TL;DR:

• Malcolm said: Anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you're both engaged in the same business, you know they're doing something that you aren't.
• Everyone has 24 hours in a day
• Take time to think and reflect on how to improve

In the first chapter of Malcolm X's autobiography. He mentions a story from his childhood where he and a group of people would go rabbit hunting together. The older men in the group had their strategy, they would sit there and camp out and wait for a rabbit to come running by and then would shoot when the time is right.

Malcolm and his friend discovered that for some reason, when a dog was chasing rabbits, if the rabbit got away, it would circle back and run around in a circle for some reason. So what they did was when they saw a rabbit get away from a dog, they would just stay there and wait for the rabbit to circle back. Because of this tactic, Malcolm was able to get 3 times as many rabbits as everyone else.

Everyone thought he had a really good shot, when in reality he just studied the prey and knew when to strike. Reflecting on this, Malcolm says, "Anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you're both engaged in the same business, you know they're doing something that you aren't."

24 Hours

What Malcolm said is profound. When you see someone that is engaged in the same business as you but has more success than you, its not that they're just better than you. Its that they're doing something different. This is the core of working smart, not necessarily hard. The secret to success is not merely putting a lot of energy into a particular direction, but it is also about putting it in the right direction.

We can take a look at the example of warehouse operations. If we want to increase total throughput we can put all of our energy into engaging our people and forcing them to go faster at all costs. But if your quality is atrocious, they will never get to the true throughput potential that you want them to. Instead if you focus on quality of the people driving the most injections into the system, you can make it so your entire department is not wasting time reworking quality defects. By focusing on the quality of a few people, you can increase your entire departments throughput. That is working smart.

Now coming back to Malcolm's words. Any business that you're in, you must realize that we all have the same 24 hours in a day. Yes, your competition may have had a head start in terms of capital or other resources, but what they do with those resources will make or break them. You can not simply throw a lot of resources at something and expect it to work out well. You have to make sure the resources are spending their time in a way that is smart.

We all have the same 24 hours in a day. We end up doing what we prioritize. As they say, everybody's got time for what's important.

Take Time to Think

One of the qualities of Malcolm was that he was a thinker. He was not a sheep like most other people. He read, he analyzed, he studied, he asked questions. In order to work smart, you have to take time to think and analyze. You have to spend some time before the actual act of doing to strategize, only then will you be working smart.

You see this as a recurring theme in Malcolm's life. He took time to reflect and analyze situations even as a child. When he was shooting rabbits is one example. When he got into gambling he noticed that if someone is always winning, they're cheating. Most people don't ever think about it enough to even come to that realization.

In our daily lives, we have to set aside some time daily to reflect and think about things. With the amount of information and content that is available at our fingertips, it is easy to just keep consuming and consuming without taking time to think about anything.

If you look at the investing strategy of Warren Buffet, it is all patient deliberation. The man has made billions of dollars by simply waiting for the right moment and then going all in on a few stocks. Many people, especially nowadays with the massive fluctuations every day, are simply picking a stock that they think is underpriced and then waiting for it to go up and selling as soon as it does. Buffet, on the other hand, is a long term value investor. He bought Delta at the start of the Coronavirus pandemic because it was underpriced, and shortly after sold it at a loss. When the market rallied earlier this week everyone was saying Buffet messed up he could've made money. Then the next day Delta comes crashing back down.

Buffet spends hours every day reading and analyzing. What is he reading? He's reading annual reports. If there's someone in the same business as you that is more successful than you, know that he is doing something you're not doing. Buffet is successful not because he follows the ups and downs of the market like every other person with robinhood. He is successful because he reads and studies companies voraciously. He sees trends and is able to capitalize when the moment is right.