“There is
no substitute for hard work.”
Thomas
Alva Edison
Dear Readers,
Of late it is becoming a fad to say,
“Don’t do hard work, just do smart work”. By the face value of this statement,
it sounds justifiable because today there is so much of technological
advancement in every field which has cut down the need for hard work.
Right from home automation, office
automation, industrial automation to farming automation, we have found easier
ways of doing thing, which otherwise was very time and labour consuming.
For example: In a home scenario, a
mixer grinder or a washing machine can do the work in minutes which would
normally have the house lady working hard on the same for few hours together.
A computer at office, is more
efficient than 5 accountants using pen and paper method.
A machinery at the factory can
produce millions of pcs within limited time with 100% accuracy, which was not
possible when things were handmade,
A tractor in the farm can plough vast
areas of land within an hour, which would take days to do, in the days of
bullock cart.
So these are smart ways of doing the
same work, we did before but in much lesser time and that too without much
effort. So every advancement in technology has led people from working hard to
work smart. This in turn has given way for ample free time, to engage ourselves
more productively.
So let us try to figure out, why then
do people emphasize so much on hard work?
With the invention of the calculator,
technically there is no need to know any mathematics to do a simple
calculation. All a person needs to know is the numerals 0 to 9 and the
functional symbols for addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. So, for
example, if a person wants to add 2345799988 + 427256560, all he needs to know,
is these numerals and plus symbol, printed on the keypad and when he presses
these in the right sequence, the answer will automatically come. This is a
classic example of smart work. But let us say if the same person, needs to know
the logic behind the answer he needs to do the hard work of calculating with
pen and paper or counting with fingers or some mind crunching, to understand
how the result is arrived. So true knowledge lies in hard work.
Every invention or a discovery is a
result of sheer hard work. Thomas Alva
Edison worked very hard to invent a light bulb, and so there is a famous saying
by him, “I have not
failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work”.
Similarly the great voyagers tried many routes, before they could reach the
intended destination. The culmination of all this hard work is the basis for
creating all the smart technologies, available in this world today.
This is an evolving continuum. One
advancement leads to another. There is a saying, “Don’t re-invent the wheel”,
which means you don’t have to start doing anything from scratch. We just need
to build up on the existing technology. Every new technology is an upgrade of
the existing technology. For example, handwriting became typewriting, type
writing became computer typing, and now computer typing has moved to speech
recognition typing or predictive typing. So, one technology leads to another.
But imagine if someone had not taken the pain to form different types of
alphabets, give it phonetics and put strings of letters together to form words
and again strings of words to form sentences, then there would not have been
any written language in the world. The process of creating such basic structure,
upon which all developments are built is the core of hard work. Speaking the language
thus created to communicate, is the core of smart work.
So, to simply state, “All creation is
hard work and all application is smart work.” The point to understand is that hard
work cannot be replaced, because while smart work can accelerate the speed of
work, it is hard work that gives substance.
Happy Reading,
D. Senthil Kannan
Article Dated Aug 2015
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