The real-life examples of why work smarter, not harder, is the way to go.

I was working as a stock boy in a supermarket, and when we had to fill the milk cooler,

people would bust open a 12-pack of milk cartons and put them in one by one.

On my first story, I just placed the 12-pack in the cooler and cut the plastic off on one side with my box cutter

and yanked it from under it, and the look of my store manager and the other employee who was

training me was pure bewilderment. From that day, everyone did it my way. Start of lockdown,

my 9-year-old son was having worksheets emailed to complete at home. One day I left them at the

laptop doing his maths while I made

some dinner with my three-year-old daughter. I walked into the living room with his dinner to find him

asking Alexa all of his maths questions. I mean, I respected his hustle, but he was actually doing it the

least efficient way possible. He memorized the equation he needed to ask, say 327 times 8, walked over to Alexa, asked

her the equation, walked back to the laptop, walked back to Alexa to ask her again because he'd

forgotten the last two digits, walked back to the laptop, entered the answer, walk back to

Alexa to check it again. He had to keep walking backwards and forwards because he knew it was cheating, so he'd turned the volume down so I wouldn't hear it from the next room. So while he thought he was being clever, he was actually taking more time to figure the answer out using the Alexa, than it would have taken to do it himself. Plus, of course, there's the fact he was working on a laptop that has a calculator and a Cortana assistant that does the same exact thing as Alexa, and he knows how to use both the calculator

and Cortana, but still chooses to cheat in the least efficient way possible.

So yeah, if he's going to be a cheater, he needs to at least make it less work than just

doing the math.

Works as a laborer at a plant nursery one summer.

Daily tasks included manually watering 15,000 plants each day.

Put together a back of the napkin plan to build an irrigation system, and I spent the

next few weeks building it up with some money from the boss.

That system is still running 15 years later, and does all of the work now.

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