Working Smarter Instead of Harder Worked for These People

While working hard is an incredibly useful tool in life, working smart is also just as, if not more, important than your work ethic. These are just a few examples of the long list of people who discovered the beauty of working smarter.

Parking Ticket Madness

In undergrad, parking where you don’t belong gets you a ticket. I ALWAYS parked where I didn’t belong because everything else was taken, and these were right up close to my dorm or class.

Unpaid tickets accumulate and are then applied to your tuition balance so that you must pay them before you can register for the next semester, or before you get your diploma, in the case of seniors.

But as a member of the honors college, I was on 100% tuition scholarship. As a result, the parking tickets were tacked onto my tuition, and then almost immediately wiped clean.

They caught on about halfway through junior year, but by then I had literally wallpapered an entire wall of my room with over $2000 worth of blue parking tickets.

Story Credit: Reddit/toolatealreadyfd

Handicap Fabrication

I work in the luggage claim department for a major airline. Every day, I get to hear customers yelling and complaining. All I had to do was borrow one of the wheelchairs from the airport and sit behind my desk.

Problem solved! Customers who’d come in all angry would see me in the wheelchair and instantly felt pity for me. Was it wrong? Yes. Did I still do it?

I’m ashamed to admit it, but yes.

All of a sudden, my horrible customers transformed into the nicest people. Physically my blood pressure has dropped and, in general, I’m in a pretty good mood most of the time now.

Story Credit: Reddit/Greyham0707

Engineering Yourself Out of a Job

I worked as a laborer at a nursery one summer. Daily tasks included manually watering 15,000 plants every day. I put together a back-of-the-napkin plan to build an irrigation system and spent the next few weeks building it with some money from the boss.

That system is still running 15 years later and does all the work now. But here’s the problem.

I ended up automating myself out of the job and had to find another one. A couple of years later, I got my engineering degree. I’m convinced Engineers are inherently lazy people that will spend a disproportionate effort to make things easier.

Story Credit: Reddit/InquiringKata

Surprise Helper

At the start of lockdown, my nine-year-old son was having worksheets emailed to him for at-home completion. One day, I left him at the laptop doing his math homework while I made some dinner with my three-year-old daughter.

Afterward, I walked back into the living room with his dinner—and made an unbelievable discovery. There was my son, shamelessly asking Alexa all of his math questions.

Story Credit: Reddit/Sparkiemark1977