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Comment by MicahWedemeyer | Hacker News Reader

Could this be summed up as Work smarter, not harder?

There's a difference between the notion of "working smarter", and the notion of being willing to leave your comfortable zone and do things outside your usual boundaries, when the ordinary result (or desperate result) isn't good enough.

What does "work smarter" mean operationally? If there were a little switch you could throw in your head, we wouldn't need the Overcoming Bias blog.

I've found that a lot of times there _is_ a little switch in my head. Every once in a while I'll be banging my head against a problem, but if I stop and ask myself "how would a physicist solve this?" I can figure it out.

It takes an effort for me to step back and ask myself what the problem is, rather than just sitting down and working on it.

Usually "just sitting down and working on it" works, which may mean my problems are too easy. :)

Asking yourself "how would a physicist solve this?" is a good example of priming. I can't remember if I read about it in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, but there was an experiment where a couple groups were given a task, with one group told to imagine that they were professors. That group performed significantly better than the other.

But you'll notice that it takes something more specific than "work smarter" to change up the way you approach a problem.

One of the things "work smarter" should mean is: work on something worth working on. Something important enough to you to call out your "extraordinary effort".

Work smarter and harder.

He's definitely advocating both, but reducing the advice to "work smarter and harder" strips out all of the social and cultural context which gives it motivational force.

The idea of making an "extraordinary effort" compels you to define your efforts relative to what's "ordinary", pitting you against not only your own everyday level of effort, but also against the masses. "Work smarter and harder" doesn't.

Granted, the post could've been more concise.

I think what "work smarter and harder" misses the most is not the level of effort you need to make, but that in order to get to that level of "extraordinary effort" you need to take risks.

I think trying to reduce this post to one sentence is probably a bad idea anyways. I thought it was worthwhile reading.

I agree. (Incidentally, I wasn't trying to put down your comment specifically, in case it came across that way. I just replied to it since I didn't want to duplicate the point that working harder was also part of the equation.)

Hah, no problem. This is one of the few sites I assume by default people are trying to be positive.

The "Trying to Try"[1] post linked to early in this article has an answer to that: The slightest effort suffices to convince ourselves that we have done our best.

    Work smarter and harder.

Couldn't you, in your head, convince yourself that you are working "harder", simply by imagining that you could work less hard than you currently are? Couldn't you do that, regardless of you current level of work? So does "work harder" even mean anything?

[1] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/10/trying-to-try.html

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