5 Tips to Earn More & Work Less

I was having breakfast with a friend this week who is about my age and very accomplished in his own right, and he said to me, I'm ready to play a bigger game, I'm ready to start thinking bigger. But I struggle with this tension between wanting more success and spending more time with my kids. And he asked me for my advice on managing those two desires of wanting to grow but not wanting to take away time from the things that matter most. And I interrupted him and I said, that's a false assumption. It's a false assumption that it requires more effort and more time to create more results. In fact, most entrepreneurial minded people are too focused on doing more rather than doing the right things. In this video, I want to outline a few steps that you can take in order to gain more clarity, but more importantly, create more room. You see, what I said to my friend from across the table was if you want to think bigger, then you have to have time to think. Most of us get caught in this rut in which we keep pounding the pavement of doing the same routines over and over and over again. And there's a time for that. There's absolutely a place for developing routines and hustling towards something. But we can really only do that in short sprints. We can only really do that for about 90 days before we start to feel the heaviness of the monotony and the grind and the grunt of it all. So if anything, what I hope to do for you in this video is to give you permission to step away from the routine, to step away from the grind, to do less, and to create room for new ideas, for new excitement and new creativity. So I'm going to give you a few things that you can think about and work into your daily routine that'll help to alleviate that burnout and give you more room for the clarity that will show you the next level of success.

The first thing that you can do that will create a meaningful impact in your day and in your life is a very simple tweak to your morning. Pick one thing, anything to do first thing in the morning, that is not checking your phone. I don't care if it's play a video game. I don't care if it's do 10 pushups. I don't care if it's drink a glass of water. I don't care if it's jump in the shower or do a cold plunge or meditate for three hours or whatever. The other people you follow suggest that you should do any one thing that you can do. That is, not checking your phone is progress. Here's why. When you check your phone first thing in the morning, you immediately start responding to the notifications into the outside world. And if you're a creator or an entrepreneur or just a person who thrives on inspiration and creativity, you have to have room for your own unique ideas and for your own brain to have the calm sense that there is nothing dangerous to respond to in order for you to have that feeling freedom to create something or do something on your own terms. The minute that you're responding to that urgent text message or slack message or the piece of news that pisses you off, whatever it is that grabs your attention, takes it away from the attention that you could be giving to the things that give you a meaningful step forward in your life. So whether you like to work out or start a business or. Or journal or spend time with family, the minute your attention is taken away from that, you're no longer in control of you living life on your own terms. So if you can capture that initial 30 minutes, and the longer, the better of being uninterrupted, that's a step forward, regardless of where you decide to put that attention.

The second thing that you can do to create more room and creativity is go for long walks, preferably in nature. The person that I have become most fascinated with over the last year is an entrepreneur named Trevor Blake. Trevor is an entrepreneur who didn't start a business until he was 43 years old, and then within his first 10 years, had three exits totaling $300 million. Today, he's working on additional companies that he says are worth over a billion dollars. I asked Trevor what the secret to his success was, and he said, working no more than five hours a day, and two of those hours are spent walking in the woods. Now, this is crazy to most entrepreneurs who think that it requires more time to get more results. But if you look at how Trevor and a lot of other entrepreneurs approach their day and approach their careers, you see that this is a trend among a lot of the world's most successful people. They prioritize recharging. They prioritize giving their brain the space to be creative. So when they show up to work, the thing that is most important is very clear to them. And even more importantly, they don't sacrifice their time and their creativity for the things that they should not be doing. They would rather wait for things to line up for them so they could take action quickly, rather than putting their own energy into trying to fix every piece of the business.

So if you ever hit that wall and you try to work your way through it, my recommendation is to close the laptop, go for a walk, and come back to the project with fresh eyes. Or as I do sometime, come back to the laptop and realize the thing that I was stressing about doesn't really matter so much.

Unfortunately, in today's world, we don't have much separation between work and home. So we are constantly bombarded with work notifications, with new ideas that we want to pursue, with requests for coffee or meeting with this random person that we don't know but we were introduced to. And so we have an endless amount of opportunities to pursue more, to pursue more work, to pursue busy work. And so we have to be vigilant about prioritizing and scheduling our off time. For me, I decided that I would take one week off every month. And what that really means is that I don't go to meetings I don't want to go to. I don't take the call from the person that I don't want to have the call with. I don't do the activity that I don't want to do. It's basically a week that I am allowed to procrastinate whatever I want to procrastinate. And what inevitably happens during that time is that the things that are not important but were stressing me out just fade away. And the things that really are important that I couldn't see before start to show themselves, but I don't have a tenseness about doing something with them. Right now. I'm able to be more creative, more productive in my approach to getting those things done. So if you work from home or you are an entrepreneur, it's more important than ever that you prioritize that time where you don't have to do anything that you don't want to do. One of the traps that we often fall into is waking up, going to the computer, saying, what am I going to work on today? Doing a bunch of busy work, and then ending the day with a feeling of unaccomplishment and a feeling of being drained at the end of the day. And so we have to give ourselves the permission to be able to remove all that noise and not fill our day with busy work. Otherwise, we just get caught in this trap of unproductivity. And the way that we can reverse that very quickly is by scheduling time off.

