Ever since I could remember, I didn't want to work my life away.
Anti role models were all around me.
And I was pretty observant as a child.
I didn't want to wake up at 4am, drive to work at 5am, grind away, and get home at 7pm because I was trying to support a family—working double shifts—just to be met by a spouse ready to argue or tell me how I could be doing more around the house.
I'll let you fill in the details there, as that sentence alone is making me emotional about the negatives (interspersed between many positives) of my childhood.
That's why I refused to go that route.
- In my teenage years, I was always obsessing over what I could do that would make the most money with the least amount of work.
- In college, I was going to class and working part time. I would spend 2-3 hours a day building side projects and learning via Udemy courses or YouTube.
- When I had my first full time job, I'd learn during my 1 hour commute (audiobooks, podcasts, YouTube) and procrastinate my work tasks for an hour or two to build my side businesses at the time.
What I'm trying to get at is this:
I didn't have 12-16 hours a day to "grind" on my side business to make it work.
I had 1 to 4 hours if I didn't lie to myself about how I could prioritize my time.
This is one thing that really pisses me off. Otherwise I'm pretty stoic (at least I think so).
A few days ago, someone on X said:
"That's easy for you to say in your position, but that's not how it works for beginners," referencing a comment I made on how you need to take rest in order to do your best work.
People say this all the time, even when I teach how to write, as if I'm not teaching what I did as a beginner. If your methods are so much better show me your results.
Here's why I get unnecessarily upset: because young people have been conditioned to see "grinding" mindlessly as a status symbol disguised as an effective strategy for achieving success.
I'm here to deconstruct that idiotic way of thinking that leads to the fact that 95% of beginners and businesses as a whole fail. "Grinding" is not wisdom nor a strategy, it's a lack thereof.
I worked 1-4 hours at a time on the side business that allowed me to leave my job.
When I started doing my own thing full time, I worked about the same amount.
Now that I've written 2 books, have built almost 10 products, run a software startup, and have built quite a large following, I'm pretty confident in the fact that most people are either wasting their time or just don't know what they don't know.
If you are grinding 12+ hours a day, especially as a beginner, I can guarantee that there is a way to get more results while working less than 4 hours.
In fact, I would argue that if you are working more than 4 hours, you are at least working on a few wrong things, and there is some improvement that can be made.
You can drop things that don't work.
You can speed up busy work with AI (I actually just created a free mini course on how I use AI since many people asked for it).
You can discover your strengths and focus on levers.
But you probably just don't want to realize that because you won't fit in with this world that glorifies busyness. The mind is a tricky thing.
If you understand the importance of leisure and leverage (that could be a catchy title of a book, oh wow, I'll write that next… ideas beget ideas) your productivity, mind, and lifestyle will transform.
When Long Hours Make Sense
I'm not here to convince you that working under 4 hours is the one true way.
It is one way.
And you don't go one way for the entirety of your life.
Productivity comes in seasons.
In one season, you may work 4 hours.
In another, you may work 16.
Sometimes it's 6, 2, 8, 10, or any other number because input vs output often aren't a linear correlation.
I have my fair share of times where I can't help but work long hours, and I love it.
But systems (especially productivity systems) don't last forever in one singular state. They evolve. They adapt to the situation. They break down rapidly and leave you lost (like that Notion productivity system you obsessed about years ago that was fun at the time and served you well, but would be a waste of time in your current phase).
My purpose with writing this is to prove that a sustained 16 hour grindset won't get you as far as you think it will.
Consistent 12-16 hour workdays is not personality trait, it is a sign of major disfunction and a general neglect for how your mind is wired.
All I ask is that you finish this letter before forming a hard set opinion, because even that is a system that will break down when you need it most.
The 80 Hour Myth – Why We Are Addicted To Being Busy
The creator's paradox:
Creativity is the result of not trying to be creative.
Humans are memetic creatures.
We imitate in order to survive and avoid being cast out (of our family… or our productivity obsessed culture).
Our mind takes the shape of that which allows us to fit in.
The problem starts with the fact that everyone glorifies the visible extreme.
There's something we find inspiring about the young startup phenom who built a $1M business in 3 weeks just from "grinding."
It feels relatable. Anyone can do that, right? It makes sense that the longer and harder I work, because that's what I've been told to do my entire life, the more likely I am to get what I want, right? It's just all about working hard, right???
