The Rich Focus on Saying No. Here's How To Do It

The richest people say no far more often than you do. I just flip through it and, you know, there's practically nothing in it. You've got to keep control of your time and you won't keep control of your time unless you can say no. My inability as an adult female to say no, I call it my disease to please as a female, is the same thing that caused me to be victimized as a child. Every time you say yes to something small, it takes your focus off the big work that actually matters. I buy anything I want, the basics. But I can't buy time. And so to have time is the most precious thing you can have. I better be careful with it. There's no way I will be able to buy more time. You have to be good at saying no and picking the things that really make a difference. Gallup published Gloria Marx's research at the University of California, Irvine, and it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to what you were doing. So 6 interruptions in a day costs you more than 2 hours of the work you actually get paid for. There are a lot of things that are a waste of time. You have to prioritize your time really carefully. Here's how the rich focus on saying no. In 1997, Steve Jobs walked back into an Apple that had lost over a billion dollars that year and was, in his own words, 90 days from being insolvent, going out of business. Everybody expected him to launch something new. Instead, he spent his first months finding out what Apple was actually selling, and the answer was about 350 products. We started, um, with the product line. We looked at the product roadmap going out for a few years, and we said a lot of this doesn't make sense, and it's way too much stuff, and there's not enough focus. And so we actually got rid of 70% of the stuff on the product roadmap. There were printers, there were 12 versions of the Macintosh with model numbers that nobody could tell apart. Good products, most of them built by people who cared, but just too many, too many products. Apple had lost its focus. There were a lot of products. These were the product platforms. 15 product platforms and a zillion variants of each one. So he got a whiteboard out and he drew a square with 4 boxes in it. Across the top, consumer and pro. Down the side, desktop and portable. The new goal would be to have only one product per box. We went back to Business School 101 and we said, what do people want? Well, they want 2 kinds of products. They want consumer products and we need pro products. Because our design and publishing market wants pro products, and some consumers do, and some education do as well. And in each of those 2 categories, we need desktop and portable models. That was his whole plan. Everything that didn't fit into one of those 4 boxes was canceled, and about 350 products became roughly 10. He had already explained what he meant by focus months earlier at Apple's development conference in May. A developer asked him about it from the floor, and here's exactly what he said. When you think about focusing, right, you think, well, focusing is, is saying yes. No, focusing is about saying no. Focus is about saying no. And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts. Apple lost over $1 billion the year he came back. The next year it made $309 million. So right now you might be thinking, okay, he could do that because he's Steve Jobs and you're not. So this doesn't apply to you yet. Being Steve Jobs is not what made those nos expensive. He was candid products his own engineers had spent years on, and he had to look at those people in the hallway afterwards. He said no anyway, and the company made money 12 months later. It worked because he knew exactly which 4 boxes he was building for, and 340 products weren't in them. You can name your own 4 boxes this week, whatever your business size is. So how do the rich actually do it? They decide what they'll say no to before anyone asks. Here are the 6 filters that they run. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag #Believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time. Believe. Make it such a yes that you'd break your own rule. So Derek Sivers built CD Baby into the biggest seller of independent music online and sold it for $22 million. Then came the speaking invitations, the consulting requests, the investment pitches, and he said yes to most of them, just Out of politeness, so he made one rule for himself: if it's not a hell yeah, it's a no. Here's how he puts it: spend time doing, working, being things you love and are passionate about. If it doesn't excite you and you don't have to do it, say no. So here's why he says it matters: being busy means being out of control. You're too busy to react when the great opportunities come because you're busy with the mediocre ideas. So he turned down speaking gigs that paid well because they meant traveling somewhere that he didn't want to go to. The money was fine; it just. Wasn't a hell yeah for him, so he said no. He doesn't even let the yes be an option. And he says it like this: no yes, either hell yeah or no. Anything in the middle is still a no. And he found the opposite of what he was expecting. Saying no more often didn't cost him relationships and made the yeses mean something greater because people could tell the difference between him being polite and him being all in. So try it on the next idea that comes in. If your first honest reaction isn't hell yeah, say no to it today instead of sitting on it 2 weeks. Now, one warning, because this filter can be turned against you sometimes. There is a difference between doubt and fear. If the hesitation is that it doesn't fit with what you're building, that's doubt, and then it's a no. If the hesitation is that you might not be good enough, that's fear, and fear isn't a reason to say no. Don't sell anything you don't already use. Yvon Chouinard built Chouinard Equipment into the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the United States. His bestseller was the piton. It was a metal spike that you hammer into into a crack in the rocks that your rope has something solid to hold on to. Pitons paid for everything. Then he went back to a climb in Yosemite that he'd done years earlier, and the rock was wrecked. Every climber coming through was hammering spikes into the same cracks and then hammering them back out to take them back home, and thousands of trips had chewed the stone apart. The spikes were his. He created this problem. So in 1972, he and Tom Frost put out their first catalog. It opened with an editorial called A Word about what pitons were doing to the rock. Behind it ran a 14-page essay by climber Doug Robinson