Here’s Why Most Business Owners Struggle To Do Smart Work

Read time: 3 minutes

Head down – work hard – keep trying.

It’s the 6-word operating system installed in you by the people who care most about your development: parents, teachers, and mentors.

If you actually listened, you built one hell of a character trait (respected by all): a strong work ethic.

This fundamental belief that “hard work builds a strong work ethic” is well known — so well known we forget to prepare for when hard work is actually the wrong work.

Smart work throws a wrench in your operating system because it challenges the definition of a strong work ethic.

Hard work demands energy to achieve a result.

With consistency, hard work creates good, sustainable results, which parlays into a strong work ethic — the discipline to carry out the work that needs to get done.

Key phrase: needs to get done.

Because eventually, you improve. You build good judgment. You make faster decisions. You take swifter action. You become effective. You become efficient.

Everything seems to get easier.

What took 1 hour now takes 23 minutes (with much less effort). But your brain searches to fill the void of the remaining 37 minutes with something that “feels” harder.

Shouldn’t this be harder or take longer to do?

When it doesn’t, you feel this disconnect, as if you’re not living up to that respected character trait.

Nowhere does it say a strong work ethic means only doing the hard work, but your brain fails to internalize this.

Remember the key phrase from before? Needs to get done. 

Eventually, you reach the point of diminishing returns.

• Hard work is sustained effort over time to produce an incremental outcome (relative to the effort put in).

• Smart work is a targeted effort to produce an exponential outcome.

Hard work is limited. Smart work is leveraged.

You either stay at the current level or aim for a new high score.

Based on the wisdom of Naval Ravikant, you have four types of leverage:

• Capital: You leverage money to amplify outcomes

• Labor: You leverage someone else’s time to amplify outcomes

• Code: You leverage technology to amplify outcomes

• Media: You leverage your message and attention to amplify outcomes

You can’t just skip to the smart work. A strong work ethic requires foundational hard work to exist in the first place.

Is this just semantics? No, because we’re talking about a fundamental belief. Clarity is critical.

A strong work ethic is a remarkable trait — but without rewiring your operating system, you fall prey to misusing it.

Smart work is not easy — it’s just different.

The impact starts with breaking the belief and rewiring your brain to accept that not everything needs to feel like hard work.

If you already had this revelation, you are in the minority. Most people don’t question the disconnect.

Thanks for reading,

Peter.

P.S. This newsletter is growing — since January 1st, we’ve increased by 30%. Thanks for reading, engaging, replying, and sharing. Let’s keep the momentum so more business owners experience the benefits of thinking with impact.

Here’s my ask to you — please forward this post to a fellow business owner or share it on social media.

If you missed last week’s post:

Last week, I wrote:

The Stealth Fee: The Heavy Price Of Pondering A Decision (And 2 Ways To Minimize It)

It’s about how the space between thinking about decisions and making them has a hidden cost (that most fail to account for). I share the root cause, the extra costs, and two ways to minimize them.

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