Maximum Results, Minimum Effort.
One of the most formative books of my youth was The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris. The premise of the book was that hard work, for its own sake, is massively overrated and that huge results are much closer than we think—all we need are the right systems. The book was revelation, but it completely destroyed my career. I say that half-jokingly because after I read it I was constantly aware of how much time I was wasting at my office job. I didn’t want to work on stupid things. I didn’t want to waste my time on meaningless tasks assigned to me by a boss. I wanted to solve problems for people, make a lot of money, build a legacy for my family, and enjoy the fruits of my labor—love and leisure.
The economy is preoccupied with hard work for its own sake. Cal Newport has written about this extensively (I highly recommend Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and Slow Productivity—the latter book explores this topic in much further detail) and has come to the conclusion that, especially in the modern knowledge and service economy, we have inflated the amount of work that needs to be done on a day to day basis to absurd levels.
Newport’s thesis is that the industrial revolution gave us a model for how labor should be managed, but when we try and apply this model in the internet age, things get out of control very, very quickly and we end up chasing our tails and hyper-inflating the amount of work we need to do.
All of this to say, aside from the world of fitness and professional sports, hard work is a terrible north star metric for productivity and accomplishment.
There’s an old concept by personal development pioneer Earl Nightingale called “paying the price”—which is the amount of energy, time, or resources that must be invested in order to generate a particular outcome.
There is no shame in trying to make this “price” as small as possible, and trying to pay it as quickly as possible, with as little effort as possible. You do this by focusing on the key elements that matter more than the rest. In other essays I’ve written about the 80/20 Rule, Extreme Pareto (99/1), and The Power Law. Whatever you want to call it, there are a handful of factors that if you put all of your focus and energy on will make all the difference.
It’s also important to remember that, when building a business, effort and energy compounds. You typically have to exert a lot of effort in the beginning in order to accumulate capital that you can reinvest in higher leverage activities. But you don’t need to remain in these low leverage activities for long.
For example if you begin your business doing manual cold outreach, there are tons of ways to scale past that once you reach a certain point. You can hire an internal sales team, you can outsource it to an agency, you can build an email list, or any other number of things.
The key question is this: What action gets me the biggest result with the least amount of effort? Society will tell you that this question is lazy and unethical. It’s not. In fact the opposite is true. It’s the most powerful and ethical question you can ask for yourself and for your clients. That’s because the only way you earn more over time is to deliver more value to your clients. The idea isn’t to cheat anyone or cut corners in a malevolent way, but embrace and uncover ethical shortcuts that give you more leverage and allow you to do a better job in the marketplace.
If you’d like more reading on this topic I highly recommend The 4-Hour Workweek, The Millionaire Fastlane, Slow Productivity, and The ONE Thing. These are all great books that totally rewrite your relationship with effort and outcome.
One last idea worth mentioning that was taught to me by a previous mentor: massively overestimate the difficulty of the task in front of you. When you think something is going to be 10-100x harder, you calibrate yourself properly to find the proper solution. If you underestimate the price of a result, you’ll come up short and give up when you encounter a challenge. Better to overestimate how difficult it will be and then find your leverage and efficiency from there.
