How I'm Getting More Done By Taking A Full Month Off (For Real This Time)

For most of my life and my career, I believed this idea that one day things will smooth out. One day my life will get to the point where I don't have to work so much. I'll get to a point where I can ease off the gas, and I'll have a really cushy, cozy life. I think I even viewed my future as that when I was a kid, I'll make a bunch of money and I'll kill it, and then I won't work as much. And for some reason, that just never happened. Even when I sold my company in 2017, I took one week off. And that week off looked like me sitting in my house reading books, wondering what the heck I was going to do with my time. Until I finally decided, I guess I'll just get back to work. I've never really taken real time off or even known what that would look like. And I know that if you're watching and you're an entrepreneur, you can relate to this. This. We think about work, we dream about work, we think about it all the time with the idea that one day we're going to have freedom. And I've gone through several periods in which I really burned out. And my M.O. for that time was to just burn everything to the ground was just like, stop. It was just to cut back and sometimes shut down companies or projects and back away from them. And I came really close to doing that about four months ago. Four months ago, I hit a real point of burnout where I just didn't have it anymore, or I felt like I just couldn't bring it to the projects that I was working on anymore. And my body was even just sort of slowing down. And it got to the point where I said, I have to give myself a real break now. Life has tried to give me this lesson in the past. For example, I got Covid in 2021, which forced me to slow down. And when I finally slowed down, I started getting all these great ideas. And every time I go on vacation, you know, for like three days, I get great ideas, and I feel really recharged. I see the big picture again. But this time I really had to get the lesson. And so I told my team that. That I wanted to take a full month off later this year. So we put it on the calendar that I would take a full month off and that the team would start working towards the ability for me to take time off. And the most interesting thing started to happen. So once again, I believed this idea that one day I'd have Enough money or the systems would be there, or I'd just be in a place in my life where I didn't have to push so hard, I didn't have to work so hard. And a lot of times we think that's going to come once we're making a million dollars or once we have a certain amount of clients, or in my case, once we have an exit. But I proved that that wasn't the case. I had my exit five years ago, right? So I still worked really hard for the five years after I had my exit. So that one wasn't proven true. So when I finally put on the calendar that I wanted to take a real month off, I mean, a solid month off with no tech, with no slack messages, no taking a break to do this thing or doing a quick coaching call, I mean, a full month solid blocked off, what happened was that all of a sudden we started building the systems that we should have built yet years ago. Now, in full disclosure, this is my fault. This isn't my team's fault. This is 100% my fault. Because I would jump into the details of a project and interrupt it and interrupt flow, which would take me out of the mode of taking a break or letting my team do their thing. But when we knew that Ryan was going to step away for several weeks at a time, we had to build the systems for what it would look like for Ryan to be able to step away and for things to run just as well, if not better. And in that, in that instance. And what happened was I started to see all the areas where I was getting in the way of the business and in the way of my team members. And it occurred to me for the first time that life never really automatically smooths out. It smooths out when we choose to smooth it out. Because I had always dreamed of it one day smoothing out. But every time there was space, I would fill it with a new idea that that's what's so beautiful and annoying for us idea visionaries. As soon as we have space, as soon as we have time, as soon as we have capacity, a new idea sparks in our brain. And we said, we gotta do this thing. Everybody, hey, come on in. We're changing everything. That's what I did over and over and over again. And in this case, I was forced to think about several months ahead and planning to be able to walk away from that and empowering the people that, that I should have been empowering the whole time. Something as simple as putting a month on the calendar through which I will be doing no work gave me permission to empower other people to make decisions that previously I had thought that only I could make. And the most interesting thing of all of this is I can now see that once I come back from taking this break, I think we will run the entire company differently. So here's some of what I experienced. The first thing we started to do was plan out content and marketing and product fulfillment three months in advance rather than three days in advance. Up until this point, when we wanted to promote something, Ryan would just pull something out of his hat, say it, do more videos, do more content, draw more attention to something. Ryan would just work harder to make those things happen. And then I would work to fulfill