on the alternative, which was aluminum wedges that you slot into the crack with your hand and then lift straight back out. There was no hammer and there was no damage done to the environment. Then they stopped selling pitons. His bestseller was now gone. Within a few months, the piton business had completely dried up and the wedges were selling faster than they could make them. So he killed the product that was funding the entire company before the replacement had even proved itself. And he trusted that the customer who cared about the environment, about the rock, would follow him. They did. And the company that came out out on the other side is now called Patagonia. So look at your own bestseller and ask whether you'd still put your name on it in public today. Only do deals for a product that you actually use. When I signed a 3-year deal with Sage, the accounting software, I moved my own accounting onto Sage to do it. Because if you're going to promote it, you want to be on it. So that goes for everything that you put your name on, the products that you resell, the partner that you send your clients to, the tool that you tell people to buy. If you wouldn't spend your own money on it, don't ask anybody else to either. Put a real number on who gets your time. Mark Cuban gets asked for his time constantly, and he answers nearly all of them the same way: No meetings or phone calls unless I'm picking up a check. Everything is email. Saves me hours and hours every day. He says the same about his lunch. I'm not big on let's go eat lunch meetings. Same with phone calls. They're a waste of time. He told Inc. The rule for the ones that you can't get out of: Any meeting you actually sit for should have a duration and set outcome. before you agree to go. A start, a finish, and what's it for agreed before you ever say yes. His reason is time. Your most valuable asset is your time, and it's perishable. Once it's gone, it's gone. You can't get it back. So he calls meetings the single biggest time waster that there is, and he's not hiding from doing the work. He gets a lot of work done. He gets around 700 emails a day and he reads and answers them himself. I read and respond to emails. I work out, I read and respond to emails. I do a couple Zooms, then I read and respond to emails, and eat dinner, then I read and respond to emails, he said. He'd rather get 700 to 1,000 emails, he says, than sit in long, boring meetings. Email is also searchable, which matters to him more than the speed does. He has so many businesses and investments that he wants it all in writing so he can go back and look it up months later. So he removed the entire category instead of just trying to manage it, and then told everybody what his rule was around meetings so they stopped asking. So decide what has to be on the table before you'll ever give somebody an hour of your time. For Cuban, it's money, and everything else gets an email. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it, and I'll see you there. Say no to the client who guards their money instead of their time. Jason Fried has run the software company Basecamp for more than 20 years, and he has spent that time turning down the customers who would have paid him the most. He wrote a piece for Inc., the business magazine called Why I Say No to Big Money Customers. So his rule is this, in his words, you get a great product by saying no to almost everything almost all the time. And that takes a certain degree of discipline that it's very hard to stick with, especially as you grow. He learned it selling shoes as a kid in Illinois. The big brands would send reps to arm the salespeople with facts about the fancy technology in the sole and the customers. They never really cared about it. They cared whether the shoe felt right. So he built a company that ships the smallest thing that works instead of the longest list of features and ideas. He puts it the other way around too. If you like saying yes, get better at saying no. No gives you more opportunities to say yes to the things you really want to do. And he's honest about why it's hard. It feels so easy to say yes when that thing is 3 months out, right? But then it's hard when it's just around the corner and he's clear about how to deliver it. Just be clear and set realistic expectations. Telling someone yes when you really mean no is a recipe for a bad experience down the road. His reason goes past just the product. He would rather have tens of thousands of small companies paying a little each month than a handful of big accounts paying the same amount, because losing one of those big accounts takes a fifth of the business with it, and a big customer drags the product towards what a big company wants and away from everybody else who is paying for it. There's a client who values their money more than their time. You can spot them in the first conversation. They negotiate before they understand what it These minutes that they're buying. They ask nitpicky questions about every step. Later, they try to go around you to save a fee somewhere, and when it gets hard, they ask for a refund. Don't take those clients and be honest about who pays when you say yes. It's the person on your team who has to manage that account for the next 6 months, and it's every good client who gets a little less of your attention because a difficult one is taking all of it. Give the no without the reasons. This one is hard for me. Charlie Munger was Warren Buffett's business partner at Berkshire Hathaway. He sat on a stage at their annual meeting for nearly 40 in front of tens of thousands of people. And the line he became famous for was 5 words long. I have nothing to add. The format put him on the spot every time, right? It's a shareholder meeting. They would come and they ask a question. Buffett would give answers at length, and then the microphone would go to Munger with the whole room turned towards him. What's he gonna say? That happened question after question all day, every year. His rule was, it's good to know when you think you can add value and when you can't. When it's the former, say something, and when it's the latter, remain Quiet because he stayed quiet through most of it. The moments he did speak carried more weight than anything he could have added by just filling in time. He applied the same rule to money too. He and Buffett sorted everything that came to them in 3 different boxes, and he named 'em like this. We have 3 baskets, in, out, and too tough. So most of what crossed the desk went into the third one, too tough. He said why that third box was so full. We have to have a special insight or we'll put it into the too tough basket. So nobody got