Why Hard Work Is the Only Way to Succeed in Business

The most successful people I know all work extremely hard. They're not watching movies, they're not watching Netflix, they're not death scrolling. They are always working for me. For the 10 years that I was running Data Nerds and estated I was always working that much because I loved what I did and I was learning and I was building and I was creating and I knew there was going to be success at the end of the road. There is no way you'll be successful as an entrepreneur if you don't work hard. Welcome to the everyday entrepreneur fundamentals. Today we are going to talk about work ethic and I'm going to kick this off with two stories about things that created and personally influenced me to have the work ethic that I do. And I have worked very, very hard for, for many, many years. Basically until I sold the business and I had my earn out was the first time in my life I felt like I didn't have to work 60, 80, 100 hour weeks. And so the first shout out I'll give to is my dad. We haven't always had the best relationship but my father woke up at 6am every single day. He was driving to his job by 7am and he did this for 36 years working as an electrician for the city of Edmonton. And so growing up I had a very good idea of what blue collar work ethic was like. Growing up in Edmonton, Alberta this was normal. You go and work an eight or a nine hour day, you clock in, you clock out. And he did this, not a word of a lie for 36 years. And now he's retired with a great pension and it absolutely paid off for him. Oops, I shouldn't be bumping my mic. And so that influenced me growing up to see just a consistent day to day work ethic. You know he also worked at Edmonton Oilers games and Edmonton Eskimo games. So we would get to go see sports. One of my big goals in the future is to own a sports franchise or be a minority shareholder in one of these massive teams in the NFL or the NHL. And the second person I'll give shout out to was my old boss Jesse. Jesse had the most insane work ethic. I met him when I was 17 or 18 years old and when I started working for him When I was 18 he worked seven days a week, 10 hours a day, maybe 12 hours a day. We would go to the club sometimes and after we were done at the bar he would want to go back to the office to work on things. And he was Always the first person in the office and the last person to leave the office, depending on his own schedule. And he did this, I watched him do it. And I'm sure he still does it today. For the five year, four or five years that I worked for him, it was seven days a week, relentless work ethic. And this was really transformative and forming for me, especially being at that 18 to 22, 23 year old age to see how hard you can work on an online business. Our businesses were running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and this guy was always on top of it. And so the most successful entrepreneurs that I've ever seen have an incredibly strong work ethic. Now some people might only work 40 hours a week, but they prioritize their time and they have a management team that are working extremely hard as well and they are very productive and everything gets done. So let's dive into kind of just a philosophy around like work ethic and what it takes to have a good work ethic. One of them is persistence. Persistent is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up. Coming from Elon Musk, the guy runs like $5 billion companies. Absolute insanity. Evan said that my persistence through all the ups and downs and when things got tough and we had to pivot, we had to fire people, we had to change what we were working on all of those times. I stayed exceptionally persistent, empowered through. I didn't quit just because things were hard. Do hard things and you never know when you're gonna get a win. So if you're consistent and persistent, you're eventually going to have things start to work out for you and you're going to get those wins. I love discipline. I love it. I think that if you have discipline in your everyday life, you will, no matter what, see incremental improvements and you will continue to get better. The hardest part about discipline is saying no to things that are easy. You know, the low hanging fruits that don't add as much value to you. Whether it's watching Netflix at night when you could be reading a book or, or you know, you have these tasks to do, but there's an event going on that you want to go and catch up with your friends at, or when your friends ask you to go to the bar. But you know you have work to do and you shouldn't go, but you still go. Having discipline to say no to those things is so important. You need to be able to get your task done. You need to be able to do deep work, read the book Deep Work by Cal Newport. I think that with today's distractions online, these cell phone things, we spend way too much in a distracted stuff state task switching a thousand times a day. We get exhausted and we don't get the things that are most important done. And you always need to finish your work early riser so I've always been an early waker. Today I Woke up at 4:45am That's a little bit early for me. Usually I'm between 5 and 5:30. I don't use an alarm clock. I go to bed around 9:30 or 10 every single night. And I feel refreshed after that much sleep and. And it is just way easier for me personally. I don't have