One day when I was in a client success meet, the project manager was explaining how they worked so hard in the last moment to meet the deadlines. Finally they could achieve the target and made the project success.  

when I listened this I felt it was actually a failure. Though the project can be success meeting the deadlines but there was a serious flaw in it. Why the project team need to work hard in the last minute, what caused them to work hard. I understood there was an operational process that they follow took a lot of time.

In corporate world, you may need to work hard but not all the times. If that is the case, there is something that is missing. you can do hard work while learning new skills, process, or concepts but that is only till learning. Once you learnt the skill, start doing smart work. Smart work by optimizing and automation to avoid the hard work by not repeating the same stuff again and again. Smart work always supersedes Hard work.