a counteroffer or meeting to talk it through, or a letter explaining what was wrong with the business. It went into the pile and they just moved on to the next one. You could do the same with your own no. Give the answer and stop. It works like ending a relationship. The moment you give your reasons, you've handed over a list of things to argue with and they'll never take every one. And none of it changes what you've decided anyway. Put your calendar next to what you say you want. Reed Hastings ran Netflix and took 6 weeks of vacation every year. Now, Netflix, they have no vacation policy at all. They're famous for this. So no allowance, no forms, no tracking. The policy is take vacation. His reason is the interesting part. Here's how he says it: You often do your best thinking when you're off hiking in some mountain or something. You get a different perspective on things. So to him, the time off was where the work happened, and he made sure that people saw him taking it. Time asked him how much vacation he took last year and how openly he talked about it, and he answered both of those things at once. He said five to six weeks. I'm definitely European in my habits now, and you know, send a picture. I'll make it clear that I'm in this great place on vacation. If the CEO never Never leaves. Nobody below him believes the policy of taking unlimited vacation, and getting people to actually use it was the whole point. The principle underneath is the one that he always repeats: lead with context, not control. He gave people enough context to decide for themselves, and then removed the rules that would have decided it for him. So his six weeks off had no business reason on them, nothing to show for at the end of it, no deals closed, and he booked them every year anyway. The vacation policy isn't the only thing that he took away. Netflix's whole expense policy—this is awesome—it's five words long: act in Netflix's. Best interest. So there's no forms, no approval tiers, no receipt desk, nobody signing off on a flight, and no way to hide behind a rule when you spend money badly. So open your calendar and look at the next week day by day. What is the thing you need to be working on most right now? And find how much space you're actually given in your calendar. If it isn't in there, put it in now and give it real hours on a real day, not whatever gap is left over between other things. And imagine yourself at 80 looking back at your life right now. If you don't take action, will you regret If yes, then start today. If no, then you have your answer and you can stop thinking about it and move on. You already know which one. Every no on this list is really a yes to something else. You have the same hours today that you had yesterday. What changes your year is what you take off the calendar, and you already know which things you need to say no to. You knew that before you even started this video. So go say no today. Being leads to doing, and the person you're becoming doesn't keep that on the calendar. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn why the rich focus on assets and how to do it. Getting rich comes down to what you own and almost nothing else. The rich don't work for money, so we learn to use debt to create assets, and assets keep putting money in our pocket. If I earn $10,000 or $3,000 or whatever extra money, whatever the number is, $1 I would take the entire amount of money, I'd go buy an asset that pays me cash flow, and I would always live off the cash flow, not the cash. The Federal Reserve tracks it. The richest 1% of American households own about half of all stock held by American households, and the bottom half of the country owns 1.1% of it. I own half of Sony's publishing, and I'm leaving them, and they, they're very angry at me because I just did good business, you know. Content, I mean, It's an opportunity to provide value to the audience. It's a way to provide affinity towards you and your company by showing the humanity. And that gap decides whether you work until 70, whether you can turn down a bad client, and whether your kids get a head start or begin with nothing the way you did. In terms of content, there's never too much content. It is just because what we want and who we are and how we communicate consume content changes every day through our experiences. You have to own assets that make you money while you sleep, that grow while you sleep. In July of 1973, a 29-year-old director signed a deal memo with 20th Century Fox. It paid him $150,000 to write and direct a science fiction movie the studio was not excited about. His name was George Lucas. Then his last film came out and changed everything. American Graffiti hit that August and made a fortune on a tiny budget. Suddenly, Lucas was the director studios wanted, and he could go back to Fox and ask for more. He didn't ask for more money. He asked to keep 2 things the studio saw as leftovers: the sequel rights and the merchandising rights. I was very careful to say, I don't want more money, I don't want more points, I don't want anything financial, but I do want the right to make these sequels. Fox handed them over without much Studios had lost money on movie merchandise before, and nobody in that building believed toys from a space movie were worth holding on to. They kept what looked valuable. They kept the box office. Up until that time, merchandising had been relatively unknown. When I took over the licensing, I simply said, I'm going to be able to make t-shirts, I'm going to be able to make posters, and I'm going to be able to sell this movie even though the studio won't. So I managed to get control of pretty much everything that was left over that the studio didn't really care about. Here's what each side actually bought. So Fox, they bought a movie. Star Wars cost $11 million to make and grossed $410 million in its first run, and Fox did pretty well on it. Lucas bought the toys and the sequels, and they paid him for the next 35 years. So let's see how this started. Christmas 1977, the toys were weren't even manufactured yet. So they sold an empty box with a certificate in it, promising to mail the figures later. Parents bought about 500,000 empty boxes. The actual toys shipped in February. That's how badly Fox misread what it gave away. People were paying full price for a piece of cardboard and an IOU. Lucas kept those rights for the rest of his working life. Every toy, every lunchbox, every t-shirt in the mail for 35 years paid Lucas, not the studio. That's what let him build his own company instead of working inside somebody else's. And in 2012, he sold that company, Lucasfilm, to Disney for $4.05 billion. He didn't ask for