Working hard may be a symptom of not working smart. Another way of putting it is working hard may be working dumb.
To clarify, hard work isn’t just physical. It can also be mental, as in an overwhelming cognitive load. It can also be emotional, as in taking things personally or constantly feeling as if an entire system will fail in the next 2 hours.
Whatever the case, if you have been exhausting yourself through a marathon of hard work, feeling stretched to the point of snapping or stressed to the point of being crushed, the solution might not be to work harder.
Instead, the solution might be to experiment with how you can work smarter. This may involve eliminating rather than adding, simplifying instead of complicating, connecting rather than juggling. The process of working smarter may require you to spend extra time to learn new skills and research unknown knowledge, the courage to implement new ideas that may not work, and the discomfort resilience to keep on iterating and experimenting when they don’t.
But if hard work is exhausting you and wearing you down, then figuring out how to work smarter may — and all that it involves and requires — could be the only path to longevity and enjoyability.
