Person Sick Of The ‘Don’t Work Hard, Work Intelligent’ Meme Hilariously Proves How False It Is
Some people have way too much time on their hands. A visual interpretation of the ‘Work Smarter Not Harder’ meme has been doing the rounds on Reddit, with one person deciding to take the simple picture to task by painstakingly and hilariously deconstructing it while pointing out all of its errors and flaws.
This picture, uploaded on Reddit’s MurderedByWords forum, portrays 6 white, male workers (representation in the workplace, anyone?) metaphorically ‘pushing’ their work, which is represented by cubes.
One guy has it all figured out though. While the others are laboriously shoving their cumbersome cubes, he has ingeniously devised an easier way and is ahead of the pack, happily rolling his sphere.
Simple, right? “He who is creative and thinks things through gets ahead.”
Image credits: L1ghtningdude
This person wasn’t having it though.
“Wait a second. What exactly is the message being conveyed here?” they wrote. “Feel free to sabotage the product for the sake of making your own job easier?”
Working from the invented assumption that these metaphorical workers were delivering a product, what followed was a glorious demonstration of anal-retentiveness, as both the picture and the message were expertly picked apart with powerful pedantry.
Someone illustrated what might be waiting for the smart worker at the end of the day
Image credits: unknown
So what is the point in all of this? Who knows. Perhaps we are living in a dystopian, largely online world where unspoken, interpretive communication like metaphors, satire, sarcasm and irony are slowly dying. A place where subtlety and nuance get quickly lost in a maelstrom of self-important blowhards, judging and shouting and taking things way too literally.
A place where telling a bad joke can easily be taken the wrong way and get you fired from your job.
Or perhaps the joke is on us, and the whole thing is so meta that the pedantic person is themselves satirizing the process of taking things too literally… We will leave it up to you to decide!
Here’s what people had to say about the pedantic poster
What do you think? Are we taking ourselves too seriously these days? Is the internet making us angrier, more opinionated and less able to read between the lines? Is there still a place for metaphors, satire, sarcasm and irony? Let us know in the comments below!
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Share on FacebookThis breakdown filled me with joy. Inspirational pictures always kind of annoyed me
Maybe people reading what the critics are saying are taking them too seriously? I found the critques funny because they are mostly true. The original meme appears to be created by a visionary type of person, usually uninterested in the details. That's what us minions are for, to figure that out.
I'm just wondering how anyone can seriously think that someone would take the meme serious enough to seriously comment about it. I can only read it as a joke.
Load More Replies...And the reaction is also just a joke. Sometimes memes come up so often that it's fun to dissect them to pieces for the heck of it. It's Reddit.
Load More Replies...I think the problem is that people these days have misinterpreted that phrase to mean "Do whatever is easiest" or "Take the easy way out".
i like both the meme and the comment. the comment analyse fastidiously and urging us thinking twice
It still craps; meanwhile, no one ordered these cubes, symbolizing an unaffecting work flow. In real life, someone who optimizes workflow gets promoted, while every peon always at the bottom is going, "what, but I put in so much more work than them!" It's like yeah, no one cares, no one ordered these cubes, and customers will probably pay extra for globes instead of cubes, no less if they did increase sales :P Worse case, you reduce the price a smidge customer loves it more than a cube, and orders 2 instead of 1 unit lol. Like you can tell who is bottom rung employee going, "but I was trained to do it this way for years..." While the new hire is going to boss going "if we do this change productivity goes up, and waste goes down." And they get promoted lol.
I wouldn't follow the advice of a poster with such poor grammar anyway. It should be "work intelligentLY" or "work smarter", not "work intelligent".
