Work Harder, Not Smarter

On cleverness, craft, and the cult of efficiency

Every few newsletters, I take a rogue shot at the advice to work “smarter, not harder.” It’s sort of a bit for me, but it’s also deeply sincere. In the sea of bad advice that circulates in the working world and on the internet, I have a particular bone to pick with “work smarter, not harder.”

Namely, not a single part of it is good advice. I actually find it so disagreeable that in the process of writing an “all the worst work advice I’ve ever received” newsletter (coming soon to an inbox near you), its badness demanded more space to breathe. So I would like to adamantly insist on the opposite. You need to work harder, not smarter.

The Era of Ease

First part first: you should probably be working harder.

While there’s no shortage of laments about how Gen Z doesn’t work hard enough, the growing distrust and disinterest in hard work are hardly endemic to twenty-somethings alone. Yeah, the youngins have disavowed the corporate ladder. But millennials en masse are also itching to leave their jobs and “quiet quitting,” a term coined in 2022 to describe the anti-hustle culture choice to do the absolute minimum at a job instead of actually leaving.

Across the board, we all seem to have grown a little tired and disillusioned with hard work.

And of course we have. We live in an aesthetic hyperreality where the appearance of ease is an ever-appreciating currency. Get on Instagram, and you’re inundated with vacations, ozempic bodies, and the daily lives of hot people who seem to make gratuitous money by simply existing. Get on LinkedIn, and people are SHOUTING about how they Grew Their Side Business To Seven Figures In One Month With One Simple AI Hack! Wow!

We’re drowning in shortcuts, growth hacks, and promises that whatever it is you want, there’s a “secret” to getting it. Working “smarter” is very in vogue.

There is, of course, no shortage of hard work warriors out there spreading their gospel. Silicon Valley’s “9-9-6” hardos, for example, who work 72-hour workweeks inspired by draconian Chinese labor policy (which the Chinese Supreme Court ruled illegal in 2021, FYI), have produced no shortage of manifestos on the “grindset.” But these vignettes of Bay Area post-grads who’ve been in more war rooms than bars in the past twelve months aren’t exactly aspirational. If they’re happy sleeping on their office floors in the name of winning the AI boom, then I’m happy for them (I guess?), but when our contemporary stories about hard work tell of lives free of playtime or leisure, I, too, understand why hard work has lost its appeal.

There are also more pernicious and complex reasons we’ve become distrusting of the promise of hard work. It is challenging to hold the merit of an honest day of work in the same brain we use to witness very real systemic inequalities that render our promised meritocracy suspect at best, if not entirely defunct. Why work hard to win a race that’s rigged in favor of so few? Why enter the race at all?

I’m hard-pressed to believe that the reason we’re not working harder is as simple as laziness or entitlement. If anything, that explanation itself is lazy—as blame usually is. It can be true that people aren’t working hard enough, while also being true that our retreat from labor is a measured response to complicated times rather than a moral failure. Nuance, revolutionary. I know.

I get why people are over hard work. And still, you should be working harder anyway.

The Point of Hard Work

The crude reason you should work harder is that, realistically, neoliberalism has its claws in deep, and your refusal to participate in it will be punishing to you and only you. Phoning it in is an infinitely losing strategy for getting what you want from a system.

The more romantic reason is that there is something fundamentally vibrant about working hard that it’s worth your time to experience.

All of the best moments of my professional (and personal) life have come from needlessly, painfully hard work. Bleary-eyed nights, meals eaten at the office, relationships forged in exhaustion, and the incomparable feeling of getting time-vortexed by a task so difficult that it swallows your whole brain whole. These have been some of my most cherished memories of being a working person.

I think most people’s stories of peak professional joy involve battles hard-won or at least hard-fought. Working hard exposes us to parts of ourselves we can never meet in ease. It makes us the type of tired that lets you sleep through the night. It gives you the uniquely nourishing feeling that even if we’re on a giant spinning rock, you have done something with your time on that rock. Hard work is the only key to a door behind which some of the purest parts of our humanness remain hidden if we do not seek them out.

