Originally written in 2018 on my old blog. Lightly revised.

What’s the difference between working hard and working smart? This is my attempt at an answer.

A long time ago I read a Richard Maybury book that described the brain as constantly trying to model how the world around it works. That idea stuck. I’ve built my approach to almost every goal around it, and it now feels like common sense. It goes like this:

  1. System. There’s an existing system I don’t understand. It’s abstract and bigger than me.
  2. Model. From my interactions with it, I build a model: a collection of beliefs about how that system behaves.
  3. Model. I build a second model: how I should interact with the system to get what I want. Another word for this is strategy.
  4. System. I build my own system to carry out that strategy: routines, tools, habits, long-term plans.

A simple example: getting in shape

The human body is the system. It’s too complex for anyone to fully understand, so I build an approximation one belief at a time. I need food for fuel. I need sleep to recover. Training stresses the body and rest rebuilds it.

From that model I build a strategy: eat better, train three times a week.

Knowing what to do and actually doing it are different things, so the last step is a system that enforces the strategy. A workout journal. Packed lunches instead of drive-throughs. An alarm. Equipment at home so there’s no excuse.

Why the four steps aren’t the same thing

It’s tempting to blur these together, but they fail in different ways.

Imagine attacking a fortified base. The defenders inside are the system. Learning that the west wall is the least guarded is your model of it. Deciding to attack the west wall is your strategy. But if you never built a system to recruit and train your own soldiers, the attack fails anyway.

Now flip it. You have a well-trained army, but you never learned about the west wall, so you hit the south wall and get beaten.

Most people can take a good model and turn it into a sensible strategy. That part is easy. The hard parts are the two ends: understanding the outside system well enough to model it, and building your own system to act on what you know. Both take planning, patience, and creativity.

That’s working smart: a better model of the world, and a better system for acting on it.