a bigger check in 1973. He walked away with $4.05 billion in 2012. Same movie, different man. The difference is that he asked to own the pieces that nobody else wanted, and those pieces built the company that he sold. Now, here's an objection that people have when I tell this story. You're thinking that's fine for a Hollywood director with leverage, and you don't have any leverage, you have bills. And I hear you, I understand. I've had the months where the whole plan is just to get to Friday. But the reason to care about ownership is that it's the only thing that ever ends those bad months. A raise makes this year better, an asset makes every year better after it. It pays you when you're sick, it pays you when you're on vacation, it pays you when you've stopped working altogether. And you don't need Star Wars, you need to You need to own one thing that other people want, and you need to stop handing it away for a slightly bigger check. Here's exactly how the people who get this do it right. Move the income into the asset before it becomes a lifestyle. So the rule I give people is actually pretty easy. If you have high income, take that income and put it into the asset. Income by itself doesn't make you rich. What you do with it does. You can earn $400,000 a year, spend $400,000 a year, and own nothing at 55. And I've watched people do that while looking extremely successful the entire time. Here's what makes it hard, and it's not about discipline, it's about timing. Move it the same week that it lands before you get used to seeing that money in your bank account. After 3 weeks, that money feels like it's yours and moving it into an asset feels like you're giving something up. Curtis Jackson did the extreme version of this, so he didn't take the cash and buy an asset with it. He turned down the cash and took the asset. When Vitaminwater came to him, the reported cash offer for putting his name on it was around $5 million. He pushed for a piece of the company, and in June of 2007, Coca-Cola bought Vitaminwater's parent company for approximately $4.1 billion, and his piece of that has been reported to be around $100 million before taxes. It was the same endorsement, it was his same face on the bottle, but he made a lot more money. So set your number tonight, pick a percentage of every payment that comes in and make it automatic and send it to something you own before you even look at it. If 20% is impossible, start with 5%. That's a good start. And 5% moving every week beats 20% that you never actually do anything with. And be clear with yourself about what counts. An asset is something that either pays you money or grows in value that you can actually get at while you're not touching it. So shares in a company, a property that you can rent out, equity in a business, yours or someone else's, a piece of work that you made once that keeps selling. That's the core list. That's what an asset is. A car isn't on it. Neither is equipment that you bought for a business that you haven't started yet. The home you live in is different. It might go up in value, but you can't get at that money while you're still living in it and you still have to live somewhere. It doesn't pay you and you can't get at the growth without selling the roof over your head. So it's not on this list. So this week, write down which of those 4 you'd actually put money into and rank them. And every time you get money from now on goes into the top one. Know which one of the 3 models you're running. If you sell your skill, you're running one of 3 businesses. And almost all of the frustration I see comes running the wrong one for the money that you're charging. So the first is the craftsman. So clients are buying from you specifically, and every piece is just one of a kind. The only thing you can do is raise your prices in this model. So you go from $500 apiece to $1,000 to $10,000 to $50,000 apiece. But there are only so many hours in a week. Once your price is as high as it goes and your week is full, that's it. You can't earn more. So it's a great living and it usually just stops there. The second is the agency. So you stop doing every job and become the head craftsman who trains other people to do the work. They'll be about 80% as good as you, and that's fine because you charge less than your one-of-a-kind price and you can serve 10 clients instead of just 2. And the third is mass market. So you take the thing that you already made and you sell a copy of it many times. A painter who sold one canvas for $1 million sells prints of that same painting forever. The work is done. The selling never stops. A lot of the pain I see comes from someone stuck in one model charging Model 3 prices, working themselves into the ground. So pick your model, choose it this week, and then price it like it is. So if you're a craftsman, then your rate has to go up. If you're the agency, then you hire more people. If you're mass market, then you stop taking custom jobs. Every one-off pulls you back into making things by hand. Build a content asset once and let it work forever. Here's an asset that you can build this month with no money at all. Write down the top 20 to 40 questions that your buyers ask you before they say yes to working with you. Not the questions you wish they asked, the real ones, the actual ones. How much does it cost? How long does it take? What if it doesn't work? Why are you more expensive than the other guy? Then answer every single one on camera, one video per question, and put them on your YouTube channel and on your website. Now count what that does. Every one of those conversations used to cost you 20 minutes on a phone call. You had the same conversation over and over and over for years. Now the video has it there for you at 2 AM while you're asleep with 40 people at once who are watching. And the person who books a call has already watched your videos. They show up ready to buy instead of just asking the basic questions. And that library of videos doesn't expire. So you build it in an afternoon and it's still selling for you in 10 years. You do the work one time and it keeps selling whether you show up on that day or not. Own the ground you're standing on. So this isn't only about money, it's also about whose ground that you are actually building on. So you can build something excellent on land that you don't own, a great store in a leased building, a great business inside somebody else's platform, a great following on an app that you don't control. It works right up until the day that the person who does own it changes the terms and conditions. And they usually change the terms once you're doing well, right? They're not being mean, they