MBA1434 Do You Need to Work More Than 40 Hours a Week to Be Successful?

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And if you don't put in the time and the hard work, then it's impossible for you to be successful. But is that really true? Is that even possible? This is what we explore in today's episode. A lot of us may think that we could be doing better if you put in more time, more work. We might be thinking we're not doing well or our business is not thriving because we're not spending enough time on it. But is that really true? Is it really time gonna solve that problem? And how efficient are you with that time? Is that really the question? We get into all of this and we finally answer the question, can you be successful on 40 hours a week when building a business? So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Do you really need to work more than 40 hours a week to be successful? This is a question I've been asking myself and thinking about for some time now. I started thinking about this after reading the book Deep Work by Cal Newport. This book really defines what work really is and this episode is going to encourage you to be as honest as possible with yourself no matter how many hours you put into your business. Let's say that's 40 hours a week, eight hours a day? Is every hour, every minute actually work? Or are you procrastinating, wasting time, browsing the Internet, doing quote unquote research, checking your social media, checking your messages on your phone, checking your WhatsApp, being distracted by notifications. So let's be honest, do we actually work 40 hours or 50 hours or 60 hours? You might be working 60 hours, but actually not really working or getting actual work done for more than half of it. But what about even the possibility of doing more than 40 solid hours a week, eight hours a day, really actually doing the tasks and not being distracted, not being taken away by things less important than your business? In Cal Newport's book Deep Work, he actually says the maximum amount, according to his research, is six hours of six solid hours. And that's really a stretch. For most people, four to five hours is really the longest period of time. They can really do some deep work and really focus on the tasks at hand. 8 Work is really pushing it to the max of doing nothing but work. You're going to be pretty spent. Your brain is going to be really tired. So physically, according to Cal Newport, it's really hard for you to actually put in eight or even more than eight hours of work every day. But you might be thinking, well, Omar, I can't do eight solid hours. I gotta take breaks, I gotta go for walks. I do have to check messages. Does that mean I have to account for that time? Yes, you do have to account for that time. And the goal really should be to make your work time as concentrated and as focused as possible. And this is what really being efficient with your time means. This is the best time management I can think of because it means that every minute you actually work, you actually are working. You're actually getting things done. If I'm going to be totally honest with you, this has taken a very long time for me to understand and then actually to practice. When I started building my businesses, you know, 10, 15 years ago, and I would, you know, put some time aside, especially when I was side hustling when I had a full time job, let's say I put aside four hours to work on my business on the weekend. I would say maybe two to two and a half hours was really meaningful work. The rest was just fluff, was me getting ready for work, was me, you know, getting distracted, me doing things I would, you know, fool myself in thinking that, yep, this is work. When really I'm being distracted by other shiny objects. Even when I was putting in 60 and 70 and 80 hour weeks, when I was building the $100 MBA back in 2012. A lot of those hours weren't efficient. A lot of those hours I was distracted. A lot of those hours I wasn't focused. And I actually could have done it in less time. I could have done it with less working hours. And the best thing about this is that this allows more time for you to recharge, rest, and come back out of the next day even stronger. If you asked me this question maybe five or six years ago, I would have said without a shadow of a doubt, yes, you need to work more than 40 hours. You got to work harder, you got to work longer if you want to be successful. Because I just thought the amount of time you spent on your business at the start really matters. And it's true, it is does matter. But being efficient with that time is even more important. And here's the thing, here's the catch right here. It takes a while for you to learn how to be efficient, for you to be more focused. So it may take you at the start 60 hours to get, you know, 30 hours of work done. And then you got to reduce it down to 50 hours to get to 40 hours of work. You get the point. So it's really not one another. You have a goal here. You're trying to hit, hit that 40 hour a week mark, maybe even less 30 hours a week. Can you do that and make it super efficient Cutting out all five, all wasted time. It's going to take you some time. And in order for you to get the things you need to get done in an orderly fashion, you may have to put in more hours until you get to that point. You know, Elon Musk has been quoted to say that he works 80 hours a week because he believes he works twice as fast as his competition. He'll get twice as far as. Maybe that works for Elon. And maybe Elon is the exception to the rule. There's always exceptions, you know, and maybe he's in a sprint right now. Maybe he's working really hard because it's very critical time in his business, but he's going to tone it down when things ramp up. We all have different times in our business where we have to sprint and when we have to think marathon, right, we got to think long term. For example, you know, we're launching a all new version of webinar ninja called webinar Ninja six. It's coming out in about a month or so. And I'm in a sprint right now. I'm in a sprint period where I'm working longer hours, I'm working hard. I'm working close to the team because this is an important time where we got to get this right and we got to launch it perfectly. After the launch, I might kick back my hours. I know that I'm planning that my calendar, and I'm working around this launch knowing that my hours are going to be reduced. The point here is that I highly recommend you're not sprinting for too long. You can't sprint forever. I tried that. I've burnt out, and it's cost me a lot. In my business and in my life. You want to sprint for a bit, few weeks, and then stop, recoup, kick it back a little bit. And I like to bridge the sprints and the marathons with a break. So whether you're going on a holiday or a long weekend or something where you just reset that clock. The other thing I want to mention is the other side of the sentence. Do you need 40 hours to be successful? What is successful? You have to define again what success means to you. Is success certain physical things that you want to achieve? Is success a certain income? Is success a certain amount of free time? Get very clear what success means in the short term and the long term. Another thing I want to mention is sometimes you're just not going to be successful because of the business itself. I know that's a hard thing to hear, but it's the truth. And my job as somebody who does a podcast like this is to give you the truth. The truth is, is that sometimes businesses don't take off because they're in the wrong market. There's not a large enough audience, there's not a big enough pain that you're trying to solve. You're targeting the wrong customer, and you have a wrong, you know, product market fit. And working harder or longer is really not going to solve those problems. You got to be smarter. You got to be able to change your strategy. You got to be able to have a strategy. Some people have businesses that are not doing so well and they're struggling and they're putting on long hours. They make a small pivot, they change their positioning, they change their market, they change their product. And all of a sudden, this business is growing faster than they can keep up, and they're doing way beyond the growth and success than they had when they were putting in 60 hours, and now they're putting in 40. The business dynamics, the business logic of your actual venture matters. The dollars and cents, the actual product, what you're offering, the Value you're conveying, all this really matters and a lot of us just forget it. You can't just market anything to anyone. You have to actually market the right product to the right people that have the money to buy it. This is why they say in business competition is a good thing, because it means that there's money in the market. People actually are buying that product. There are a lot of different places to buy a hamburger. That means hamburgers are popular. People like eating hamburgers. That's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. That means that your chances of success with a hamburger business, if it's good and the positioning's right and you have a unique selling proposition, is quite good because you already have a proven concept. People eat hamburgers, right? Versus trying to do a business where you have to convince people that they want it. So you can work long hours on something that people don't want. And that's something you really need to find out early on in your business, if you even have traction. A lot of people call this escape velocity. If you're in the SaaS world, software as a service, this is something between five to $10,000 in MRR. If you hit that mark, that means, hey, there's enough demand for you to make some money on this business. If you haven't, you can't bootstrap your rate of 5 to 10k a month an MRR, then there's something here that's wrong. You need to fine tune your MVP or minimal viable product in order for you to prove your business has legs, has potential. That's experimentation. That's change a few pivots. Possibly it could be a change of strategy, a change in offering. But the point here is, is that sometimes putting more time into it is not really going to solve the problem. If I gave you a bunch of plastic chairs and some duct tape and some chewing gum and told you I want you to build a log cabin, right? I told you I want you to build a log cabin. And you can spend as much time as you want to make this happen, but I need you to make it happen. You want 5 hours, 10 hours, 20 hours, 100 hours. You can have as many hours as you want. You'll say that's impossible. I can't do that with the materials I have, with the tools I have. Doesn't matter how much time I put into it. Same thing with the business. If you don't have the right building blocks for this to be successful, to build what you want, it doesn't matter. How much time you put into it? I hope that makes sense. Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

