Efforts Made Or Results Obtained?

A lot of people have so much focused their energy on the process without paying attention to the product. It is true that the process is what births the product, but it is also the result that is rewarded, not the number of attempts that you have made. If you have expended energy on doing something and you did not later get it done, how do you expect to be rewarded? This is why you have to focus your attention on the results you want to obtain, so as to let you know the kind of efforts to make towards it. Of course, what the world is interested to know is not how hard you have tried, but what you have to show for it.

I once watched a particular football match in which a team played so much well that their ball possession was as high as 70% against 30% of the other team. In fact, everyone already concluded that they would easily win because of the finesse at which they played, and because of the world-class players that they have. However, the result stood at goalless draw until the end of the first half. Well, they thought that the goals would start coming in in the second half, but it still stood at goalless draw until the last moments of the game when the other team won a penalty. The penalty was played and they converted it to a goal.

The team that everyone never expected to win, was what won the game by a lone goal to the amazement of everyone. After the match, no one remembered how well the other team had played and the so many chances they missed. The question was "who won the match?" Of course, it is only a win that would validate the efforts. Even if you played like a divine creature and still did not score, but the other team did not play as much and scores, they will be rewarded. In the same way in life, it is only your results that will substantiate your efforts. This is the reason you have to devise a smarter way of doing things (instead of the hard way), with your mind on the result.

When you keep your mind on the result that you want to obtain, it will become a motivating factor for you to look for easier and better way of doing it. One of the things that I have learnt in life is that there will always be a smarter, easier, better and quicker way of undertaking a task, but you only need to figure it out.

I remember a particular time, during my internship period, that a task was given to us. The entire interns were divided into two and given the same task to be completed for a couple of days. We started our own and we were using the old way of doing it. To our greatest surprise, the other team, within just a couple of hours, were almost done with their own task. We had to send some delegates to the other team to learn how they were able to do their own.

By the time delegates arrived, they brought their own idea of how they were able to make their own work faster. When we applied the same, we also got the same result. It was at that point that we realized that smart work is more preferable than hard work. When the late Steve Jobs (the co-founder of Apple inc.) was asked how he selects the people who works for him. Being a man that is result-oriented, he simply told them that he normally selects the people that are perceived as "lazy," because they would always discover how to get the job done easily without spending so much time on it. After all, it is not the number of hours that are spent on the job that matters but how you have delivered the results.

One thing to know is that, in order to obtain a better result through smarter work instead of hard work, you need to go for more knowledge. The more you know about something, the easier it will become for you to understand difficult tasks relating to it with ease. So you have to try as much as you can to keep updating on your existing knowledge and also try to gather more and extensive knowledge. Always remember that working with ease is a direct result of the level of knowledge you possess.

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