Working Hard Is Overrated

Working Hard Is Overrated

Catarina Fake on why working hard, while a popular business dogma, is misguided:

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing. Working hard, even, if that’s what you like to do.

It’s easily to paraphrase this insight as another way of saying “work smart.”  But nonetheless, pay attention to the nuances: working hard, for a lot of people, often means freaking out. It means reacting, fearing a negative outcome, or rushing to do things because you suddenly realize you’re behind. Working smart simply means you’re approaching a task with some degree of premeditation and productive design.

The point Fake is trying to make is that you can work hard on something — expend a great deal of energy — and you can work smart — approach a problem intelligently — but neither of these two B-school dictums guarantee you’re working on the correct thing or parsing business reality correctly.  I could be working until 3 AM using my best GTD tricks on figuring out the best banner for our blog, but it doesn’t mean that’s the problem I should be concentrating on when I have an entire marketing organization to run.

So yeah, good advice. A hair worth splitting, in my experience.

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