Hard work used to be confined in my mind as quite a stoic approach to doing things: sticking it out longer, focusing longer, or just telling myself I should be more consistent with task “X”.
But upon encountering a multidimensional framework on hard work at Marco Praxis‘s website, it changed my perception on the types of approaches to hard work and that it could be more than just grind and hustle. Here are the main ideas:

I definitely thought I could better utilize these methods for different goals in my life. Because I didn’t naturally associate “opportunistic” and “outthinking” as ideas related to hard work.
For example, I’ll often say I want to work harder at studying Korean. Instead of only seeing areas of improvement for consistency, focus and effort – I didn’t seek improvement in putting myself in social dynamics within a Korean community. In this way, perhaps I could’ve expedited the ability to quickly correct my speaking mistakes or to encounter a new social opportunity.
Another aspect I didn’t think about was strategizing or finding shortcuts to learning.
What I mean by this is that I recently learned that memorization, understanding, and recall is not the only way to work hard at learning. I could also jump straight into comparing and contrasting the different nuances of expressions directly with English on a mind map or imitating phrases of a korean movie/video that would most match my speaking style. I believe a higher level of self awareness is needed to do the latter.
This is referencing the concept of Bloom’s Taxonomy – where remembering, understanding and applying are in lower order thinking ranges and analyzing, evaluating, creating are all in higher order thinking stages. According to Justin Sung (Learning coach expert), he suggests that we can attempt to jump straight into comparing/contrasting as a strategy to learn faster.
Although I’m not fully aware of the process and terminologies, from what I’ve summarized our brain adopts new information by organizing it within the information we are already familiar in our neural network of the brain. So if we have the ability to choose to analyze information at this compare/contrast level, we have a better chance at stimulating synapses that build stronger connections for long term memory storage than trying to store new information just by memorization and recall.
Overall, seeing this multidimensional framework has helped me rethink how to plan for different goals (i.e, language study vs fitness) that better embodies the “work smarter, not harder” tagline. 😎

Let’s talk about your dreams!
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