From a post I published on our w3management and nonlinear growth blogs.

People tend learn efficiently by “feel”. Here is an activity/experiment meant to teach the idea of efficiency in a way one can feel. I used to use it with my Tae Kwon Do students to explain the importance of technique.

Take a piece of paper and a pencil with an eraser on one end. Try to poke a hole through the paper with the eraser without another person helping you. Even if you stretch it between two books, it is an extremely difficult proposition. Now flip the pencil over and use the sharpened end - there is a remarkable difference in the level of effort required.

When it comes to sales, marketing and "making" traditional business often will do the equivalent of trying harder and harder to get that eraser to go through. I value hard work as much - maybe more - than many of the startup gurus who extol its virtues. It is A tactic to double effort, double hours, double people.

There are times when such tactics are not only appropriate they are critical: when all else fails, sometimes it takes heroic effort to pull a project or business through. Additionally, total immersion in one's business can feed your creativity and problem solving muscles and lead to outstanding results.

That said I try to remember that there are also times when what's needed is for one to flip the pencil over and sharpen it, to draw on the original experiment.  In terms of projects or businesses, these times call for examination of the problem(s), root causes, how pieces fit together, and what an ideal solution might look like.

The idea is to make sure that all that hard work will get us where we need to go; to remain mindful of the difference between working intelligently, as opposed to working really, really, really hard to poke a hole in paper using a blunt piece of rubber.