly irritating, especially as this person will typically be very arrogant, and younger than me ;-). On the other hand, I have natural sympathy for the humble hard-working guy.

Nonetheless, from my experience in the workplace, and especially in technology, it is actually easier to work hard than to work smart. It is easy to understand: you can stay 2 more hours at work just doing 'routine' stuff (like writing or running tests, debugging software, even writing the 98% of software that has no architecture or algorithmic difficulty). If by that 'sacrifice', you stay 2 hours less in front of TV or video-games, you may even not feel it is a sacrifice. However, it really hurts your brain to think of an innovative solution to something difficult, or to challenge what you were doing before, or to decide to have an uncomfortable conversation. You can feel almost physical pain in your brain when you are doing the essence of 'working smart'.

And as a result, most people decide they will not work smart, but just hard. So, people typically should focus on working smarter, not harder.

Heh, how about both: work hard but smart? You should focus all the energy that you can (the "hard") on the thing(s) that move you closest to your goal (the "smart"). My 2c