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Sliced Almonds and the Conflation of Wealth With Hard Work
The problem with “work smarter, not harder.”
I have a handful of go-to childhood stories, not because they are fun or traumatizing, but because they taught me something invaluable. For example, when I was five the boy that sat next to me in kindergarten insisted that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. I’ll never forget it. It was the day I learned common sense may not be so common.
Fast-forward about ten years to when I was 15. It was a few days before Christmas Eve, we had family in town for the holidays, and a few of us decided to go to the grocery store. We needed sliced almonds for a recipe. My immediate reaction was to grab the whole almonds because they were cheaper than the sliced almonds and I could just slice them myself. My uncle, disagreeing with me, grabbed the sliced almonds off the shelf, turned to me and said, “Work smarter, not harder.”
Work smarter, not harder.
Intellect is not the issue. The issue is money and how we view the lack of it as a form of irresponsibility. While this point may seem a little hyperbolic in relation to a small discussion in a grocery store over almonds, we can extend this anecdote out into day-to-day headlines and see that it still rings true.