So, yes, you should work harder because, even though we all know the race is rigged, the person who trained harder is still more likely to cross the finish line first. But if you need a “better” reason, do it because the solution to general malaise has never been found in doing less.

The world is a frustrating place. I know. But whether your discontent is that you’re losing the rat race or that you’re just feeling like a sad little rat, hard work is the first antidote you should try.

It will possibly make you richer and more powerful. But unless you’ve tumbled down the slippery slope to nights spent in your office with a sleeping bag and soylent, it might also make you more whole.

The Cleverness Trap

Second part, second: you also shouldn’t be working smarter.

The thing about working “smarter” is that literally no one else cares. Seriously. No one’s performance review has ever said “that Jimmy… he just works so smart!” I’ll respond to your cries of “but it’s important to be resourceful!” in a second, but for now, genuinely consider the last time you admired someone because of what a “smart” worker they were.

Yes, finding easier, simpler ways to accomplish exceptional work is a good thing. Obviously? And of course you should do the best work you can while wasting as little time as possible because duh?

But it’s the pesky little “not” in “smarter, not harder” that poisons the well with its suggestion that for something to be “smart,” it must also liberate us from working hard. Working stupidly. We see these ideas juxtaposed and interpret “smart” to mean “clever”. The trouble with cleverness is that, beyond the hellscape of internet comment culture, it’s just not worth a whole lot.

If anything, it comes at a cost to any person who indulgently wields it.

Consider the fates of those who have walked the “smarter, not harder” path. The ultimate poster boy is Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, who tricks an unsuspecting neighborhood boy into taking over his punishment of whitewashing a fence on a Saturday while all the other boys are out playing. The thing about Tom is that, while beloved to the literary canon, he’s a little piece of shit. He deviously manipulates Ben by making it seem as if whitewashing the fence is an esteemed and elusive privilege, ultimately convincing Ben to do all the work himself.

Cunning? Sure. And the tactic does free him from hard work. But that type of cleverness has no place in the workplace where the Bens and Toms of the world have to work together again the next day. Tom’s strategy works exactly once because in real life, the Bens remember who handed them the brush.

Giving in to the alluring insinuation that the most precious resource in any work equation is your own personal time is a naive and egocentric way to build yourself a bad reputation and alienate the people you work with.

Of the people I know who are known for working “smarter,” here’s what I actually think of them: they overdelegate, undercontribute, skirt the rules, think they’re smarter than they are, put others down, make for bad teammates, and I wouldn’t hire a single one of them twice. To put it mildly.

Being more efficient can be of great benefit to an entire team, but when you follow the advice to “work smarter” without also working harder, you are often just abusing others’ generosity or naivety by offloading work onto them. In my book, that doesn’t make you smart. It just makes you mean.

Skipping the Hard Parts

Arguably, developments in AI workplace tools have created the opportunity to work “smarter” in ways that displace work onto systems instead of other people, resolving the issue of being a tricky little jerk.

This is the ultimate development for the “smarter, not harder” folks, and to their credit, tool utilization has been pretty important to this whole societal advancement stuff.

But the drive toward convenience and ease through tool adoption has also led to the slow extinction of human skills that are hard to price, so instead we pretend we’re not paying for them.

Admittedly, my beliefs about AI and its general goodness are fickle at the best of times. Some days I’m on board, and others I think that we’re slowly disintegrating the human capacity for intelligent thought. Current status: queasy but open-minded. But what I do feel certain about is that when measured on a longer time horizon, there is nothing “smart” about the erasure of the “low value” tasks that make up the beginnings of a career.

Apprenticeship is historically a cross-cultural tradition for honing and expanding our diverse human crafts. The whole concept is quite charming, really: we submit to our ineptitude, graciously study from those who have already overcome theirs, absorb the tiresome grunt work that exposes us to the basics and contours of a discipline, and then practice it until our hands bleed. We work hard at thankless tasks that our craft masters don’t want to do, and in doing so, we begin to build experience. When we’ve mastered the basics, the cycle resets. We repeat it indefinitely until we are performing at the highest echelon of our craft, perhaps even expanding its bounds, and taking on our own apprentices so that, through grueling hard work, they too can become great.