just see how much you're making now. So you can ask yourself one question about every part of your business. If the owner of this changed the rules tomorrow, what happens to me? What happens to you? An app decides that your videos goes to fewer people. A marketplace raises its cut from 15% to 30%. A landlord sees your line at the door at 8:00 AM and doesn't renew your lease. And every one of those, you did the work and somebody else owned the thing that you were standing on. So the fix for this is build an email list. Names and addresses of people who want to hear from you sitting in a file that you can export and take with you. That list is the only audience you actually own. Everything else is rented and the rent will keep going up. So same logic on the physical side, sign a 5-year lease, and your landlord watches you get really busy. When it's time to renew, he raises the rent because he can see that you can afford it. So lock in your renewal price on the day that you sign while he doesn't think that you're worth that much yet. That clause costs you nothing today. And in year 6, it's a difference between you staying open and maybe closing down your business. So take 10 minutes tonight and list every platform, landlord, supplier who could end your business with one decision. Then start reducing that list one Build your money 50. So your relationships aren't a risk like that. They're how you got every one of those deals in the first place. And I would protect them before protecting anything else. So here's how I make it helpful for me. Write a list of 50 people, not 500 contacts, not a follower count, 50 named human beings who each move real money into your business, either because they buy from you or because they send you people who can or who do. And getting that list Put those people whose introductions changes your year. Like if those people knew you, like you, trust you, what would it do for your entire year? And then those 50 people get something from you every month that has nothing to do with selling them anything. You send them a client, you send them the article that answers the exact problem that they mentioned. You introduce 2 of them to each other. You text them the week their mother's having surgery because they told you about it. Like do that for a year and you have something a competitor cannot buy with an ad budget. They can't outspend you on advertising. Yeah. And they can't outsource it. Advertising tomorrow morning if they wanted to. They cannot spend their way into 50 people who pick up the phone when your name shows up. Give them a license, never the ownership. This is the one that costs people usually the most money. And it happens in a single sentence in a contract that almost nobody ever actually reads. So you build something for a client, a system, a course, a piece of software, a process, a set of designs. And in the paperwork, it says that the The client owns it. Change that. Make the rule that you give them a perpetual license to use that thing and you keep owning it. They get to use it forever. They're happy because using it is all they ever wanted and you still own the asset, which means you can build the next version, sell it again to somebody else, and turn one project into a product. It's the same work. It's the same one-off invoice. It's the same happy client. Sign it their way and the project ends with you owning nothing. Sign it your way and you still own something that you can sell for 10 more years to other people. So go read the last contract that you signed and find that clause. It's in there. And if you are the one writing the contracts, then write the licensed version starting now. Profit won't save you, cash will. This is another part that kills a lot of great businesses, and it's not the part that most people worry about. Profit won't save you. Running outta cash is what usually closes the doors. You can be a profitable company and still go bankrupt because you just aren't getting the money showing up in time. So what happens here is expenses come in fast and payments come in slow. So you start the work in March, your team gets paid And March and April and May. The client then pays you in June. On paper, March looks like a great month. In the bank, March, April, and May are all empty bank accounts. So ask about the money before you take the job, not after. When does it get paid? What's the deposit? What happens when they're 30 days late? A client who won't answer those questions is probably going to pay you late. And when you own real assets, ask the same questions of them. A rental making $300 a month is $3,600 a year. And that's the whole margin. One furnace costs more than that. Now if you take out a couple of vacant months, because the mortgage and the taxes kept running even though the rent stopped, so run that math before you buy it. Otherwise, you're not actually being an owner. You're just on call to fix toilets for a margin that one furnace completely wipes out. The way I want you to think about is this: buy it for less than it's worth. If it's worth $400,000 and you pay $340,000, you're up $60,000 before you do anything. Overpay instead, and you spend years just earning that amount back. That holds outside of real estate too. If a business makes $100,000 a year, don't pay $1 million for it. Buy the equipment Take the equity while the company is still small. Stop paying to look rich. A lot of smart people never start because they're scared of looking broke. So the car payment, the watch, the dinner you grab the bill for, the wedding built for an audience of people who you don't even know— every one of those decisions is trying to buy the appearance of wealth with the exact money that you could have bought the real thing. So every dollar you spend looking rich is a dollar you can't use to actually get rich. So next time you're about to buy something to impress people, Ask what you could do for that same money. The $60,000 car is a down payment on a property. That $40,000 wedding upgrade is most of a second down payment. I'm not telling you to go live like a monk. I'm telling you to pay attention to like, what are you actually buying? The look of it or the real thing? Your money buys one or the other, but not both. All progress, I think, begins with telling the truth. So you can open your statements from the last month and put every line into 2 columns, things I own now and things I just showed people, you'll know what to do before you finish that sheet. What you own is what you keep. So nobody's coming to hand you an asset, you build one or you buy one and you do it with money that's currently going somewhere else. Start with one, the video library, the