Historically, working hard is considered a good trait for career success, and many people adopt this behavior by exhausting their energy and the ones around them to achieve this success.

By Emile Fakhoury
While the new trait or new generation is being told to work smart to optimize energy and achievements, working smart is also sometimes working hard and exhausting energy to find the optimum goal.

Like many of you, I have personally used both regimes, worked hard on many tasks, and sometimes worked smart in other studies. We could alter between working hard and smart to keep gaining trophies and please our corporate management.

However, there is no work-life balance without having happiness and peace for yourself and the people around you in society.
I have achieved the best results in my career when I work happily!

I will list the tips that I have learned through my life and career experiences:
1-Take regular breaks
Don’t wait for summer or end-year holidays to plan your next vacation; take regular breaks like more extended weekends before you find yourself energy drained so you can enjoy the moment and return energized and refreshed.

2-Reward yourself and the people around you
Grand celebrations and awards are great, but celebrating small successes and rewarding yourself and your team for nicely done work will bring happiness to your workplace and more wins. Positive energy will help you overcome challenges smoothly and attract positive success.

3-Plan work and plan time off
As you plan work and business plans daily and weekly, you should also think about planning weekends and time off; this will set your brain to balance working hard or smart and being happy.

I prefer to fill the gap in my brain and not wait till the last moment to plan; this will help set up a positive mood and make us both eager and energetic.

4-Say No and be Honest
No one can perform without a break. We cannot multitask while maintaining optimum performance; we should be able to plan our priorities and learn to say No honestly to keep the happiness in both life and the work environment.

Happiness at work brings satisfactory experience to individuals and corporations and improves mental health tremendously while improving business performance. I believe successful businesses and leaders should focus on finding the optimum situation to make their team happy to extract the best performance from their team.

Working hard or intelligent is now old-fashioned to optimize performance; work happy instead and get great results!