How I Work 17 Hours a Week & Make Millions

If you want to live the four hour workweek, you have to stop trading time for money. And in this episode we're going to talk about how you stop trading time for money. The mindset shift that's required, what things are trading time for money and what is not and how you can get there. So typically I run this podcast about outsourcing, about virtual assistant, about ofs. Occasionally though, I want to talk about lifestyle because people want to know people are interested. I work 17 hours a week and I have since about 2008. And actually my time is probably a little bit less than that right now, especially during the winter. During the winter, I ski three or four days a week. And if it snows, if it's snowing every day, I'm going to ski every day. And so I actually have experience living the four hour work week because I've been at four hours and doing that. I've also built an eight figure a year business. So how do you do this? How do you live the four hour work week and also make a lot of money? Well, here's one of my keys. This is one of my number one keys, is do not trade time for money. Don't sell your time ever. So this is going to be controversial, but let me explain. In my life, I will not ever do something in exchange for money. So people will always ask me, will you do coaching? No, I won't. Well, why not? Well, because you're going to pay me some money and you're going to expect something from me. Will you help me with this? Will you do my social media for me? I mean, you have people that'll do it. No, I won't. Why not? Because you're going to pay me money and expect me to do something for you. And to me, that's selling my time where even though you may expect a little bit of my time, you may expect someone else to do it, but you just want a little bit of my time for it. That's selling my time. And now you may be selling your time for really expensive. It may be $100 an hour, it may be $500. Maybe it's $5,000 an hour. And that's not the point. I mean, you know, making $5,000 an hour is pretty good, but the problem isn't the rate. The problem is the limit that you put on yourself when you sell your time. There's only so much time in a day. And if your income is based off of your time, then when you run out of time, you run out of income. There's only so many people you can talk to. There's only so many projects you can manage. There's only so much you to go around. And if you're selling your time for money, then if you're not working, you're not making money. So now, at the risk of offending a lot of people, I'm going to take that risk and point out some situations where you're selling time for money. So if you are a realtor showing houses, you're selling your time. Like I'm going to go out and show you all these houses and you're going to pay me a commission, which is time for money. If you're a doctor, you go into work and you perform an operation or you see a patient or a dentist, you're selling your eight hours in exchange for money back. If you don't work well, you don't get paid. If you're a retail store owner and you're required to be in the store to answer people's questions or to work the till or whatever it is, well, you know, if your store's not open and you're not there, then it doesn't make you money, then you're selling your time for the money. It may be high paying, but it's still just selling your time. Now let me give you a couple examples of this in my life where I've told people, I mean, at the risk of really being offensive, I've still done it. So I had a kid come to me, he's 22, and said, hey, I've started this window washing business, give me some advice. I said, stop it. He was like, what do you mean? This is so great. Like, no it's not. You're selling your time for money. Well, I get paid like $60 an hour. I don't care. That's selling your time for money. Right? And we talked through this concept of as long as you're out washing windows, well, you're working for that money. Well, how could I change that? Well, you could hire other people to do the entire process. So you're not involved at all. Well, I can't do that. Well, then you're selling your time for money. So could he change the business so that he wasn't involved? Yeah, I think he could. I think he could hire some people to wash windows. That's all they do is wash windows. He could hire someone else to go out and sell. He'd have to pay that person really well. I'm not sure how the economics work of this, but you Pay someone to go sell the windows and you pay someone to wash the windows and you're just managing this process and you get good at managing it so that you're not actually involved. You don't talk to the customers, you don't bill the customers. You're. You're not involved, then, yeah, you can make this work. Now the people selling may actually just go start their own. The people washing their windows might start selling that. It's a hard situation. Right? Okay, so someone else comes to me, this is another teenager and. Or this is actually a dad of a teenager around me and they're like, hey, can you give my kids some advice? He has a lawn mowing business. I was like, yeah, stop it. What do you mean? Well, he's selling time for money, you know. Yeah, but he's a teenager. Well, I don't really care. Like you're