You’ve heard it all before:

  • “Work smart, not hard” 
  • “80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts” 

Then there are the counter-arguments:

  • “Nothing worth having comes easy”
  • “Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard” 

The truth is, these ideas aren’t mutually exclusive, but their application depends heavily on your specific work environment and goals.

But before we get started, let’s address some common misconceptions…

Common Misconceptions of The Internet About Work

  • Hard Work Leads to More Stress: There’s a belief that putting in long hours only results in increased stress and more work, rather than success. The reality is, it depends on your situation.
  • Smart Work Guarantees Promotions: Some think that working smart alone will automatically lead to promotions and recognition, overlooking the importance of effort, positioning or the creation of value.
  • Success Is Instant: Many assume that success happens overnight, underestimating the time and dedication required for real achievement. Success can happen fast, but that is not the norm.
  • Personal Well-being Isn’t Important: There’s a misconception that sacrificing personal well-being for professional success is necessary, neglecting the importance of work-life balance. (Just visit your typical tech startup…)
  • Work Hard & Smart: Or put more cleverly, some say “Work hard, smartly.”. It is a key misconception that success demands both hard work and smart work, failing to recognize that each approach can be effective individually as well as each approach can fail miserably… It all depends on your specific situation!

It’s Not About Hard or Smart Work, It’s Something Else

In reality, you must evolve to a higher level by approaching work strategically, especially in the face of AI, automation, and global competition. (Take a look at World Economic Forum’s predictions about the jobs of tomorrow after you finish this article, and you’ll get a very clear picture.)

Remember: with modern technology advancements, anyone worldwide can perform your job for a fraction of the cost, using the same tools. So working hard does not give you the same edge as it did before.

Similarly, knowledge is becoming less and less of a differentiating factor. The internet and artificial intelligence are giving access to specialize knowledge, as well as “the ability to be smart” to essentially everyone. For instance, back in the day, programmers needed to memorize complicated programming interfaces – now anyone can Google it.

In the light of these changes, we need a more evolved approach. We need to be more competitive, and incorporate elements of working smart as well as working hard, in a context that will lead to our career development.

We call this approach working strategically. Working strategically entails:

  • Balancing hard work and smart work as per the situation demands.
  • Prioritizing your career above all else.
  • Constantly creating more opportunities and ensuring job security. (Related: Explore how to avoid layoffs to learn what job security really means)
  • Focusing on creating and controlling value in your work.
  • Cultivating key relationships to advance your career.

Of course, the details of how you do your strategic work matters…

The Context of Your Work Matters

Your approach to work – whether it’s smart, hard, or both – depends on your job and your working conditions. Specifically, whether you’re self-employed, earning commissions, or drawing a fixed salary.

For example, if you’re a sales executive earning commissions, your income directly correlates with your efforts and results. In this scenario, both working smart and working hard can significantly help your earnings and career progression – your efforts can both boost your quantifiable performance.

Conversely, if you’re a project manager on a fixed salary, your contributions may be less quantifiable, or have a long time horizon to be noticed and appreciated. In such a case, your career progression depends more on your visibility and relationships within the organization than on raw output. Doesn’t matter if you work hard or smart, but matters a lot more if you are perceived to work hard or cultivate smart relationships.

Defining Work in Different Contexts

Entrepreneur, Freelancer, or Commission-Based Employee

For these roles, work directly translates to the tasks you are given. Success is easily quantifiable: sales made, projects completed, or clients satisfied. Success is objective, everyone can agree on and even define your success through contracts. You make it or you fail, there is no wiggle room.

Example: A salesperson needs to close deals to earn commissions. Here, working smart involves finding the most promising leads and employing effective sales strategies, while working hard might mean putting in the extra hours to maximize client interactions.

Fixed-Salary Corporate Employee

For salaried employees, especially in large corporations, the definition of work is much more amorphous. It expands beyond assigned tasks.

Sure, you have tasks, projects, deadlines and goals – but these are ubiquitous among all employees and don’t differentiate you. Furthermore, along with objective criteria, there are a host of subjective criteria that measure your performance. Just read through your last performance report, and try to identify what percentage of the items discussed are actually objective.

If you are like most professionals, the majority of the items are going to be subjective, and completely dependent on the opinions of your boss and key stakeholders.

Because of this subjective nature of fixed salary work, career advancement often hinges on visibility, networking, and strategic positioning within the organization.

Example: A project manager must not only ensure the team delivers but also navigate corporate politics, build alliances, and showcase their contributions to higher management.

The Real Meaning of Work in Modern Corporations

In a corporate setting, simply doing your job – no matter how well – is no longer enough.

The truth of the matter is, career progression is a political game, requiring you to create and control value, break down silos, and form strategic relationships.

This is the essence of working strategically – deploying periods of hard as well as smart work, for a specific purpose and in order to achieve a specific political end. In this sense, working hard as well as working smart are a means to an end, and are only valid, if that end is clearly defined.