those, which a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck on that hamster wheel, too. I just couldn't see it for myself. But once we started planning for several months in advance, oh, you can write emails and promotions ahead of time, you can record content ahead of time, you can build the systems for distribution ahead of time. So it looks like everything is running exactly how it was, except Ryan recorded them several weeks ago. This was no more evident than in our content systems, because as it's been, when Ryan wants to create a lot of content, we put out a lot of content. And when Ryan gets burnt out on creating too much content, we just don't create content for a while. Where in this case, we sat down and said, let's take all the content that we're doing from all these different areas. I'm doing some for podcasts, some for videos, some for TikTok, some for other people's shows, and let's put it behind a system to where all of our distribution and planning and recording is all synchronized. So instead of doing four different types of content, we do one and we repurpose it natively for those different channels. What a simple concept that you would think I would know up to this point, but I wasn't executing in my own business because I was too busy. I was too busy to clean up the chaos. It took putting time on the calendar to step away to make that a priority. Another really interesting that happened was we took inventory of everything that Ryan has to do in order for the company to be successful, in order for it to keep meeting its goals and our commitments, we were able to simplify everything down to about 15 hours a week. What Ryan, who works all the time, who doesn't know how to stop working, could be simplified down to 15 hours a week, which is a day and a half of scheduled time. Yeah. And I Think when I come back from break, we'll operate on that. Because all the magic happens when you have the space to come up with the next breakthrough. Another interesting thing that happened was I'm working on another project right now, if some of you may have seen the video. I am attempting to buy back the assets of my old company, a company that I built and sold from 2013 to 2017. When I sold the company with my partner Matt and I wrote a book about it and have helped hundreds of entrepreneurs be successful because of what I learned running and selling that company. And I'm reacquiring those assets. But because of my chaotic work schedule, I have not had the time or capacity to make that my full time thing. I haven't had the capacity to get into the details and the weeds of every little thing of that business. So instead I created partnerships with people who would raise the capital, who would run the operations, who would bring the most updated e commerce strategies to the table to implement in that business. I had to create partnerships so that I didn't get into the weeds of that business. And I am barely working on that project from a time commitment. I'm bringing in the relationships and the experience and spearheading the deal. It's my old company for goodness sake, and a lot of people putting up the capital are relationships that I've had for years. But someone else is managing the different details. My investment partner is rallying the investors, doing the interviews for the people that I'm nominating to be hired. And as a result of that, I've seen for the first time that I don't have to be full time committed to a project for it to work out beautifully. Work hiring an amazing team. The capital is showing up, the vision's in my brain and it's flowing out. And when I communicate it, people get really excited because I have been forced to stay in the visionary and creative seat. I was forced to stay there because I'm too busy, too busy with my primary project, my primary focus, which is capitalism.com but now I'm seeing that I can stay in that mode. Whereas before I thought that one day life would smooth out to get to that point, I've now been forced to smooth it out and take a step back. And I'm seeing that things are working better as a result of taking a step back. Things are working better on this new project because I'm staying in visionary seat. And people get really freaking excited when I communicate from a position of, of vision and true excitement about this project. And it makes my partner's job easy to go raise the capital because I so believe in what we are doing. And it's happening on the capitalism.com side because I'm finally empowering the team members to take over and make decisions on things that I previously controlled. And I'm starting to see that although life never smooths out, if you prioritize your life, work will fill in the gaps. Someone told me recently that if you prioritize your off time, that your work time will just find a way to work its way into the cracks. I used to say I will kill it and I will work so that one day I can be free. But despite the fact that I have enough money and enough passive income to step away, I don't. Because I still prioritize my work time. Only recently have I done the experiment of prioritizing my free time, prioritizing my off time in the form of a month long sabbatical. And I can already see that during that time off I'm going to take the coffee date with a strategic contact that I just want to connect with and that will lead to an opportunity. In three weeks I will communicate with somebody that I'll run into and I'll say