Quote from: Hell-raiser on March 09, 2018, 08:29:54 AM

Many people say that you should work hard if you want to succeed in life and rise to riches. I'd rather say that working hard will only make your boss richer, not yourself. On the other hand, there is an age-old adage which says that you should be working smarter, not harder. But working smarter is a vague idea, and I'm interested to hear what people have to say on this topic. As far as I'm concerned, I think that working smart comes down to creating environment where you will have more chances to meet Lady Luck smiling at you, where you will be able to hit a lucky strike because luck plays an ever-important role in our lives. For example, if you want to find a date to have a romantic relationship with or you are looking for a one-night stand only, you will go to a beach or a bar since your chances are higher there, right? The same approach seems to be applicable to work as well. In other words, stick around the places where your chances of success are the highest.

So share your opinions here, guys. What is your practical take on working smart?

Below I will be posting replies which I consider most relevant, revealing and insightful on the topic discussed.

Quote from: Kemarit on March 09, 2018, 08:50:20 AM

Quote from: Hell-raiser on March 09, 2018, 08:29:54 AM

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You have a point man. Actually I have been hearing this sort of argument even when I was still a child. My father will always tell us to work smart, and make money out of money. And when I grow up, I did work hard, but I later realized that I don't want to be worker that long. I need something to help me became financial stable in the future. So I decided to quit my job, put my offline business. Although I still need to wake up early and oversee everything, I did enjoy what I'm doing and the best thing, I'm the boss. LOL. But there's some kind of element in luck as well. I don't know but I felt that I'm just lucky because suddenly I gain financial freedom and then when I discovered bitcoin, it give me another leeway, more funds for me to channel to my business. So I say that you have to make the right decision + element of luck = success in your life. You have to be in the right place at the right time.

Quote from: audaciousbeing on March 09, 2018, 11:31:18 AM

Quote from: Hell-raiser on March 09, 2018, 08:29:54 AM

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Even when we have heard several talks about working smart, but a lot of people are still work hard thinking that someone will have to teach them to work smart or they are thinking they are working smart. Quite a number of times, I am always taken aback when I begin to imagine what people spend their time on to earn money, struggle, use their strength but nothing to show for it while they are left with no other option than to believe in miracles in other to come out of penury. However, working smart is not something that falls on you or easy to come by, rather its a conscious effort to break away from the shackles of poverty with constant research and education, you are sure to work smart and be financially independent.

Quote from: Hell-raiser on March 10, 2018, 09:35:15 AM

Quote from: BillCoin on March 09, 2018, 12:00:04 PM

What do you mean by working smarter?

I will try to explain the difference between working hard and working smart using an example from software development. Let's assume you have a large set of data which you should sort (arrange elements of the dataset in a certain order). You can take a naive approach and use a bubble sort algorithm which is devastatingly slow. Or you can use something like the quicksort algo which is extremely fast. In the end you will get the same result but times spent will be strikingly different. Now you can try to apply this example to real life.

Quote from: Hell-raiser on March 10, 2018, 10:19:26 AM

Quote from: kryptqnick on March 09, 2018, 12:50:32 PM

I don't think that relying on luck is smart. It is truly risky. I think that smart work is rather about thorough development of the ideas, high level of rational success predictability, not luck attraction.

I see your point and I don't particularly disagree with it. But I didn't mean you should rely on or hope for luck alone. You can continue to work hard for your boss as always and still be looking for an opportunity or chance to change your life dramatically to the better. Let's loosely call that working wise. Basically, all I wanted to say was to emphasize that you shouldn't discard or write off the importance of luck completely. Ignoring a stroke of luck when it happens all of a sudden against all odds would be the most foolish idea that you will likely regret for the rest of your life. In this manner, it makes sense to work toward increasing your chances of meeting Lady Fortune one day. For example, if you want to be romantically involved with someone, it means visiting places where your chances of starting a romantic acquaintance are the highest.

Quote from: Hell-raiser on March 11, 2018, 03:13:38 PM

Quote from: m0gliE on March 09, 2018, 01:50:09 PM

I also think you are wrong when you talk about luck. Because your boss (and those of very large companies) are perfectly aware that they are in such position thanks to their luck. So they tend to close their network, to make golden paths that lead to domination... and are completely unaccessible for anyone out of their private "leading sphere".

Frankly, I don't see where I'm wrong here when I mention luck and that you should not only take it into account as a possibility and be prepared to take advantage of it when it pops up, but in fact act toward increasing your chances of encountering it. If you mean that your boss is somehow depriving you of any chance of meeting luck in your life, I think this is simply impossible because it goes against the nature of luck. In other words, luck is something which is not supposed to happen but still happens, and whatever you or they do to close the doors to it, luck will overcome all the roadblocks in the end because it is in its very nature.

Quote from: Hell-raiser on March 15, 2018, 08:13:06 AM

Quote from: xWolfx on March 09, 2018, 02:35:44 PM

I agree that you will need both. Earning money in this world is easy once you have a good network of contacts and good capital, but at the beginning it's a nightmare.

Once we reach a certain point we can move towards passive income and work less, when we have a great amount of capital, and spend more time with family, travel and things like that. It all depends on what you want to do. If we worked hard and smart enough in some years we won't need to work anymore, you will then decide if you want to work for fun or do something else.

I know that the idea of working for fun sounds like crazy for a lot of people, but if you like what you do, then it's not so crazy.

No, it doesn't sound like crazy. Actually, you came up with an idea of a passive income, which I haven't yet seen coming up in this thread, well, not in the part that I was able to push through yet. If anything, working smart can be defined as an activity directed towards building more sources of passive income. That's an interesting idea anyway. It seems like this is the ultimate goal of working smart, that is doing more with less until you don't need to do anything in the end. And if you are a smart guy, you won't stop there, so I emphatically agree with your attitude and point of view.

Quote from: Hell-raiser on March 16, 2018, 03:56:45 PM

Quote from: Kronos21 on March 09, 2018, 04:33:07 PM

A lot of people overestimate their importance.

Yeah, that's the point I want to emphasize massively and which I wholeheartedly agree with. Maybe, it is the first thing you should do before you start off on a working smart journey, I mean, correctly assess you abilities and whether you are actually as smart as you think you are as well as finding your smart spots and sticking around them. That idea should be definitely added to the piggy bank of ideas making your life easier and wealthier.

The truth is that everyone cannot think the same way. If we are all working smart, who is going to end up working hard? It is a way the world has been fashioned and as much as working smart is good, working hard is also good, but it all depends on the level at which we all operate.

Also, everything in life is all about luck and some have gone down the road of working smart with luck not shining on them. We have to consider that just a few of those smart ones are extremely rich now, while some did not even ask for it, so sometimes, i feel luck and opportunity also come to play like someone rightly said.