Work Smart, Not Hard Is Total B.S.

Anyone who preaches that you have to “work smart and not hard”, is crapping shit i.e. bull shit. We have enough of that online, thank you.

Work smart and not hard, why? What’s your end result… more money, more fame? More life? Or more time… for what?

It’s definitely not more sex, or even love for that matter. Those things cannot be had by working less or smart… no, you have to give it 100% (not 80/20). You can’t be smart about it, you can’t have your cake without baking it properly.

And yet, there’s a whole bunch of self-righteous people who feel they should not “over” work themselves. Whatever happened to the pride of putting in extra hours for work? Where’s the craft? What is it with all this self-entitlement?

Genesis 2:15

Before I go any further with this thought, just take a good long look at this chart:

This is from a study by UBS, on how many hours you would have to work if you were from one of those countries.

Apparently, to buy an iPhone 6, if you were from Mumbai, India… you would have to slog for 350 hours. If you were from New York, that would be 24 hours plus change. And hey, life is a breeze in Zurich — those guys really know how to work smart and not hard!

So only guys from Nairobi work harder than anyone else…?

And yet, for a minute I believed this “work smart, not hard” meme.

Unfortunately, I’m also a student of finance and I understand how currencies are valued and devalued.

So you see, it has nothing to do with whether you work hard or not. It does have a lot to do with which country you work in, and the strength of your currency.

I remember one of my friends, who left the Middle East (we’re based in Bahrain, which is a friendly island in the Gulf Cooperation Council, just tucked away between Saudi and Qatar) to go back to India.

After working in India for 8 months, he was crying (literally). He had to work 12–14 hours a day for the same pay he had here. And to add fuel to fire, he wouldn’t get more than a 5% increment that year.

What he said struck me…

You’re lucky Jose, at least whenever the Bahraini Dinar grows stronger, or the Indian Rupee becomes weaker — you can see a 10% increase in your monthly salary overnight. I have to wait till the end of the year…

He missed that currency advantage, but he also missed working less hours.

The Bahraini Dinar is pegged to the US Dollar. If the Dollar becomes strong globally, so does the Dinar. Imagine if no one wanted the US Dollar, or there was no peg? What would his situation be?

What happened to him? He’s back in Bahrain and enjoying more time with his family…

I remember when I was working in India for a startup. My dad’s birthday was coming up, and I wanted to buy him a new monitor (aka screen) for his computer. I did. The monitor cost me an entire months salary (this was like 15 years ago).

That’s when I realized that in India, the cost of living is cheap, but not so for durables or “white-goods”. Those are matched up in price internationally. Food, drink, accommodation and travel were all cheap and you could live comfortably, but not durables (and certain consumer goods) that were imported.

And as history will teach you, people who were willing to “work hard”, and work “for less” because their currency was weaker — managed to take away the jobs of those who wanted to “work less”, and work “for more”.

You can call it offshoring or outsourcing — I just call it demand and supply. And demand & supply works (excuse the pun) for just about anything in life.

Ok, so let’s pick on the Millennials now. Here’s a great talk by Simon Sek…