Over dinner with my family, I suddenly remembered an episode of DuckTales where Scrooge explains the story behind his Lucky Dime – in short, that he earned it through the hard work of shining the shoes of the first customer of his first company, a nascent shoe shine business; and, that (more importantly) after realizing he’d never make enough money to swim through just by busting his ass at the shine chair, he made his motto “work smarter, not harder,” invented an elaborate contraption based on an old bicycle that could shine five pairs of shoes at a time, and then hired in an ever-increasing flotilla of young shoe shine machinists.

Frankly, I was shocked and thrilled by the recollection, as though “work smarter, not harder” has been my mantra for at least the past decade, I’d always assumed I picked it up from some business book. Instead, while (as Will Hunting eloquently described) the equivalent of an MIT undergrad degree can be had for five dollars of late fees at the public library, apparently the Harvard Business School equivalent runs at the cost of a DuckTales DVD rental. How exciting to finally have good advice to pass on to up-and-coming entrepreneurs!