That person is an idiot. The cube is a metaphor. If no one tried to be smarter about the work they did, no progress would ever be made. When I was first hired at my job, one of my tasks was to check that all the files had arrived for the day and that no data was missing. Boss said my predecessors took half the day to verify everything. I had to visually compare 150 files to their corresponding names and check off that they came in. On my first day, in two hours, I wrote a program that at the push of a button did this instantly and reported which files were missing, if any. My boss saw how smart that was and put me to streamlining more processes. This lead to complete and total faith in my abilities and I was eventually allowed to work full-time from home instead of driving 110 miles a day. I'll sphere the cube every day of the week.
You are the idiot. What you did is you created a conveyor belt to transport the cubes. If you wanna take the picture example and apply it to your case, you would have deleted 72 files and checked the remaining 78 files.
Load More Replies...Awful lot of people in these comments who don't know how to have fun. The last few comments in the article especially.
That is very old. What is next? The dancing baby from Ally McBeal?
I actually just saw the dancing baby in a post just recently - I don't recall the circumstances.
Load More Replies...Cant people just leave the meme alone? Stop wasting your breath on a meme.
The person who did this completely missed the point in my opinion. The worker shouldn't have to choose between self and company. A wise business, organization, government, society, etc should try its best to set up the individual for success not martyrdom. While I do understand the person's point, unnecessary sacrifice should not be idolized nor should laziness. Win-win is a model where as many parties as possible win.
Well...this is about the work you need to do represented as a 3d shape. Sometimes you have to adjust your work to be able to complete the task...it's about being adaptable. Creating a cylinder shape is a happy middle - but you are still limiting yourself to only go in a certain direction. Creating a sphere means you can be super flexible by going in all direction meaning you can go further and do more and still get the job done. Seeing it just as a percentage of what you have lost at the start means you have failed to understand the freedom of the potential it work smart. As for the 'product' the customer may have order a cube but wanted a sphere but you only deliver cubes. Yet because of you working smarter you spend the time at the start making a sphere, which makes it easier to deliver, and means the customer gets what they want.
I honestly don't know what annoys me more: cheap motivational pictures or exhausting people who overthink them and write f*****g essays about something that barely deserve attention.
" 6 white, male workers" Did you just assume their gender?
I'm sorry but in essence it's true. I can do my job 5 times faster than most and better because I figured out what is b.s. and not applicable to what I'm doing. Granted I'm probably in another field than most on this thread but it actually does work for some careers.
The cubes don't represent product, they represent tasks. It's not meant to be taken so literally, dumbass.
A lot of Engineers seem to have been outraged by this (I'm assuming they are engineers because of the pedantic approach and calculating precisely the percentage of material wasted.
Okay, since they engaged in this ridiculous debate: Yes you would have to know what the goal of the work was. Perhaps the goal is speed. In making the movement of the first one faster, perhaps he can then get a second one there before the others delivered their first square.
Sorry, no. Not having it. This person (and any who agree) are being "that guy" (or woman) and nowhere near as clever as they think. Being pendantic isn't the same as being intelligent. You're not that smart if you don't understand analogies.
Wow, I really couldn't live without knowing this. Now please take your time and maybe go outside and dont think about it? I really think there are greater things in life than discussing and making a diserattion about a meme
This breakdown filled me with joy. Inspirational pictures always kind of annoyed me
Maybe people reading what the critics are saying are taking them too seriously? I found the critques funny because they are mostly true. The original meme appears to be created by a visionary type of person, usually uninterested in the details. That's what us minions are for, to figure that out.
I'm just wondering how anyone can seriously think that someone would take the meme serious enough to seriously comment about it. I can only read it as a joke.
Load More Replies...And the reaction is also just a joke. Sometimes memes come up so often that it's fun to dissect them to pieces for the heck of it. It's Reddit.
