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Getting
An Edge Where It Matters Most
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Amechi Chukwujama
Doing
anything big, such as effecting a great performance in your chosen career,
is not determined by how brilliant, intelligent, educative, or
“creative” you are, but by how smart. You may have three Ph.Ds. yet
find it difficult to carry out the simplest tasks. The missing link is
smartness.
Smartness
is the ability to achieve results or get things done with the minimum
expenditure of time, energy, and mental efforts – often in a novel way.
Being
smart pre-supposes being intelligent in a clever, skillful way. Since
smartness is defined by a quick brain, clear thoughts, balanced emotions,
and ingenuity one needs to be smart to excel in any calling. (Only a small
proportion of those who can be described as smart are universally smart
– the rest are smart in a restricted area.)
Even
in purely intellectual and scientific, the smart guy leads the pack.
Remember Albert Einstein? He wasn’t a particularly brilliant guy. He was
slow from infancy, troublesome at school, and capped his academic failures
with a disgraceful expulsion order from his teacher who told him, “Your
presence in this classroom is disruptive and affects other pupils.”
Eleven
years after his expulsion from school in 1905, 26-year-old Einstein who
was then a patent examiner in the Swiss Patent Office at Berne published
the Theory of Relativity that changed our understanding of the workings of
the Universe. And you ask, how did Einstein work?
Towards
the end of the 19th century, the American physicist Michelson established
experimentally that a light ray travels at the incredible velocity of
300,000 kilometers per second. And that it is impossible to “catch” a
light ray, for no matter how fast you travel, it will always escape from
you with this speed.
Every
other physicist set out to work, but no matter how hard they thought about
Michelson’s experiment, they couldn’t give a sensible explanation to
it. Then enter Einstein. What did he do? He began from the end. He assumed
that light possesses such a property that made it behave in this way. That
was that. Everything fell into line. Every other physicist contemplated on
this for about two decades and then said “amen.”
Wasn’t
that smartness? Mention, if you can, anybody who has achieved any
noteworthy success in his calling without being extra smart: Agatha
Christie, George Lucas, Kissinger, Gorbachev, Napolean, Isaac Newton,
Pablo Picasso, Opray Winfrey, Freud, Socrates, Paul the Apostle, Mother
Teresa, Prophet Mohammed, FDR, Tiger Woods.
If
in your memory bank (or experience base) you associate smartness with
dishonesty (or the idea of being smart conveys images of sharpness) it is
just unfortunate, for anyone who is intentionally dishonest is dishonest.
It doesn’t need qualifying.
Basically,
then, a smarter person than you lives in the same neighborhood, exists in
the same society, and breathes the same air. He faces the same
constraints, has the same information, but has found a way of cutting
through these barriers and has devised an innovative system of combining
this information for a better output.
Let
us use a weak analogy to illustrate the added edge smartness can give to
intelligence. If we imagine intelligent entities to be diesel-powered cars
moving in a fog, a smart intelligent entity can be likened to a
turbodiesel with halogen headlamps.
A
smart intelligent guy knows that at the end of the day, what matters is
achieving results – not how long it took, or who put in the most, or how
many times he failed. It is not surprising then that he wouldn’t
discount an option just because it sounds cranky (or absurd). He
understands that life is a game and consists of creating and solving
problems. He therefore does not look at problems as obstacles but
opportunities.
He
also knows that whenever there is a need for the individual to make a
decision, the mind follows a continuous process of asking and answering
questions, which is in four states: the question (problem identification
and definition); the alternatives; the consequences; and the
judgment/decision.
Smartness
is an acquired and dynamic ability that can only be seen or identified
when it is being made use of or put to work. Many people are not born with
it. It is an art of the possible – not a theoretical concept that can
only be understood and made use of by baldheaded eggheads or the gods. If
you don’t have it (yet), take heart: it can be learned.
According
to Goethe, “there is no growth without activity.” Work is central to
success. So let us re-examine the concept of work. One of the myths about
success is that hard work and prosperity have a positive correlation. Of
course, there is no truth in that statement, for if you look around you,
you’ll find that the hardest workers are always the poorest. If hard
work brings success, African housewives, trench diggers, blockmolders,
bricklayers, truck drivers, nomadic herdsmen and subsistence farmers will
be the most prosperous.
Don’t
let anybody deceive you, if hard work brings prosperity every coal miner
in South Africa or Ukraine would be richer than Michael Jordan, Geoge
Soros and Warren Buffet put together. What brings prosperity is rather
working smarter.
The
secret to working smarter is to see yourself as a lazy person. Yes, you
heard me right – a lazy person. If you look at it any other way, you
will be making a mistake.
Simply,
a lazy person is someone who is eager to save work. Saving work implies
saving the time needed for its completion (since work expands to fill the
time needed for its completion), and minimizing the mental, physical, and
material inputs necessary to get the work done.
Perish
the thought that to “make it”, you have to break your head, work
donkey years, or pay your “dues.” If you can devise a scheme within
the law to collect one dollar from every person that logs on to the
internet today, you’d become hundreds of millions of dollars richer. And
no one can say that you don’t deserve it. Well, when you think about it,
they’ll say so, but that’s their opinion!
According
to Mrs. Hetty Green, who accumulated a large fortune in her time without
capital, friend or influence, “The goal of success is not always reached
by the toughest road; the path is an easy one to find. That’s why so
many people miss it.”
Get
an edge where it really matters most – in your life. From today, try to
deliberately look for easier, faster, and cheaper ways of getting the
results you desire. Think like a lazy person!
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Chukwujama’s career purpose is to assist individuals, teams, groups, organizations and societies uncover the motivation and disciplines required to tap more of their potential. Send all communications to: chukwujama@consultant.com |
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