teaching. The principle you're teaching is if you work hard then people will pay you, which is true. And it's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. You're just not going to get rich doing that. You're not going to live the four hour work week doing that either. Which to me, that's what this is all about is like, financial freedom is one thing. Time freedom is another thing entirely. And to me, time freedom is so much more important because you can make more money, you can't make more time. So when my son came to me when he was 12 and he was like, dad, let's start fixing up motorcycles and selling them, I was like, yeah, we're not going to do that. What do you mean? I want to. Right? And so I helped him, I helped him find a better way to run a business. He starts selling things on Amazon, he starts importing things from China and selling them on Amazon. Now there's still some, some time for money involved in that, but he, that, well, he didn't. I did had someone in the Philippines work on it and eventually someone in the Philippines is running the entire thing for him. Selling these silicone ice cube trays that were imported from China, added to Amazon and selling. And like all he had to do every once in a while was make an order out of China, which someone in the Philippines could definitely do that for. You make an order, ship those trays to Amazon and you have inventory and Amazon selling them for you, right? No, no time involved, just money involved. And that was, that was how I've taught my son, my kids. Actually, not just him, he was the oldest one and the most entrepreneurial them was don't go provide a service to someone. Providing a service is your trading time for that income. So now, for a lot of you listening to this, I understand that what you're currently doing, you're very involved, right? Which is completely fine. Now let me just give you a slight framework for how you can step away. So the concept is, if you have to be involved in order to fulfill orders or to sell orders or to make sales, you're trading your time for money. So the concept is hire someone to buy back your time. And the more you hire someone to buy back your time, the more you distance yourself from that business. So if you're an insurance agent and you are talking to clients to sell them things, if you're providing quotes, well, you need to hire someone to provide those quotes for you. And then if you're the one doing the fulfillment on the back end, you're supporting those quotes, then you need to hire someone to support those quotes. If you're running a retail store and you're at the till, well, you need to hire someone to run that, to run that till for you. If you're the expert at laying concrete, that's fine. Can you bring someone with you and teach them to be the expert? You have the relationships, so there's someone else bringing you the deals, and you're never going there yourself. You're sending someone else that you've trained because now you've brought them in, you've taken them with you a bunch of times and taught them how to make this work. And that is how I've done this every single time. Every time I've ever gotten something off of my plate and stepped further away, where this thing doesn't require my time anymore, I've always brought someone in, and then I've started working with them. And the first time, it does not work. The second time it only works slightly. And the third time it works a little bit. And the fourth time, it works a little bit better. So I've been working with Julia. I mentioned Julia all the time on this podcast. I've been working with Julia on my email, where I feel like. I mean, email is the only way I communicate with people other than, like, my family. I'll text with them. And yet I feel like it's taking too much of my time. And so I have Julia now communicating in my email. And it's been like two years of her doing it. And I'm still teaching it, but every time I teach it, my time gets less. So I stopped trading time for that person, converting Because I provided them some support of some. Some means. I mean, I have a customer support team that deals with customer support, but people still want a little bit of my time. And the more I can give that to someone else, train someone else to do it, the less time I have. So I know that you think I'm the only one who could do this. You're not the only one who could do this thing. If there are other businesses where someone else is doing that thing, that means someone else could do it for you. And that someone could probably be in the Philippines. So I recognize that this has been controversial and is probably offensive to a bunch of people. And I've always been an offensive person. I've also always done things differently than everyone else, and maybe purposefully differently. And to me, if you want to live the four hour work week, you have to do things different. You have to make conscious, different decisions than what everyone else is doing, because what everyone else is doing leads to working 60 hours a week. Now, the hottest topic in the world right now, AI. Today I set up an AI version of myself. And I'm gonna talk about that in another podcast. But. But can I save some more time by setting up an AI version of myself that other people can reference? I think I can.