Problem-solving is the essence of work. You can become more productive by welcoming the problems you face and inventing, discovering, or creating solutions to them. Adam Smith notes that many machines were invented by “common workmen” who channeled their frustrations into practical solutions.

In Book 1, Chapter 1 of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith asks us to consider the example of a pin-making factory employing 10 workmen. Making a pin requires 18 distinct processes. If each workman tried to make pins by himself, each one might be able to produce 20 pins per day. But by dividing their labors, focusing on just two or three of the distinct processes of pin-making, the same 10 workmen could make 48,000 pins per day!

Smith’s explanation of the division of labor suggests the following insights:

Focus your efforts on work at which you excel.

Or just focus on something. Our age is an age of being “distracted from distraction by distraction” (T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets). Simply the discipline and self-mastery of focusing your efforts will set you apart from the crowd.

Invent solutions to the problems you encounter along the way.

Problem-solving is the essence of work. You can become more productive by welcoming the problems you face and inventing, discovering, or creating solutions to them. Adam Smith notes that many machines were invented by “common workmen” who channeled their frustrations into practical solutions.

Team up with others whose knowledge and skills complement yours.

If problem-solving is the essence of work, then team-work is the essence of civilization. “The work of one man in a rude state of society [is] generally that of several in an improved [state of society],” Smith writes. “In every improved society, the farmer is generally nothing but a farmer; the manufacturer, nothing but a manufacturer. The labour to which is necessary to produce any one complete manufacture, is almost always divided among a great number of hands.”

Devote your spare time to the ongoing renewal of good government.

All members of a well-governed society benefit from the division of labor. Smith again: “It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labor, which occasions, in a well-governed society [italics mine], that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.”

Smith doesn’t spell out in Book 1 what makes a society “well-governed.” However, he does return to the topic in Book 5, where a well-governed society turns out to be one which safeguards economic freedom without turning a blind eye to the miseries of the laboring poor.

What do you think? What makes a society well-governed?

Daniel Vos is Lead Web Developer at Five More Talents and Lead Web Developer at IX Publishing, Inc. This article appeared on his blog and is used by permission.

[Editor’s note: the link to the original source for this article is broken and has been removed.]