Number four, pay very close attention to your emotions. I don't mean to get philosophical on you, but I believe that our emotions are an indicator of how we really feel about the things that are in front of us, the opportunities that show up, the tasks that are on our to do list. How you feel about something is a good sign, whether you should pursue it or not. If you are hustling because you are looking for something because you are falling behind. If you are hustling because you are waiting for the right opportunity or you don't want to miss the right opportunity. If you are hustling because everybody else is hustling. If you're hustling because everybody else says to hustle but you don't have clarity in what it is that you are doing that's operating out of fear. You fear missing an opportunity. You fear what you running out of money. You fear not accomplishing everything that you want to accomplish. The problem with this is that when you are hustling out of fear, you tend to drain the battery and it gets worse. The other experience of hustling out of excitement is the most rewarding experience of life that can possibly exist. I've had the privilege of getting to know Gary Vaynerchuk lot a a little bit over the last few years. We've only hung out a couple of times to record a few podcasts together. But one thing that I noticed about Gary is that Gary is truly enjoying his life and his work. I think he's done a really good job of reframing the Hustle label that has been put on him over the years because if you look at his life, he does hustle and he hustles in pursuit of the things that are truly giving him joy.

It's very clear if you read or watch anything for even more than five minutes that I want people to be happy and be self aware. Do I believe that work ethic is a foundational piece of success? Yes, I do. Do I want anybody ever to work so much that they get depressed? Of course not.

Gary likes to remind people that if you are hustling and feeling drained, it's because you're prioritizing the wrong things. And I interpret that as you are hustling out of fear rather than true excitement or contribution. When you're with Gary in person, he is incredibly present. He is there with you and he's truly pumped about all the different projects that he's got. It's a big game to him. He's telling the truth when he says that he secretly wants to lose everything because he loves the game so much. It's a big video game to him now. He's wired differently than most people, but the principle remains universal for all of us. If we are hustling out of excitement for the things that we truly desire, instead of hustling out of fear of what might happen if we don't, then we have a much better chance of living fulfilled, exciting and rich lives. Rich both emotionally and financially, because we make the most money when we prioritize the things that we truly desire that are truly unique to the world and to the marketplace.

And number five, limit the number of money making activities that you prioritize. Here's what I mean. I was once working with a client who had just crossed a million dollars in their business and they were selling, I think, financial advice. And they had this business that had grown over the last year and a half. It was doing seven figures. They were excited about it and they were asking me about an unrelated project that was a new start. It was also financial advice, but it was starting something completely new. And I interrupted them because we were having lunch in a hotel and actually the table next to us turned and looked at me because I inward, I said, stop. You mean to tell me that you're gonna take your attention away from the thing that's making a million dollars and you're gonna give your attention to the thing that's making zero? Tell me how that works. As entrepreneurs, we have so many ideas and we see everybody else killing it in so many different ways. There's YouTube and real estate and there's bitcoin and there's selling on Amazon and there's all these different business opportunities that you can pursue. Or in my world, I work with a lot of physical product owners who are selling on Amazon and then they see somebody killing it on Shopify and then they see somebody building an audience on Pinterest and they see somebody sponsoring influencers and they're all over the place and they're completely ignoring the thing that's actually working. Look, here's the truth. You can make a lot of money. You can get rich trading bitcoin, you can get rich investing in real estate. You can get rich making YouTube videos. You can get rich having a social media agency. You can get rich creating a business that sells things on Amazon. You could do any of these things, but you can't do all of them. So you have to limit the number of money making activities that you prioritize. And once again, your clear indicator is which ones are you truly excited about. Yes, there are sometimes things that pay the bills that we have to maintain for a while, but your goal is to only do the money making ventures that are truly exciting to you and that requires you to eliminate some some of the good ideas that take your focus away from the thing that is working right now. It only takes one great idea, one good investment, one good business, one good connection to completely change your life. The trouble is, most of us drown all of that out with just more noise and more work.

Working in our crazy busy world and culture can get real messy and it can get really lonely and depressing too. And when you feel that way, it's a good indicator that you're off track. The only solution that actually works is to carve out time to recharge and to, dare I say, be bored. You can't really create anything great until you have clarity and excitement and then the willingness to hustle, not the other way around. If this video helped you find clarity or have mission to carve out room for you to come up with new ideas and play a bigger game, please help me share this with other people who need this. We're so burnt out in this culture and we so need entrepreneurs and business minded, free thinking creative people who are doing things out of excitement rather than from the energy reserve. And you can help me do that by liking this video and sharing it with somebody that you think needs to hear it. And if we can help support you on your journey for more money, for more exciting businesses, for more clarity, for more freedom in your life, please subscribe to the channel. We make content for entrepreneurs and for creators who are doing great things and I'd be proud to be a part of your journey. You can do that by subscribing to the channel and showing up to one of our live Q&As. Or if you want help on your business business journey, you can start@capitalism.com start thanks for watching and I'll see you on the next video.