I have a proposal.

We should redefine hard work as hard thinking. We often love to fetishise “hard grinders” but the person who outperforms you generally isn’t spending a copious amount of effort doing so. They’re outworking you in the form of better strategy, finding shortcuts and focusing on only the necessities.

Typically, the hardest work is finding a better way to do it. Hard thinking beats hard work.

One example of hard thinking from my life is from playing online chess. This is a summary of how my rating has fluctuated over the past year:

In the middle of 2020, I hit a plateau of around 1300. No matter how many games I played, I couldn’t seem to break past this point. I remember one day I played 20 games and by the end, had exactly the same rating as when I started.

But one day, I decided to try something that led to rapid improvement: I began to study. It sounds super basic, but from watching tutorials, I learnt basic opening principles, tactics and traps. I began to analyse all my games for mistakes and learnt from them. The growth from these simple changes was amazing. I shot up from 1300 to 1450 in less than two weeks.

I didn’t work any harder, per se. I was probably spending less energy watching tutorials compared to playing 10 games a day. The gains came from better planning.

Hard thinking can be applied everywhere. In academics, the best students have more efficient study habits than the rest. In sports, the best athletes are more strategic over their workouts, diet and gameplan than the rest. In business, the best start-ups have better ideas, innovate more regularly and use customer feedback better than the rest. Of course, luck is a huge confounding factor for all these examples. But generally, luck finds the prepared.

Conventional, head-banging hard work probably plays much less of a role than which we give it credit for.

Where are some areas where hard work could be replaced with hard thinking for better results?