Welcome to the first ever post on chris-rushton.com.  I have to say, I am very excited to be taking the first step in what I hope will be a long journey into the blog-o-sphere.  Since it is the subtitle to my page heading and according to my bio, my motto, I thought I would write the first article on my attitude to work.  Where it can be helpful, where it is less so and why I think it is the smartest way to live.

What Is Smart Work

To me, working smart is creating value with your time.  This quite cryptic phrase actually has quite deep consequences.  It is finding ways to make your life easier in the long run.  It is knowing your goals, knowing what needs to be done to achieve them and doing it.  It is knowing when to work and how hard to work at that time.  I prefer it to hard work for a couple of reasons. Firstly I can be more effective with my time, spending it doing the things I want to rather than what I have to.  Secondly and a consequence of the first, I believe thinking about what I do and optimizing my life at any given point will make me more successful.

Why work hard?  I can’t see why people feel the need to slog their guts out when there are better ways to do something.  I have seen first hand the path hard work takes you down.  Friends and family spending every waking hour pushing a rock up a hill, only for it to roll back down as soon as they had finished.  This doesn’t appeal to me.  I don’t see why it would appeal to anyone to be honest, but if you still feel hard work is for you then good luck with it.  I mean that sincerely, you will need it!

Take learning multiplication tables.  The standard way that we were all taught in school was to do it is to remember it by heart.  This is the hard way.  It is also the limiting way.  If you only learn up to 12 x the number, what happens if you want to work out 15 x, or 130 x?  A better, smarter way would be to work out a few key values and use them to build up answers.  I chose to pick the prime numbers since they are building blocks of numbers, 10 because it is the base number and 2 because it is easy.  Using combinations of this considerably smaller set of results, I could quickly and easily figure out much more complicated multiplication problems than peers who just memorized the tables as a song.

For example, 18 x 7?  Quickly, the answer is 126.  How did I do it?  I knew that 10 x 7 is 70, 2 x 7 is 14 and 2 x 10 = 20. Still confused?  It means that I can quickly work out that 20 x 7 =  2 x 70 = 140 and take away 2 x 7 = 14 leaving 126.  Because I have a smartly thought out system, I didn’t need to spend hours figuring out all my multiplication tables.  After all, there is an infinity of numbers, you can’t know every multiplication.  It’s better to work smart than hard.

This example is pretty elementary.  To check I was right before I embarrassed myself and ruined my reputation on my first blog post I checked it with a calculator.  It took about the same time to grab it, push the numbers and see the result and it’s no less accurate.  I guess that means that the smartest way to learn your multiplication tables is to buy a calculator.  Unfortunately for you, there might not always have a calculator to hand, but smart workers know this and always have a backup!

Smart Work vs Hard Work

This is a slightly more involved thought about how smart thinking and smart work can massively improve the quality of life of an individual.

Take 2 stock traders, 1 who works hard and 1 who works smart.  They both have similar systems for deciding when to buy and sell stock.  The person who works hard gets up at 6am, reads the news attentively and is at his trading station before the markets open.  He diligently watches his stocks and applies his trading criteria to them, executing orders throughout the day, finally finishing when the markets close.  The next day he gets up and repeats this process.  He is successful.  He makes good money but he works hard for it.

The second stock trader works smart.  He realizes that he can have a computer check his criteria and execute his orders for him.  He doesn’t know how to write software but realizes that if he could automate his system, he could save him a whole lot of time in the long run.  This is where the smart person sees the need to work hard.  He learns how to program and develops a basic program that can execute his trade orders for him.  It takes him 6 months to develop.  In those 6 months, he has been working very very hard.  Harder than the first stock broker but he has used his time to create something of value.

6 months after he first had his smart idea, the the 2nd trader’s buying and selling are fully automated. He can now sit back in his chair and watch his program make him money.  It doesn’t matter if he wants to go and get a coffee because if a good trade opportunity presents it’s self, the program will act on it in the same way he would if he’d been there.  This reduces the pressure on him and he is happier for it.  He can spend more time with his family or friends or doing something that he loves.  If he was very smart he might realize that currency is traded 24-7 and by adapting his stocks code, he could even make money whilst he was sleeping.  His hard work has paid off in the long run.  The first trader is still sat at his computer.  He may be making the same amount of money but his quality of life is not even close.  I know which route I would choose if I had to make that decision.

Final Thoughts

Work smart.  Use your time wisely and create value with it.  Don’t waste it.  Put the work in where it is necessary but try and be aware when it isn’t.  Don’t believe that you have to work hard to be successful.  Do believe that smart work will get you where you want to go.  Try and be innovative in your solutions to problems.  Chipping at marble using a plastic knife will get you nowhere.  The smart person goes away and finds a chisel.

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