license clause, the 5% that moves automatically into investments, even just one asset that pays you on a day that you didn't work is the whole game. If you have the ability, then you have the responsibility. If you can, then you must. Now let's learn how a true workaholic Outworking the people around you still works, and it's never been easier to do. You need to work super hard. And I mean, if you do simple math, say like, okay, if somebody else is working 50 hours and you're working 100, you'll get twice as done— as much done in the course of a year as the other company. If you don't work hard every single day, you will perish. Gallup found that full-time American employees worked 42.9 hours a week in 2024, down from 44.1 in 2019. I begin each morning by I start my day by doing my highest priority work first. I have a very clear priority list, and I start from the highest priority work first. Before I even get to work, my day is already a success. If it's not in the calendar, it won't get done. It's not really a priority, right? You have to make sure that it's in your plan, it's in your day. That gap is 62 hours a year, and that's a new skill, a finished project, or the side business that you keep saying that You have to prioritize your time really carefully. The way that I've found to stay focused, be productive, and not get distracted is one, by auditing my time so that I know, one, what I'm supposed to be working on, and then two, that at the end of any task, I'm gonna reflect back on how long it took me, how much time did I spend on task. So here's how a true workaholic actually works. Jensen Huang runs Nvidia, and he works 7 days a week. The reason goes back to 1996, when the company came one chip away from dying. You're getting ready to ship the RIVA 128. Yeah. And you guys have about 6 months of cash left. And you're running out of money. In 1993, 3 engineers sat in a Denny's in San Jose and started a company with $40,000. Jensen Huang was one of them. Chris Malachowski and Curtis Priem were the other 2. They made graphic chips, and for the first 3 years, they made them badly. By the time we started the company in 1993, we were the only consumer 3D graphics company ever created. By the time that we realized we had gone down the wrong road, Microsoft had already rolled out DirectX. It was fundamentally incompatible with NVIDIA's architecture. 30 competitors have already shown up, even though we were the first company at the time that we were founded. So the world was a completely different place. By 1996, the company was nearly dead. Huang laid off about half the company. Everyone left had one chip to bet on and not enough money to build Our backs were up against the wall. We were running out of time, we're running out of money, and for a lot of employees, running out of hope. So here's how building a chip normally goes. You design it, you pay a factory to make a small batch, physical samples come back, you test them, you find the mistakes, you fix the design, and you pay for another batch. The plan that companies normally go through, which is, you know, build the chip, write the software, fix the bugs, tape out the new chip, so on and so forth. Every round, costs months and money. Nvidia could afford one production run and nothing after that. So Huang made a bet that should have killed the company. He spent a big piece of the money he had left on an emulator, tested the entire chip on that machine, and never held a real sample in his hand. We also made the decision to use this technology called emulation. Then he ordered the full production run on a chip that nobody on Earth had even touched. If the emulator was wrong about one detail, there was no second batch and there was no company. You decide to do the entire testing in simulation rather than ever receiving a physical prototype. You commission the production run sight unseen with the rest of the company's money. So you're betting it all right here on the RIVA 128. Yeah, the chip was the RIVA 128, and by the time it shipped, there was enough cash left to cover one more month of salaries. It sold a million units in 4 months. Nvidia lived. Was everybody telling you you were crazy? No, everybody was clear we had no shot. Not doing it would be crazy because otherwise you're gonna be out of business anyways. Well, it worked. Yeah. And for years afterward, Huang opened his presentations by telling the room that the company was 30 days from going out of business. He still works like a man who believes that. He has around 60 people reporting directly to him, and he holds no scheduled one-on-ones with any of them. Nvidia's leadership team is 60 plus, 60 people. Yeah. And they all report to you? They— yeah, they all report to me. 60 direct reports? 60 direct reports. Yeah. I don't do one-on-ones. I give you feedback right there in front of everybody. Here's how he describes his week. I work I work from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, and I work 7 days a week. Now that's a true workaholic. But he isn't just putting in more hours. He set his whole company up so that those hours count. And right about now you might be thinking, okay, that sounds like the fastest way to burn yourself out. And I hear you. I mean, it doesn't necessarily have to be how you run your company. But when somebody joins me, I ask them a question: how many hours do you want to be working? And how many are you working right now? Then I write a contract to match Some of the people on my team work 25 hours a week. Some are at 70. Both work fine because the hours aren't what usually breaks people. The wrong work is. Hours on work that matters make you good. Hours on work that doesn't matter will wreck you, whether you're at 25 or 70 hours a week. And Jensen Huang isn't spending his week on boring paperwork. He built a company with no managers between him and the information, so he spends his hours deciding, making important choices. You can set up your week the same way. So here's how a real workaholic spends a day. Split your week into building days and meeting days. So my week splits into building days, maker days, and manager days, which are meeting days. So Wednesday and Fridays, those are my maker days. Wednesday is my creator day and Friday is my CEO day. And on both days, I don't have anything booked. Monday and Thursday, those are my manager days. I stack them with calls. Tuesday is a maker day on paper as well. It's my YouTube day, so nothing gets booked on it either. Here's why I'm strict about this. about it. One 60-minute call dropped in the middle of a building day does not cost you 60 minutes. It costs you almost a whole day. You spend the morning knowing