The image is from Working Hard vs Working Smart and the Myth that Young People
Working hard is not necessarily useful; it is better to work smart.
Japan’s largest cosmetics company received complaints from customers complaining that the boxes of soap they bought were empty. So, to prevent this from happening again on the production line, the engineers worked hard to invent an X-ray monitor. They used the monitor to check every soapbox shipped.
The same problem occurred in another small company. Their solution was to buy a powerful industrial fan to blow each soapbox and blow away the empty boxes. Simple!
NASA discovered that in the low temperature and low gravity conditions of outer space, astronauts could not write with regular ink pens. So they spent a lot of money and effort to develop a pen that could write at low temperature without gravity.
What do the Russians do? They used pencils instead!
These stories demonstrate the difference between focusing on the “problem” and focusing on the “solution” to the problem! Sometimes we have blind spots like this at work; so to work hard is not necessarily useful; it is much better to work smart!
