I came across an interesting article, Boasting how many hours you work is a sign of failure, and a light bulb went off for me. Of course it is. The opposite should be true!
I live the opposite and I realized I have for almost all my adult life. I’ve been spending a lot of time reflecting, and realized I value my schedule above everything. Now I plan for what I want to do around the schedule I want. I won’t trade it away.
As I reflect on all of my past businesses, I had always set them up to take the minimal amount of daily work, with periods of high output. Often I devised automation tools to do a lot of the work for me. The time I gained was mine, I didn’t just work for the sake of working.
Even though I can rattle off my successes, there were years of struggle, and I see now that the struggle had a lot to do with the life I wanted to live, which included not burning the candle at both ends. So as hard as it seemed, I was still living a life I chose to.
I suppose what I’m talking about is the old saying about working smart, not hard.
There’s a joke about how “Entrepreneurs quit working 40 hours a week so they can work 80”. It’s likely true for a lot, but it isn’t true for me.
I do have responsibilities that exist 24 hours a day, but my actual work schedule is completely different.
Why do we worship entrepreneurs when they claim to work 80, 100 or 120 hours a week? Now, I’ve done stretches like that. I’ve certainly put it in when it counted, but it was always important to me to work a schedule I wanted and create the tools necessarily to facilitate that.
If I can accomplish everything I need to within the work hours that maintain the life I want, why shouldn’t I do that? If I’m already living my dream life, why would I want to voluntarily work more hours just so I can have more stuff?
And it’s not like I live my life as a homeless person or monk. I have good stuff. But I drew a line and called it good. When I made that choice, things got a lot easier. Now I generate time.
I’m reminded of another article I read recently, I spent 2 years cleaning houses. What I saw makes me never want to be rich, the closing paragraph said “The bigger the house, the more they worked to afford it”.
What is more important to me: A leisurely work week, or a boat? A leisurely work week or a bigger house? A leisurely work week or owning a second property somewhere that I barely visit?
What an enviable position we are in as entrepreneurs, where we have such freedom to create the life we want to live!
I’m choosing my time as my greatest asset and pleasure. Time for reflection, time for my family, time for personal interests, and also reduction of the stress that goes with chasing “more”. I have gratitude instead of feeling incomplete. What an awesome thing.
How might society be different if we idolized people that have figured out how to have a fulfilling life with reduced hours instead of 100 a week? Generate the things that you value in that time, including time itself.
I’m the first to tell you that the path I took is my path, so you can’t be just like me, but you certainly can take ideas from me.
My parting thought with you is, what does your ideal schedule look like, what life can you create around it, and how might you go about creating that?