However, no more are the days of tediously learning until your hands blister. Claude will do the that part for you. No need to hunt someone down to get feedback. Claude will give that too. Novices need not concern themselves with the messy business of terrible first drafts because ChatGPT can produce perfectly average ones for them. Under the imperative to work “smarter,” an employee can siphon off any and all “low value” tasks that apprenticeships are built on and instead find themselves with an abundance of time to perform “high value” tasks for which they possess none of the experience to accomplish.

What the apprenticeship model of working harder to become smarter gets right is that information is no substitute for wisdom, and capability is only a primitive evolution of real excellence. While the new age AI-enabled pseudo-masters of the workforce may be making slide decks in half the time, they’re doing so at the expense of their own development. They’re letting the computer whitewash the fence for them, which may be quite clever, but they’re never learning how to look at the wood in winter and know if you’ll need to paint it again next summer. They’re ignoring human craft has only ever been expanded by those who learned the nature of their brushes and colors so intimately that they ventured to imagine new ways of painting.

Who knows what AI will do to our basic workplace skills. My current forecast is bleak. Actual mastery requires doing the hard part. Building deep, generational, transferable knowledge requires harder work still and the passage of wisdom between human hands. We’ve been handed the keys to the most powerful “work smart, not hard” machine of all time, and I worry what it might cost us. Maybe my fear is misplaced. Or, maybe the moments of genius sparked only by rubbing two human brains together are inherently beautiful things that we will not be able to comprehend the value of until they are lost to us for good.

While there might be easier, quicker, “smarter” routes to everywhere, we are already walking around ever more incapable of reaching destinations, contacting our loved ones, and deciphering the cursive script of all of the humans who learned how to be people before us and wrote it down so we could know too. I’m not saying you need to delete your AI or that people should be navigating via sextant instead of Google Maps. But it’s a weird time, and there are centuries of human wisdom held in letters, maps, and stories that we are slowly losing because we've become oh-so-resourceful. In engineering ourselves smarter phones, smarter maps, and smarter houses, we’ve pursued cleverness to its terminus where we need not be smart at all.

I know I’m being existential, but when resourcefulness becomes dependency, we risk breeding new strains of ineptitude that we’re hubristic to believe we will never pay for. One day, the generation that ChatGPT-ed their way through life will eradicate a skill we couldn’t afford to lose. They will have found the smartest way to work, and with all their new time, they will stumble into their parties and family dinners with no true wisdom to impart other than how to make the most money with minimal effort.

Is the efficiency worth the risk? Are the extra two or three hours of activity that can be extracted from each day? What about the chunks of shareholder value buried deep in the marrow of workplace behavior that the AI heroes are always about to unlock?

I’m sure there’s material value there. Sincerely. This isn’t a doomsday prophecy. But what scares me is the “efficiency at all costs” mentality and the danger-laced insistence that, as we transcend the age of hard work, the best thing for our souls and societies is to move into the age of “smarter.”

Some Things Are Meant to Be Hard

Stepping off my existential soapbox, what I will acknowledge is that there is no reward for doing things the hard way. You don’t win points or deserve something more because you suffered for it. No one is going to congratulate you on writing by hand when you could have typed or clap because you didn’t use AI. While I don’t think you should be working smarter, you also shouldn’t be making things harder than they have to be for martyr points no one’s ever going to hand out.

But some things are meant to be hard. Sometimes the hardness is the whole point. And if I could program all of us with new advice as we navigate a world of rapid technological change and fraught political times, it would be this:

Smarter is not always better. It is rarely richer, more beautiful, or more human. The world is full of devices and algorithms that are getting smarter by the day, and you don’t need to be doing the same. The richness, that’s in the hard stuff. So go find the things where the hard work expands your mind and your life as you pursue them. Then go work as hard as you can.

Thanks — always — for reading.
Talk soon.
KL