This is the most dangerous advice you can follow

There is a lie that well-meaning people will tell you throughout your entire career.

They say it in boardrooms and at conferences. They write it in books. They believe it will unlock your potential.

This is the most dangerous advice you can follow in the early days of a startup.

It’s a trap. It presents a false choice, a sophisticated excuse to avoid the very thing that is most required of you.

Here’s why:

It presumes you already know what “smart” is.
In the beginning, you are operating in the dark. You have a hypothesis, a guess. You have no idea what the "smart" path is. The only way to find it is to do the hard, unglamorous work of trying a dozen things that don't work.

Hard work is the engine of discovery. It generates the raw material: the data, the customer feedback, the painful failures, that your intelligence can then use to find the smarter path.

"Smart" is not a strategy you start with. It is a conclusion you earn through effort.

It gives you an excuse to quit.
"Hard" is honest. You either made the hundred sales calls, or you didn't. You either wrote the code, or you didn't.

"Smart" is abstract. It's a comfortable hiding place. When a task becomes a grind, it is easy to stop and say, "There must be a smarter way to do this." And then you spend a week thinking about the 'smarter' way instead of pushing through the necessary work.

The real formula is more of a sequence than a choice.

First, you work hard. That hard work forges insight. That insight then allows you to work smarter.

Hard work isn't the opposite of smart work.

It is the raw material for it.

You can’t think a sculpture into existence. You have to do the brutal, hard work of swinging a hammer to get the stone out of the quarry. Only then can you begin the smart work of shaping it.

Stop looking for the shortcut. Go get the stone.