that it's coming, so you don't start any deep work. Then you spend the hour on the call doing the thing. Then you spend the afternoon getting your head back, and by the time you're thinking clearly again, it's already 4:00 PM and you've built nothing. A meeting day and a building day are 2 different jobs. On a meeting day, you're reacting, you're answering, you're trying to make decisions quickly with people. On a building day, you go down into one thing and stay there for 4 hours. Try to do both both in the same morning and you'll be wiped out by Friday with nothing finished. So pick one day this week and close it. Start with whatever you can book off and then grow it to a whole day. Move every call off it, even the good ones. Then take everything you moved and jam it into one other day. So I use 2 meeting days for meetings because of the size of my team and what I'm working on. But start with one. And on that day, you might get through 6, 7 conversations in a row and you'll still have the next whole day free to actually go build something. Even half a day is a good start. Then you grow it. Give every day one job. So inside those days, I give each one a single theme. So Monday is my team day, and I spend the whole day mentoring and talking to the people on my team. Tuesday is my YouTube day. I'm filming this video on a Tuesday. Wednesday is my creator day, my project day. Thursday mornings, I do my group trainings, and Thursday afternoons, I save for friends and friends of friends and podcasts. Friday is my CEO day. The reason why I have different days for different things is switching. Every time you jump from a sales call to editing a video to a hiring decision to support emails, It takes a while to get your head into the new thing every single time. So you feel busy all day and you finish your week with like 4 and a half things finished. A theme day means you never have to catch up. So on Tuesday, I'm not taking calls, I'm not taking meetings, I'm just locked in on my YouTube. My tools are open, my camera's ready to go, my head is already there, and I'll film a stack of videos one Tuesday that keeps my channel fed for at least a week. I can only do that because I'm not bouncing between things, and the bouncing is what creates most of the chaos and mental fatigue. So look at last week and count how many different How many different kinds of work you touched on your worst day? If it's more than 3, that's your problem. You're not lazy. The problem is you're just switching too much between different kinds of tasks. Then name your own day. So for me, Monday's people, Tuesday is making YouTube videos, like whatever fits your business, write it somewhere where you will see it. And when somebody asks for a Tuesday sales call, tell them Thursday works better. They will almost never be offended. That's the part that most people worry about and it hardly ever happens. So they book on the Thursday and they start treating your calendar like it's worth something because you treated it that way to begin with. The people who take your protected days almost always are not doing it on purpose. They take it because it's available. So stop making it available. You made it available. And listen, you're going to have real emergencies. So you can decide right now what the rule is going to be for emergencies. For me, I'm training my team so they know if you are calling me on a Tuesday, if you are interrupting me, you're sending me something, I'm in the middle of making videos, so it better be important. And people respect that boundary. And there are almost no emergencies that ever pop up. So the first few weeks, That's going to be a little bit harder. People are used to your old calendar. They might test a new one a handful of times. The more you hold steady, this is my calendar, the more they respect it. Shrink the block and move it off your morning. Every meeting I run is scheduled to end 5 minutes early. So a 25-minute call instead of 30, a 55-minute instead of an hour. That gives me 5 minutes to go to the bathroom, to get some water, to get my head straight before before the next thing starts. So you never know when you're gonna have to go pee. And a day with no gaps is also where you can feel frazzled at the end. That's the smaller version. And here's the bigger one. I used to check a whole list of websites every morning and it would take me a while to get through all of them. It felt very productive. It also was the first thing I did every day, which my best hours went to reading other people's work. So I ran an experiment. I condensed it into half an hour at 1 o'clock every day. And in that half hour, I have to get it done. And And look at that, I get it done in half an hour instead of 90 minutes in the morning. If you give a task 2 hours, it usually takes 2 hours. So you could start doing this today. You could take the task that is eating your mornings. You can cut the time by 2/3, move it to the afternoon, set a timer. When the timer goes off, you're done, whether you are finished or not. The first 2 days, it'll feel a little bit rushed. By day 3, you'll notice the work was never actually filling that whole block anyway. Your mornings are your best hours, so don't spend them on Kill the work before you speed it up. So I have a formula I use for this, and the order is the whole thing. It's eliminate, automate, delegate. That is the order. It's a particular order. Eliminate comes first, and almost nobody starts there. You'll buy software to speed up a task that you should have just deleted. Now you're paying every month to do something that doesn't actually matter, or you'll hand it to a person, which is worse because now somebody's week is filled with work that was never worth doing in the first place. Yeah, that's a good point. First place. So eliminate first, then automate what's left. A tool can automate whether it's a software, whether it's AI, et cetera. This isn't only a business framework, it's a framework for anything in life. Anytime you're feeling stressed out or overwhelmed, that feeling is a signal that you need to go eliminate a few things from your life, not to work faster, to have and do less. All progress begins, I think, with telling the truth. And the truth is usually that a third of your calendar is there because it was just there last month. So here is the assignment: open last week's calendar and find the recurring thing that you'd be a little embarrassed to defend, right? The report, the check-in, the updates that people are not replying to. Skip it on purpose. Say nothing. If a week goes by and nobody notices, skip it again. Do that for a month and it's gone for good. One number, 3 drivers, and