kids yet. I'm sure this will change at some point. But when I do have kids, I will find time to have those peaceful hours during the day for me to read, get my most important tasks done and clearly think without distraction. I find the mornings right now the first three hours of my day are like read, prioritize and exercise and then get into my workday and whatever needs to get done that day. So I'm a big fan of start your day out early having a passion. So I wasn't overly passionate about real estate data, but I was really passionate about real estate. I freaking love houses, Casas. I love mansions. I love storage units. I love commercial buildings. I love sports arenas. I love land. So I was really passionate about real estate. The data side of it was just a skill that I had that I was able to turn into a very lucrative business in estate and data nerds. And so the ability to wake up early is a heck of a lot easier when you're passionate about what you're working on. Find an industry as an entrepreneur that you're passionate about so that you have the drive to go and get this done. Next responsibility. This comes with experience 100%. I was thinking about some of the things that were really influential in my life in my 20s that I did for myself. And one of the things was when I was 25, I was like, I really wanna start adulting. I remember I bought my first car and paid it off. I paid off the loan. I remember I bought my first house and I got a mortgage. I remember getting a dog and I remember getting a girlfriend and I thought I was gonna get married to that one, you know, I'm gonna get married here soon. But I was trying to do things that I called them adulting to be a respons and it taught me A lot about what it is to be responsible at a young age. I was trying to do this in my mid-20s at the time. And so I think responsibility is something that you learn with experience as you continue to keep growing up. And as an entrepreneur, the larger your business grows, the more employees you have, the more customers that you have. Your responsibilities are just gonna go up and, and up and up and up. So, like I said, it comes with experience. But be very mindful that you have to be a responsible person to be a good entrepreneur. And you have to be serious. You can still be happy, healthy, human, but you have to be responsible. Focus. There's apps like Rescue Timer, but one of the biggest ones that you can have, and I'm actually not doing that right now, is keep your cell phone outside the room when you have deep work to do. And the second one is schedule your time for deep work where you will not be distracted. You don't have your messages open, you don't have WhatsApp open. Your slacks closed. Your email's closed. There's no social media available to you. Having one or two hours a day to focus truly deeply focus will dramatically change your life and you will be significantly more productive. And so in today's world, I see way too many people who are constantly distracted and it's exhausting. It's not good for your mental health either. There's lots of science coming out about how bad this is for our mental health. So to have a good work ethic and to get shit done, you need to be able to focus. Time management, we talk about this a lot throughout the everyday entrepreneur courses. I always loved using the delegation quadrant to manage my time. I, as an entrepreneur, I lived and died by my calendar. I tried to schedule, you know, every hour of my waking day to be focused and manage my time. And as I get older, I realize that time is our most valuable resource and there's no getting it back. The clock is always ticking. And so managing your time is absolutely critical. Like, I remember I used to have an open door policy at my office. Like, you could always come into my office when my door was open. I would change that now if I were to go back to an office again because I need to manage my time and I need to focus and I don't want to be distracted. And so really reflect on where your time goes every single week and get a little bit better every single day. And another thing is the power list. Like, write out every morning what the most important things are that you need to get done and the day doesn't end until you get those done. And you can block off time in your calendar to get those things done. You have to be able to manage your time to have good work ethic. Hard work. I kind of started off with two stories about hard work, but there's other people in my life that have really embodied this as well. The first one I'll say is Dan Martell. The first time I met him when he was moving to Kelowna, I was like, hey man, do you just want to go for a run or can I show you around Kelowna? It'd be really cool to meet you. You're a really great entrepreneur. I really look up to you. He's like, I'll see you at 4:45 in the morning to go for a run. 4:45 in the morning? I wasn't waking up this early then. I was still like a 5:30 person. To be at a running spot at 4:45, you got to wake up at like 4:15. You know, you got to have a little bit of food, you got to hydrate, you got to go to the bathroom, you got to get dressed and then you got to drive there. And so the most successful people I know all work extremely hard. They're not watching movies, they're not watching Netflix, they're not death scrolling. They are always working. And you have to find the balance for