Losers Work Hard

I said it.

Losers work 80+ hours a week.

It’s even more embarrassing if you’re an entrepreneur who’s pulling those hours.

If you’re enjoying that work and the hours are just a natural consequence of you building something you’re passionate about? Go right ahead.

I’d argue however that if you’re pulling those hours, chances are, you’re doing so out of compulsion, not passion.

You should absolutely despise hustle culture.

An entrepreneur who works 80+ hours a week isn’t a business owner, they’re just in a high-paying job.

How do you escape this cycle of becoming a slave to your business?

How do you stop being controlled by the very thing that you built?

The answer is something I’ve spoken about before - leverage.

Leverage comes in many forms.

Daily - Do the most important, needle-moving tasks first thing in the morning.

Weekly - Schedule only those tasks that move the needle. 99% of meetings can be eliminated, 99% of tasks can be delegated.

You get the idea.

But how do you exactly identify which tasks should or shouldn’t be prioritised.

The easy answer is to calculate your hourly rate and any tasks that are below that rate should be delegated or eliminated.

I’m serious.

The second thing is to stop being the bottleneck in your own business.

Not every decision has to go through you.

Not every payment has to go through you.

As horrifying as this thought may seem at first, this level of ruthless delegation is the key to not getting trapped in your own business.

Let people make quick decisions, that often means taking decisions without you.

Set a dollar limit, any problems that cost less than that, trust your people to make the right decision on their own.

Third thing is the most abstract and yet the most important one.

You need to find ways to climb the creative ladder. Let me explain.

Drake earns hundreds of millions of dollars a year, he doesn’t write the lyrics to his songs, nor does he make the beats or produce the songs.

He just adds his voice and selects which songs are good enough to go live.

At the beginning of his career, he had to do all of that himself. As he became bigger, it no longer made sense to pursue the same practice and he decided to employ people who are good at what they do and trusted them to do it.

What did he do with his free time?

He enjoyed his life!

Wasn’t that the goal to begin with? To create freedom for yourself and do whatever you want?

Maybe the analogy hit with you or maybe it didn’t, the point is, as you go along, you need to identify the highest leverage tasks that you can perform and focus on ONLY that. The rest can all be delegated or eliminated.

Be ruthless about this.

Hope you enjoyed this one.