Long work hours

Hey - It’s Michael.

I met someone great (!) yesterday. Enjoy the newsletter!

The illusion - it’s all around you.

Do more. Take this meeting. Do that task. Follow this goal. Achieve that milestone.

Hustle!

Do this sideproject, take that job. Work sixty hours per week, no, seventy, better eighty or a hundred!

Sleep less, no friends, endure more misery.

Hell you might even enjoy it.

It’s what most people grew up with: working more hours is the only way to achieve your goals.

But is it?

Imagine playing a videogame where the character has different stats you can train & evolve over time:

It might be things like balance, speed, damage you deal or quality of defense.

Real life is similar. There is communication, negotiation, planning or resilience.

There is the ability to build a network or aquire knowledge, the ability to learn quickly and choose the right mindset.

I call them meta skills and those meta skills are ultimately what you should max out on (e.g. learn, train & improve).

They disproportionately improve your odds of success. There is no limit to how good you can become. They are leverage.

Your work hours on the other hand have physical limits. You can never significantly outcompete somebody else. You’ll have to sleep and eat at some point.

Somebody might work ten hours per day while others work eight or six. Great, thats a factor of 1,25 or 1,67.

So no matter how long you work - at most you’ll work 2x as much. It’s impossible to work 10x longer than others.

But knowing the right people, setting up your environment, building the right habits, improving the way you work - those are the real levers. You can do those things 5x, 10x and at times 100x better or more than other people.

You can outcompete them! (Hint: it’s not about competing with others but it proves my point.)

Principle:

Max out on meta skills.

Dismantle your belief that working longer hours is the only path to success.

Define what success means to you. Look at people who achieved what you want. Study what they did & how they did it.

Most likely they put in long hours and significant amounts of effort but it’s rarely the hours that made the difference.

It’s how they approach things. It’s the meta skills. It might even be luck. It’s a million things but definetely not work time.

Stop Rule:

Stop working more. Start working better.

So instead of more working longer hours, take a few minutes and do a little brainstorm.

Write down all the ways you could build leverage to achieve whatever it is that you want to achieve.

Focus on that - work less and enjoy life a bit more - it’s pretty short anyway.

“Those who work much do not work hard.” - Henry David Thoreau

What would I do if I could only work 2h today (and still achieve my goals)?

See you next week - Michael