what's you and what works best for you. But there is no way you'll be successful as an entrepreneur if you don't work hard. Delegation, literally. Going through a conversation right now with my girlfriend, one of our apartments, that's a rental, the HOA fees just went up. It went up, I think 150 pesos. So I don't notice these things. I do not pay attention to them. Emily, who is my right hand, she's way more than my ea. She's my ea, my accountant, my financial analyst, she runs all my legal, she does my scheduling, she helps me with everything in my life. And I delegate 80% of the tasks that I don't enjoy doing or that I'm not good at to her. And then she even further delegates a lot of them. She deals with all my accountants and lawyers pretty much all the time. Whenever we have notaries and registries to deal with. On the real estate, she handles it all. Property managers, she deals with all these videos, they're edited and cut into shorts and made beautiful and then uploaded, all delegated because they're things that I don't like doing. And so to have really good work ethic. And to be able to work hard, you have to delegate the tasks that A, you're not good at and B, you don't like doing. And then there's the important and urgency matrix of the delegation quadrant. Eisenhower matrix. You can look it up on the Internet. It's famous, it's old. But I think that delegation will free up so much time so that you can work harder, but you also gotta share tasks. You create jobs for other people. There's a lot of benefit to it. My other friend, John Mack, very successful entrepreneur, just hired an EA a couple weeks ago. They use a notion template. She does his calendar, she does his emails now. And he's just like, why haven't I been doing this forever? I pay her, you know, I think it's like $5 an hour or something. Like it's next to nothing and it's dramatically changed his life and he makes millions of dollars a year. One of my favorite topics, I've said this word a lot, but I've noticed For me personally, 75 Hard was a great amount of days to be consistent enough to seriously change your habits. And what I'm learning about myself is a really good time period for me to be extremely consistent is about 90 days. One thing I'll talk about is that I quit smoking weed this year. It's been about six months now and for the first time I'm like, you know what, I have no pull towards this. I feel like I could smoke again like once and not feel like I need to do it every day or every week. But my goal was to do it for an entire year. So I'm 100% committed to that. And I'm going to be consistent for 365 days. My next one will be with alcohol. I love a glass of wine and I love a family reservera from Don Julio, but I want to quit that. I don't think alcohol is a value add in many ways and so in any way, to be perfectly honest. So I think being consistent in your actions just opens up your life to being so much better. Your identity will change, you'll become a stronger person, you'll be a happier, healthier human. And consistency is if you want to be more productive, just be consistent every single day and get a little bit better and you'll reap the benefits. That's it. Work hard, people. At the end of the day, one of the things that I never got along with people about was people who are lazy. I talk about this very often, not trying to Call anyone out. But I see it's actually a stat. There is a record amount of 25 to 35 even 40 year olds right now that went through the pandemic. They went work from home, they lost their jobs, they couldn't afford their apartment, so they moved back in with their parents. They collect Serb checks, unemployment checks from the government and they don't want to work. They waste all of their time doing, you know, watching tv, being addicted to social media, they just waste all their time. Those are the epitome of people to me. I can't stand them. It really drives me crazy. People that think that they're going to be successful and only work 20 or 30 hours a week, it's just never going to happen. And so in today's world, the only way to get ahead is to work harder than your competition. Another really good example of this is here in Kelowna. If you go to a Walmart or a Save on Foods or any big box store like Costco, almost all the workers now are East Indian. And I know that most of these people, this is not their only job. You don't see many Canadians working in these stores anymore. And these people are willing to work multiple jobs and probably work like 80 to 100 hours a week to provide for their families and to get themselves ahead 80 to 100 hours a week. They're working two or three jobs at a time now. I don't see enough people willing to put in that amount of effort to get ahead. For me, for the 10 years that I was running data nerds and estated, I was always working that much because I loved what I did and I was learning and I was building and I was creating and I knew there was going to be success at the end of the road. And so work ethic and having the desire to work hard is so important. So thank you for tuning in. Stay tuned, there's a ton more content coming out. Next is Business Fundamentals, which is arguably the best lessons and strategies we use to build multiple seven figure businesses and sell a business for eight figures. So jump into Business Fundamentals next. 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