Hard work is necessary in life and in many employment
sectors in order to stay afloat. The
scientific red queen hypothesis in which ecosystems keep each component in
check via an evolutionary arms race is a case in point. This idea, stolen from
Lewis Carroll’s fantastic satire Through
the Looking Glass, in which Alice
must run as fast as she can just to stay in one place, is the classic
illustration of hard work not paying off.
Indeed, when someone posted a picture of women in Africa carrying
bundles with the caption that quoted George Monbiot which said, “If wealth was
the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would
be a millionaire,” my first cynical thought was, Of course not, you need to work smart not just hard. (see Women andGirls Lead, a non-profit who promotes networking and education for women). Given that the adage ‘Work smart not hard’ is
one I follow, I thought I would delineate how this adage really works by
discussing three principles that allow for working smart. The principles I will discuss are novel
discovery, bolus energy expenditure, and specialization.
Like the evolutionary arms race that I focused on in the
previous example the rat race is composed of groups and individuals all trying
to get ahead. When large groups compete with one another for dominance, it is
often necessary to extend ourselves by the expense of a bolus amount of energy
in order to make significant advancements that take us out of the realm of hard
work and into the realm of smart work. In
2003 a roughly 10 year push to finish the human genome project came to a
close. The work of two teams pushed
technology to reach the goal of mapping the entire human genome and paved the
way for the decoding of numerous genomes since.
Furthermore, the recent announcement of a $1000 personal genome sequencer; the holy grail of genome sequencing was a direct result of this work. In
2011 the NASA space shuttle took its final flight. This marked the end of 40 years of energy
expenditure by NASA and the US
government that should have ended decades before and at a substantial reduction
in cost to society. What should have been a push for
‘smart’ advancement got bogged down by a bureaucratic system unwilling to
maximize its time efficiently. The major
difference between the two energy expenditures was the duration and endpoint. The money for genome science was goal
oriented with a specific endpoint and the NASA shuttle missions was goal-less
with no specific endpoint. These examples
makes two points; one that a bolus of energy can provide a ‘smart’ advantage to
a group if goals and endpoints are delineated and two, that the bolus of energy
is only ‘smart’ if it is truly only a bolus of energy directed at a specific
goal, not a never ending drain on society.
Once completed the advantages to society are two fold; i.e. the goal
itself and the technology needed to achieve it.
To re-emphasize, ‘smart’ work leads to reduced energy expenditure on any
given tasks in the future.
A final strategy to working smart also involves the
reduction of energy expenditure. It is
impossible to know all things well and harder still to know many things well. So a sensible third key to working smart is
to specialize. The human race in general
has learned this well. Different groups
are good at different things and people within these groups are sub-specialists
as well. Any well oiled machine consists
of various components selected and specialized to perform a specific function.
Likewise, a close look at any large-scale successful company will show you that
while many of their employees may have had the same training coming in, they
are divided into work units in which training is specialized to the function of
the work unit. At the large reference laboratories where I once worked, there
were multiple floors of laboratories, i.e. transfusion medicine, cytogenetics,
or drug metabolism, and in each of these labs were managers, supervisors and
technicians who may have had similar scholastic training but had now focused on
one set of skills most important for their function in a work unit. This type of structuring is not just
important for a successful business but also for tailoring your individual
training. Specialization allows one to
focus on a key set of skills and therefore reduce energy expenditure in areas
not within those key function sets.
I have limited this article to three strategies to working
smart, which in general center on reducing energy expenditure in the long term,
and I have used a broad spectrum of examples from outside the realm of on the
job interactions to make my points.
While these strategies work in the specific cases of evolution, large groups
and industry, do they apply generally and how do they relate to the specific
case of women living in Africa? While case by case these women will have to
make decisions based on information that I do not have, in general I can
suggest that they can follow the three rules I have discussed to procure more
success from their work. Observations made
within their day to day duties might lead to some novel discovery that could be
applied to performance of these duties in the future; indeed a systematic
addition of small changes to the daily routine may yield a process improvement
to better perform the task at hand. A
bolus of energy provided by the pooled resources of the tribe could be expended
to complete a city improvement which will make life easier for everyone, and
finally each woman might specialize in some part of the enterprise of running
the community to ensure continued success and greatly improve the skill in
which individual tasks are performed. In
this way their hard work may actually pay off, thanks in part to also working
smart.
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