Load More Replies...I think the problem is that people these days have misinterpreted that phrase to mean "Do whatever is easiest" or "Take the easy way out".
i like both the meme and the comment. the comment analyse fastidiously and urging us thinking twice
It still craps; meanwhile, no one ordered these cubes, symbolizing an unaffecting work flow. In real life, someone who optimizes workflow gets promoted, while every peon always at the bottom is going, "what, but I put in so much more work than them!" It's like yeah, no one cares, no one ordered these cubes, and customers will probably pay extra for globes instead of cubes, no less if they did increase sales :P Worse case, you reduce the price a smidge customer loves it more than a cube, and orders 2 instead of 1 unit lol. Like you can tell who is bottom rung employee going, "but I was trained to do it this way for years..." While the new hire is going to boss going "if we do this change productivity goes up, and waste goes down." And they get promoted lol.
I wouldn't follow the advice of a poster with such poor grammar anyway. It should be "work intelligentLY" or "work smarter", not "work intelligent".
That person is an idiot. The cube is a metaphor. If no one tried to be smarter about the work they did, no progress would ever be made. When I was first hired at my job, one of my tasks was to check that all the files had arrived for the day and that no data was missing. Boss said my predecessors took half the day to verify everything. I had to visually compare 150 files to their corresponding names and check off that they came in. On my first day, in two hours, I wrote a program that at the push of a button did this instantly and reported which files were missing, if any. My boss saw how smart that was and put me to streamlining more processes. This lead to complete and total faith in my abilities and I was eventually allowed to work full-time from home instead of driving 110 miles a day. I'll sphere the cube every day of the week.
You are the idiot. What you did is you created a conveyor belt to transport the cubes. If you wanna take the picture example and apply it to your case, you would have deleted 72 files and checked the remaining 78 files.
Load More Replies...Awful lot of people in these comments who don't know how to have fun. The last few comments in the article especially.
That is very old. What is next? The dancing baby from Ally McBeal?
I actually just saw the dancing baby in a post just recently - I don't recall the circumstances.
Load More Replies...Cant people just leave the meme alone? Stop wasting your breath on a meme.
The person who did this completely missed the point in my opinion. The worker shouldn't have to choose between self and company. A wise business, organization, government, society, etc should try its best to set up the individual for success not martyrdom. While I do understand the person's point, unnecessary sacrifice should not be idolized nor should laziness. Win-win is a model where as many parties as possible win.
Well...this is about the work you need to do represented as a 3d shape. Sometimes you have to adjust your work to be able to complete the task...it's about being adaptable. Creating a cylinder shape is a happy middle - but you are still limiting yourself to only go in a certain direction. Creating a sphere means you can be super flexible by going in all direction meaning you can go further and do more and still get the job done. Seeing it just as a percentage of what you have lost at the start means you have failed to understand the freedom of the potential it work smart. As for the 'product' the customer may have order a cube but wanted a sphere but you only deliver cubes. Yet because of you working smarter you spend the time at the start making a sphere, which makes it easier to deliver, and means the customer gets what they want.
I honestly don't know what annoys me more: cheap motivational pictures or exhausting people who overthink them and write f*****g essays about something that barely deserve attention.
" 6 white, male workers" Did you just assume their gender?
I'm sorry but in essence it's true. I can do my job 5 times faster than most and better because I figured out what is b.s. and not applicable to what I'm doing. Granted I'm probably in another field than most on this thread but it actually does work for some careers.
The cubes don't represent product, they represent tasks. It's not meant to be taken so literally, dumbass.
A lot of Engineers seem to have been outraged by this (I'm assuming they are engineers because of the pedantic approach and calculating precisely the percentage of material wasted.
Okay, since they engaged in this ridiculous debate: Yes you would have to know what the goal of the work was. Perhaps the goal is speed. In making the movement of the first one faster, perhaps he can then get a second one there before the others delivered their first square.
Sorry, no. Not having it. This person (and any who agree) are being "that guy" (or woman) and nowhere near as clever as they think. Being pendantic isn't the same as being intelligent. You're not that smart if you don't understand analogies.
Wow, I really couldn't live without knowing this. Now please take your time and maybe go outside and dont think about it? I really think there are greater things in life than discussing and making a diserattion about a meme
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