nothing else. So I have a brain that wants to chase everything, right? Left alone, I'll start 6 projects on a Sunday. So I keep one Google Sheet, and I have what I call my wildly important number. At the top, there's one number. It's not a feeling. It's not a theme. It's a number. And under it, there are exactly three drivers, and each one is also a number. Something I can count at the end of the week to see my progress. That's the whole document. Three is the limit, and it matters. Two, when you're not really running a business, you're running a project. Four or more, and you just have no priorities at all. You just have a list of to-dos that almost never get done. So to put it in a rhythm that makes Makes it work. Every time I'm, uh, checking in with my team, that number gets updated before the check-in. So you can see in a glance whether it's moving. But the number itself and the 3 drivers underneath it, they don't get swapped out because some shiny idea showed up on a Tuesday afternoon. The numbers hold for months. So if a driver turns out to be wrong, you change it deliberately, not because you're just in a mood to change things. That saved me more time than any app I've ever bought. The new project isn't the problem. The problem is the old one sitting half finished for 6 weeks while you play with this new idea. So write your number down tonight, write your 3 drivers underneath it, then look at tomorrow and find the block that doesn't move your number or any of your 3 drivers. There's always one. That's the block that goes away. Do 3 a day while they do 1 a week. So here's where your extra hours now should go. When I was young and part of an agency, I was the least skilled person on the team. That's not me being humble. I was measurably the worst. So I did homework. Everyone else was putting out a video a week. I made 3 a day every day, including Including weekends, one in the morning, one at lunch, one at dinner. And my agent was looking at them, giving me feedback. So if we count what that does, in a single week, I got 21 reps and a piece of feedback on each video I made. The person next to me got only one rep. Over a month, that's 84 corrections against their 4. I didn't catch up to them because I was smarter. I wasn't. I was not naturally more gifted. I caught up because I'd been wrong 84 more times than they had, and every one of those got fixed. So that's what the extra hours are for. More attention. Attempts at the thing that you're trying to get better at, and after every attempt, somebody tells you what you did wrong. So find your rep. If it's a salesperson and you're taking calls, if you're making videos, then it's videos. If you write, then it's pages. Count how many you did last week, then do that many in a day and let the quality drop a little while you do it. You'll be embarrassed by attempt number 7, and you'll get better by attempt number 15. And find out how it went as fast as you can. If nobody tells you what you got wrong, then you're not getting better. You're just practicing the wrong things. You're just Staying busy. Start your day before the work starts. So every workaholic I admire protects the first stretch of the day and spends it with intention on purpose. So back to Jensen Huang from NVIDIA, he gives his time to his email stack. I give mine to a walk. So I call it the Believe Walk. It's, it's one word hashtag, and it's 3 steps. Step 1, wake up and get outside fast. Put a stopwatch on. I'm out the door within 15 minutes. That part matters more than the walking because the alternative is picking up your And the second you do that, you're starting to hand your life, your day to whoever happens to be overwhelming you with email or Instagram. Step 2 is the walk, right? Fresh air. Move for 20 to 30 minutes. Some mornings I'll throw a rucksack on, extra weight, but that's, that's an extra point. You don't have to do that. You just have to get outside. And then step 3, listen to somebody who's already done what you're trying to do. So I'll put on Steve Jobs or Howard Schultz. You're borrowing their belief until yours show up. So this is not about trying to have some productivity hack. It's about who you are when You sit down. I think being leads to doing. So do your believe walk. Get outside, walk, put something in your ears. It helps you believe in yourself more. And if you're tight on time, 10 to 15 minutes is enough. That's the baseline, and it's more than enough to change your life. You have 15 minutes. Make the information come to you. So working hard only pays off if you hear about problems quickly. Hwang has about 60 people reporting straight to him. Like I said, no scheduled one-on-ones, nobody filtering what reaches him. When he gives feedback, he does it in front So everyone hears the same reasoning at the same time, and he never has to say it 60 times. And every morning he reads a stack of short emails from people all over the company, each one listing the 5 things that matter most to them right now. He gets through about 100 of them. So look at what that design does. A normal CEO waits 2 weeks and sits through 4 meetings to hear the same thing. He reads it first thing in the morning in 5 lines. So he spends his day deciding Exciting and not just chasing people all day for updates. You can build that at any size. If you have a team, you can cancel your next status meeting and ask for 5 lines instead. If you work alone, you're still losing time just hunting for information. It's spread across all of your different apps. Every extra app you have to open is another place to go looking and lose time. One inbox, one task list, one document where the plan lives. If you have to check 4 apps to find out what you're supposed to do today, you'll spend your best hour just finding it out and get nothing done. A bird sitting on a branch isn't afraid of the branch breaking because Because her trust isn't in the branch, but it's in her wings. So build the system so the information reaches you and then trust yourself to decide. You have more room than you think. So nobody gets more hours in a day than you do, right? The people who beat you work the hours everyone else gave up and they spend them on fewer things. So close one day, name your days, cut a block by 2/3, delete the reports nobody Pick your number. If you can do that, then you must. Where you are next year comes down to what you do with this week. If you want to learn why you don't need a job to make money, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe and I'll see you there. Security in a corporate job doesn't exist anymore. The safe job is about to be unsafe. So far this year, companies have cut more than 800,000 jobs.