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I want to wrap up today's lesson with a preface. I know I should have done this at the start, but I wanted to kind of get the important things out first before I talk about the exception or the caveats. It's really hard for you to be super efficient with your time with a new business idea because you're still trying to figure out what to do first, second, third, and you're kind of running around trying to get things done. When you're trying to actually launch your business and get it off the ground, you may be putting in a lot of hours because you're not organized yet with your time. You're not really working on efficiency once the business is running. Your job is to be as efficient as possible with your time because, hey, you have a limited amount of time and you got to make sure you maximize it as much as possible. And also you have your own time to keep track. But also there's time in general. Every minute, every hour, every day that goes by. It's going to cost you money, it's going to cost you opportunities if you don't continue to improve. So really working on being efficient with your time is more important after launch than before. Now, of course, if you just continue to delay launch, this is a problem. This is why deadlines are so important, and having some sort of confined time or deadline for yourself for launch is so critical, it's hard to optimize while you're growing. It's hard to optimize and innovate at the same time. In the beginning, before you launch, you're innovating, you're coming with ideas, you're creating a new website, you're creating your product, all that kind of stuff. And then you're going to shift gears to optimize the product, optimize your time, optimize your business. Rarely do you do both at the same time, so keep that in mind when it comes to the hours. And remember, efficiency is the key. We have other episodes on the show. Make sure you subscribe so you can search our archives. So and see all the great episodes we have on productivity, on making your workspace a distraction free zone, on how to make sure that every minute counts in your business, how to delegate and buy time, all that kind of stuff. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA Show. If you love you here, leave us an iTunes rating and a review. We'd love to hear what you love about the show, what your favorite episode is, what your favorite takeaway. And don't forget to share this show on social whether it's on Facebook, on Instagram, on Twitter, it's the biggest compliment you can do is to share the book, screenshot this episode off your phone and share with your friends and family. That's super, super appreciated. Before I go, I want to leave you with this business is a marathon. It's not a sprint. There are some sprints in the middle, like I mentioned, but for the vast majority of it you're trying to just make it to the finish line. That's far, far away, Right? You're trying to really pace yourself to make sure that you can stay in this race. You know, one of the things that marathon runners do, and I ran a long distance in track in high school and one of the things you'll learn is how to pace yourself so you don't wipe out, so you don't collapse. It's an endurance sport, right? You're trying to endure the challenges and keep moving forward. Right? So keep that in mind. You don't want to burn out. You don't want to put on all these hours and then not have a business a year from now. It's a real thing. We're all human and our bodies have a right over us. So make sure we give its right, its rest and its recharging time. Thank you so much for listening. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you, then take care. Of.

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