John Jonas (Episode 54) urges listeners to do hard work now to realize life changes later, using two personal examples: his daughter Addy’s early winter training (starting in January to win races in September–October) and his experience hiring virtual assistants. He recounts initial fear before hiring his first VA in 2015, describes that early work by hires yields delayed monetary returns but frees the founder’s time, and reports growing to over 35 full-time staff based in the Philippines. The core message: invest effort up front (hiring and training) because benefits compound over months and years.
Questions this video answers
Episode 54
January 12, 2022
2015
Over 35 full-time employees
The Philippines
Chapters
Episode 54, do the Hard Work. Stop Putting It Off. So if you're watching this on YouTube, hopefully you can see this picture, which is of my daughter Addy at the finish line of a race last September. And she won the race, which is no surprise. Addie has won every race she's been in in high school, except for state championships. She works her butt off. She's really, really fast. Out of the hundreds of girls racing she's. She usually wins. This week is. It's the beginning of January, and her training begins this week so that she can win races in August, September, and October of this year. This January work won't pay off until then because she doesn't care about the races in March, April, May, June. She just doesn't care about those races. But if you want to win the races in September and October, you gotta start. You gotta start working early, and you have to do the hard work. And it's hard and it's cold and it's long days, and it is hard work. When I hired my first VA in 2015, that's kind of what it felt like to me initially. At first it was like, oh, my gosh, this is amazing. I have someone else who's. Who's willing to do some work for me. But then it was pretty quickly. Like, the work he does today doesn't make me money tomorrow. It takes time for it to make money. And I have to put effort into him doing the work right now so that I can focus on more important things. So the work's getting done, and then better work is getting done, and the business grows, and then it makes me money down the road. And when I went to hire the first time, it was before I actually hired someone. It was scary and it was hard. Like, I don't know if this person can do good work. I don't know if I can keep them busy full time. I don't know if I can afford this. There was a whole bunch of obstacles that I was like, I just don't know. And so I put it off for a couple months because the return from it wasn't immediate. Now when I actually hired someone, there was an immediate return. It was amazing. The liberating feeling of, like, wow, I just got this task off of my plate and someone else is doing this for me. And that's a really, really big deal. The monetary return took a few months in the beginning. So it's not always super simple. But you have to do the hard work in business if you want the return. And it takes Time, like, that's just. That's just part of it. So when I took the leap, finally, it was super, super liberating. Today I have over 35 people working for me full time. And it's amazing the Philippines has turned out to be. I mean, for me, it's life changing. So if you're putting off hiring someone because it's hard, I get it. If you're putting it off because you're busy, I get it. But if you want life to change in six or eight months from now, that hard work has to be done now. And if you don't do the hard work now, it's not gonna change. If you hire someone today, you're not gonna cut your work week from 50 to 17 hours like I did. That took me years to do that. But if you're willing to do the hiring today, you might get a couple hours back in a couple weeks. And that couple hours magnifies itself over and over again as you become more productive, and then you're able to manage the tasks that that person is doing better, and then you're able to give them more things, and then you're able someone else, and you're able to cut back on your time a little bit better, and then you're able. It snow. It snowballs. It becomes a giant snowball that keeps rolling and rolling downhill as you get better and better, and you get better at hiring people and you get better at delegating tasks. But you have to start with one person and do the hard work up front. Just be aware, if you want to change your life, if you want to have a better schedule in August, you have to start the work now.
