(2015·吉林第二次调研)My students often tell me that they don’t have “enough time” to do all their schoolwork.
My reply is often a brief “You_have_as_much_time_as_the_president.” I tell them that “not enough time” is not an acceptable explanation of not getting something done.
Once in graduate school, I tried to prove to one of my professors by saying that I was working hard. His answer to me was, “That’s irrelevant(无关的). What’s important is the quality of your work.”
If you analyze the matter, you can identify two parts of the problem: There is, of course，the matter of “time”， which we can think of as fixed. Then there is the problem of “work” during that time. But, as my professor suggested, it’s not how hard one works but the quality of the product that’s important.
That led me to a new idea: the quality of the work. That concept is perhaps best explained by a sign I once saw on the wall in someone’s office：“Don’t work harder. Work smarter.” There is a lot of sense in that idea.
