I saw this on the Twitterverse the other day, a tweet by @drose007 who was talking about his time in Amazon and something that Jeff Bezos said about Amazon’s competitors, in particular, eBay:

eBay: Building distribution centers, carrying inventory and shipping packages is hard. And that’s a good thing, because it will be hard for competitors to replicate. Investors don’t like how hard our business is, but that’s exactly what I do like about our business.

That really struck a chord. Because all that talk about working smart got me thinking that you can mostly get away with hard work if you’re being smart about it. Perhaps true for some situations. That’s probably true in the era of bullshit jobs and busy work. Work that doesn’t push the needle, put points on the board. But for the work that really matters to your product or business, smart and hard work is the best one-two punch combo. If your focus and priority is on point already; if you’re already being the smartest you can be smart about in terms of your productivity, priorities and opportunities, then next it’s all about hard work, isn’t it?  

But hard work is not enough. It has to be difficult for a purpose. To build a moat. To build something that’s difficult for others to replicate. Because if it was easy, then it’s not worth the hard work, is it? That’s why the hard work of building online communities is hard to replicate, because tech is easy, but getting to people’s hearts to stay loyal to your app and the community in it, is damn hard work. 

This made me think really hard about my own products. 

Am I being the smartest I can be in terms of work and priorities?

Am I doing hard work that makes it hard for others to replicate/automate?

Some ways to say “Hell yeah!” to both questions, and you’re good.