Practical Examples: Smart, Hard, and Strategic Work

Let’s go through a couple of examples of smart, hard, and strategic approaches to specific problems…

Task: Preparing a Sales Presentation

Hard Method: Spend long hours manually compiling data and creating slides from scratch. Some of this may be necessary, especially if the harvested data is crucial to making your point. Creating the slides from scratch, on the other hand, not so much.

Smart Method: Use presentation templates, data visualization tools or AI tools to streamline the creation of the presentation. Create the same presentation in less time and with less manual effort.

Strategic Method: Delegate routine tasks, by assigning or outsourcing the data collection and creation of slides. Focus on tailoring the presentation to the audience’s specific needs in order to enhance your visibility. The goal isn’t the presentation, the goal is the visibility you get while giving that presentation. Spend your time and effort on your message.

Task: Managing a Project

Hard Method: Micro-manage every detail and work late to ensure deadlines are met. Chase after everyone and make sure they are living up to their commitments.

Smart Method: Use a good project management software to track progress and automate updates. Don’t chase, create a process to collect information – like status reports or daily updates.

Strategic Method: Foster a collaborative team environment, get the team to update task information and track progress in real time. Focus on maintaining regular communication with stakeholders or clients to anticipate potential issues while building relationships.

Task: Conducting Market Research

Hard Method: Manually gather and analyze all data, including browsing through countless articles, reports, and databases. This involves extensive time spent on data entry, spreadsheets, and even creating charts by hand, so that you understand every little detail – become the genuine expert.

Smart Method: Utilize market research tools and software like SEMrush, SurveyMonkey, or Tableau to automate data collection and analysis. These tools streamline the process, provide real-time data, and generate comprehensive reports quickly, reducing time and effort significantly.

Strategic Method: Go beyond just data collection and analysis. Identify top level market trends and insights that directly support your company’s strategic goals, but leave the detailed analysis for future work (automation/delegation). Instead, tailor your topline findings in such a way that they can be presented as clear, actionable recommendations that senior management will notice.

As you can see in all 3 examples, strategic work not only incorporates key elements of hard work as well as smart work, it also explicitly orients your work to generate greater visibility, relationship and value.

Developing Work Approaches as Skills

All three approaches to work (smart, hard, and strategic) are a type of career skill. This means, they can be developed.

Here are some practical tips to help you develop each:

Developing “Smart Work” Skills

  1. First Things First: Focus on the most pressing and impactful tasks first.
  2. Batch Work: Group similar tasks together to enhance efficiency. (Batched work is more efficient)
  3. Automate: Use AI tools to automate routine tasks. Also, from keyboard shortcuts to voice recognition, from desktop scripts to email filters – use everything you can to streamline your work.
  4. Delegate: Assign tasks that others can do to free up your time for higher-value activities.
  5. Eliminate: Remove non-essential tasks from your workload. Don’t even let them crop up on your tasklist. Delete – free yourself from clutter.
  6. Take Breaks: Regular breaks can improve focus and productivity. (We recommend a 10 minute break for every 50 minutes of work)

Developing Hard Work Skills

  1. Deep Work: Learn how to do deep work, where you can make substantial progress over a defined period of time.
  2. Endurance: Build the stamina to work long hours when necessary. You can always reward yourself to something special after long bouts of work.
  3. Attention to Detail: Ensure thoroughness in every task. Perfect may be the enemy of good, but attention to detail is the ally of excellence.
  4. Reliability: Be someone others can depend on to get the job done. Your word must be golden. This also helps with relationships.
  5. Persistence: Stay determined even when facing challenges. Some people fold, others focus when they are confronted with difficulties. Learn to focus when things get tough.

Developing Strategic Work Skills

  1. Value Creation: Prioritize tasks that directly and significantly impact your organization’s goals. Ensure your efforts contribute to measurable outcomes that align with the company’s strategic objectives (the objectives that executives keep talking about).
  2. Value Control: Position yourself as indispensable in the value creation process. Create systems and frameworks where work flows through you, ensuring that you are seen as critical to the successful execution of key projects, even when you’re not the one doing the day-to-day work.
  3. Networking: Cultivate and sustain relationships with key stakeholders within, and more importantly, outside your organization. It’s important to break through silos and connect with those outside of your immediate team or department, especially up the orgchart.
  4. Visibility: Proactively communicate your achievements and contributions to those who matter. Use presentations, reports, emails, conversations and informal updates to ensure your results are recognized by senior management and influential figures.
  5. Future Focus: Constantly update your skills, credentials and knowledge to stay ahead in your field. Position yourself where the future is headed. Be forward-thinking. Go where the puck is. In just five years, the work you do, and how you do that work will be dramatically different. Be ready for the emerging world. 

Conclusion: The Path to Career Advancement

The bottom line is this:

To succeed, you need to transition from working hard or working smart, into working strategically.

Recognize the importance of AI, automation, and global competition. Focus on creating and controlling value, forming key relationships, and positioning yourself for visibility and growth within your organization.

And above all else, constantly generate optionality and focus on your own career. Become a master of opening new doors and getting new, better, higher paying, bigger scope, and better title jobs.

By combining hard work, smart work, and strategic thinking, you can achieve significant career advancement and outpace your competition.

We are here to help.