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It’s an age old question… Which is better hard work or smart work? You’ve no doubt heard some self-development gurus tell you that the only thing you need to do to be successful is work hard.
While I love the guy, I feel Eric Thomas (sometimes called ET The Hip Hop Preacher) is a bit guilty of this. Maybe you’ve seen his video about talking about how when you finally want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe… then you’ll be successful.
If you haven’t seen the video yet, I’ll link it below. Watch it, and you’ll have a lot more context on where this post was coming from.
While I bought a book and a shirt from him while I was in high school, I haven’t watched any of his stuff for ages.
But… Is Eric Thomas only working hard?
Of course not. He’s also leveraging himself and working smart. When Mr. Thomas creates a video, he’s leveraging his time… a perfect example of working smart. Create a book or coaching program and sell it to thousands of people…
Sounds scalable, sounds like… smart work. Why do his speeches focus so heavily on hard work then…?
It’s simple.
Telling people they need to work hard gives them a temporary boost of motivation. They feel a temporary high. When you listen to an Eric Thomas speech, you feel pumped. You feel excited.
It’s a lot like watching a thrilling movie. You feel an energy boost during the action, and for a short while afterwards… but the fire burns out fast.
Before that fire burns out, however, that’s the perfect time to upsell to potential customers…
“Are you serious about change? Join the private Facebook group.”
“Ready to take your life in another direction? Invest in your future by purchasing tickets to the next event…”
I’m not accusing ET of being a bad guy. NOT. AT. ALL. I love that guy to death and hope to meet him someday. He ABSOLUTELY has changed thousands of lives for the better. But make no mistake…
Pumping your audience up, followed by delivering a refined sales pitch is the easiest way to separate people from their money.
This is why you so often hear gurus repeatedly beating hard work’s importance over the side of your head. Of course, that’s not to say hard work isn’t valuable. If you actually execute, hard work is suuuuper valuable.
An Example of Working Hard
Let’s say you are a freelancer and you bill your clients $20/hour. If you work an extra 50 hours per month… you’re going home with an extra $1,000 (before tax). That’s a solid boost.
But… working hard has its limits. Even if you worked 15 hours per day, 30 days a month, you’d “only” be earning $9,000/month. That’s barely 6-figures!
Clearly, working hard has its place, but working hard alone isn’t enough. Well, how about we try something else…
An Example of Working Smart
You are a 22 year old that uses Google maps to find local businesses that don’t have a website. You offer to build them a website for $1,000. Calls take you an average of 3 minutes (they tell you to screw off a lot), and it takes 40 calls to make one sale.
In other words, you’re making one sale for every 2 hours you’re on the phone. You’re a pretty good salesperson. But you don’t have any web design skills. You pay your friend $500 for every website he completes.
Your Profit: $1,000 – $500 = $500/sale
Hourly Wage = $500/sale divided by 2 hours needed to generate a sale and…
You’re making $250 per hour at age 22! That’s a perfect example of working smart.
If you work the phones 36 hours a month, you bring home… $9,000! That’s exactly the same as the person that was working inconceivably hard in the first example.
So, what does it mean? Should you work hard, or should you work smart? I think this is the wrong question to ask. It’s not an either or. Most quality business and self-development gurus make a point of stressing that you ideally do BOTH.
While technically true, even this isn’t a complete answer. I’m about to share a secret with you that’ll CHANGE your life instantly.
While I may not pump you up as good as ET can, your life will never be the same if you can remember this one principle. Ready for the secret that’ll forever change your life?
Keep reading…
The Secret to Success — Working Smart Leads to Working Hard
When I started this blog back in 2013, I worked super hard. In fact, in my first 6 months blogging I wrote over 100 posts! Over time, however, I slowly started to write fewer and fewer posts.
The blog just didn’t gain enough traction. It seemed like no matter how many posts I wrote, my traffic numbers barely budged. My little blog just wouldn’t grow. Eventually, I got tired and I gave up.
When you feel like you’re spinning your wheels without any chance of going anywhere, it’s easy to give up. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what tends to happen if you work hard without also working smart.
Fast forward a few years and a friend of mine helped me recognize exactly why my blog plateaued. There were so many things I was doing wrong in 2013 and 2014 that made it almost impossible to succeed regardless of how much effort I exerted:
— I didn’t bother to do keyword research.
— I never did guest posts to gain inbound links for my blog.
— I wasn’t using enough images in my posts.
— My posts were not formatted well.
And the list goes on and on…
What’s the point?
It didn’t matter that I was working hard writing a new blog post just about everyday. Without writing a post on topics people were searching for and optimizing my post to have a decent chance of ranking in Google, there was NO WAY this little blog was ever going to grow.
YOU NEED RESULTS to stay motivated. This blog now has about 330 posts. About 320 of those posts were the result of only “hard work”. The most recent 10 or so have been the result of “smart work.”
Of my roughly 10 blog posts that receive significant traffic, just 5 of them were written during my work hard phase. 5/320 is equal to just 1.56%. That compares to working smart, where about 50% of my posts are receiving a respectable amount of traffic.
Do you see the difference?
By working intelligently, you can increase the rate and frequency with which you’ll achieve success. When you taste success, it inspires you to work hard and enjoy more of it.
When you’re grinding and grinding for days, months, or even years without anything to show for it, however… it’s almost inevitable you’re going to give up.
One Counterargument
There’s an argument that working hard can lead you to try many things. These vast experiences can eventually lead you to discover what constitutes “smart work” in your industry.
That’s 100% true and if you can stick to working hard long enough to discover what’s “smart,” all the respect in the world to you. Just remember to try new things and not be a blind plow horse that keeps pushing even when things clearly aren’t working.
To avoid getting discouraged and giving up, however, I recommend you try working smart from the beginning if at all possible. Consulting with an expert in your industry can cut YEARS off your road to success.
If you’re running an online business, that means not wasting months or years trying to build yourself on an unprofessional platform like blogspot or Tumblr. Get yourself a professional website if you want to be successful online.
Most of all…
Remember, it’s not the smartest or the hardest workers that are the most successful. It’s the people that identify smart strategies from the beginning, produce quick results, and use those initial successes to motivate them to continue working hard.
Or for the special breed out there… The person that is so blindly determined that they will work tirelessly without ever giving up — exhausting every option until they find a “smart work method” that produces great results.
Figure out which you are, and make your plan to begin your next project with hard work or smart work accordingly!