what I do for work and it'll come from a real, abundant, healthy place and they'll open up doors for me. When I prioritize my own freedom, I get more of it. But if I prioritize my work time, I get more work. These are new revelations for me, these are new realizations for me. But I'm starting to see that I can truly prioritize my own freedom and that work will be more abundant as a result. In fact, if I prioritize my own freedom, it helps my team relax into their role. There are people on the team who are now taking ownership and building systems and processes that are work right now, but give them space and freedom for them to do their jobs better as a result of me leaving the room. Whereas I previously saw it as if I step away, they won't know what to do. What a bogus, narcissistic thought that I had in my brain that I only learned as a result of being forced to take real time off. So if I could do it differently, and I will be, it will be prioritizing the space and the off time so that work is healthy and sharp when I show up to do it. Because we all think that we're special and unique in our abilities of what we bring to our companies, but. But we're not. What is special and unique is the vision and the commitment and the belief that we bring to our companies. And I can't do that for myself or for a client or for a team member if I'm burnt out. I can think of times that I've been really unhappy and burned out in work, and that spills over to my employees, to my team members, to my partners, to my investors. And when I do that, that doesn't give them confidence that the business is in good shape. But when I show up pumped, when I show up excited, when I show up with enthusiasm and I'm sharp and I can see the big picture, everybody wants to work with us or for us. We all have that power as entrepreneurs and as creators and as visionaries. We all have that when we are tapped into that place. And I know you've experienced those moments of clarity, really, where you feel like you see your own true greatness, and you can see the clarity that you want to bring about in your projects and in your companies and in your businesses. But we drown it out with overwork. And it took me reaching a point where that was unsustainable for me to realize that I can operate from a place of ease, a place of excitement, and empower people around me to make the decisions that I really shouldn't be making. This is still a discovery for me, and we'll see when I come back from a brief hiatus how things play out. Did things fall apart or did things run even better? But I can tell you my team is excited that I'm stepping away, not resentful, and I worried that it would be the opposite. But I think this will be a break, not only for me, but for them to get ahead of the things that they control and plan out their jobs, to allow them to have the same freedom that I'm now taking for myself. It starts with you as the leader of a company and how you operate and what you do spills over to the people that you impact, including your team members and your stakeholders. So it's my hope in this experiment that me prioritizing freedom and prioritizing my own happiness, that it will not only make all of us more money, but it will give my team members and investors and even my clients the ability and the space to do the same for themselves. I will keep you posted on how this goes, and my hope and my intent is that you will have no idea when I'm taking my hiatus. I mean, maybe I won't be replying to your comments as much on YouTube and on social media. But other than that, I hope that you will not be able to tell when I'm taking a break. That's how I will really know that the experiment that we're running is successful. And I also think that as a result of this, we're going to make a lot more money too. Because even when I give myself permission over the last few months to let other people make decisions, I'm staying in visionary mode. I'm staying in the visionary seat. I'm staying in an excited place and it's getting my team members really pumped and they're starting to think longer term and bigger. And people who want to work with us are starting to really see and feel this energy for me that they haven't felt for me in years. So if we continue to cultivate that, if you continue to nurture that, imagine how much power there is that you beaten out of you through hustle energy, which is exactly what I have done. I just don't have any hustle energy left. It has to come from a different place, which feels more like inspiration and internal motivation than it feels like pounding the pavement working, trying to prove something to yourself or to other people, which I was totally guilty of. Now it's about how do I optimize and plan my life to be the most epic life possible, work and otherwise. And this experiment will give me the space to be able to experiment with planning for that specifically. So I hope you have no idea when I am gone, but when I'm back, I will report on how it's going. Thanks so much for watching. I'm Ryan Moran with capitalism dot com. I appreciate you and I encourage you block off time for yourself, prioritize your off time. We got into this game as entrepreneurs for the freedom for us to feel the excitement, for the pure passion and joy of creating what we wanted to create. Don't drown that out with work as long as I did. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

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