Wrong.
You and I both know that there is a deeper formula at play.
We both know that a highlight reel spurred by unconscious competence is not reality.
We both know that you can spend 10,000 hours writing 10 books just for them to never see more than 50 readers, and that pisses some people off, because someone who understands how to distribute a sub-par book can sell millions of copies and run laps around you: because they focused on what gets results.
Most people are missing the context.
They're missing the invisible extreme that actually led to the success of most creatives, visionaries, and strategists.
Take Charles Darwin.
You know, the guy who wrote 19 books in his lifetime, discovered the theory of evolution, and changed the world as we know it while working 4-5 hours a day followed by lots of long walks, reading, and other leisure that fueled his mind with the ideas that allowed him to accomplish such grand tasks.
The difference between you and him is that this was his life's work.
It didn't matter how long it took.
For you, it's do or die. You either succeed in 6 months or you quit and accept your fate forever, which is laughable and backward. And that constant state of stress and survival definitely isn't helping your cause.
When we actually take a look at (1) the lifestyles of successful people and (2) the human brain and psychological facts, we shine a light on a few things.
First, most of the creatives we admire had very similar routines.
They had intense focused work blocks followed by relentless rest that involved a complete disconnection from work.
Take David Ogilvy, a legendary advertiser and copywriter, who believed in doing intensive research and writing down everything possible, then stepping away to let his subconscious work on the problem.
Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science, and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process.
– Ogilvy
The long walks, reading, and leisure time of the greats is what activates the Default Mode Network (DMN) in your brain. That is, when you stop focusing on work, your subconscious continues to do work for you, often in a more creative and effective way, presenting the ideas to your conscious mind (see: shower thoughts) that bring novelty and innovation to your work.
Other scientists have found that the complexity of the DMN shapes our capacity for self-awareness, memory, ability to imagine the future, empathy, and moral judgment[…] The better-developed your DMN, other scientists have found, the better able you are to construct models of other people's minds.
– Rest, Alex Pang
In other words, the most effective and result generating "work" you do is when you don't work at all. This is an extremely hard pill to swallow for those whose identity is so attached to "the grind" that their mind will spit out a reaction to that statement before it even has time to think.
If that's you, you should go on a walk, because that's the exact ineffective thinking that is getting you nowhere.
When you are deeply focused on a string of tasks, your mind is narrowed in on that quest-like video game. You will not and cannot see outside of the task. You simply sit down and complete something that you've already learned or strategized how to do. You are mostly limited to the ideas already circulating in your brain. Your mind isn't attempting to come up with new ideas, and if it is, the ideas are few and far between.
Most great ideas come from well informed self-reflection.
The Power Of Procrastination — It's Not Laziness, It's How We're Wired
You and I are not like cows. We're not meant to graze all day. We're meant to hunt like lions. We're closer to carnivores in our omnivorous development than we are to herbivores. As an intellectual athlete, you want to function like an athlete. Which means you train hard, then you sprint, then you rest, then you reassess. This idea that you're going to have linear output just by cranking every day at the same amount of time sitting… That's machines. Machines are meant to work 9-5, not humans.
— Naval
Most people have underlying fears and desires that tie them to "the grind:"
- They romanticize the long and hard route
- They have underlying trauma that makes them want to prove themselves to people who won't care
- They were raised in a frugal family and delay their success because deep down, they're afraid to make money
- They think they don't deserve leverage yet, so they do everything themselves or try to do everything at once
The reality is…
It's no longer acceptable to say you found and exploited a shortcut.
It feels like you're falling behind when you stop working so much and are met with boredom.
But to the Ancient Greeks, who we consistently reference as pillars of wisdom, leisure was the pinnacle of civilized life.
Work was necessary, but secondary to leisure.
I've recently rediscovered this myself.
As a fancy pants "startup founder" I felt like I needed to grind all day to keep up with the AI race that's happening right now.
2 months later, my writing began to suffer. It felt like I couldn't think clearly.
I would look back on my old writing and think, "How in the world did I write that?"
Not because it was the greatest thing I've ever seen, not by a long shot, but because I could articulate my thoughts in such a compelling way. My vision was clear. My life, at the time, felt stable even though the future was incredibly uncertain.
I thought back and remembered my long walks where my brain would light up with connections between so many different worldviews and philosophies.
I missed that.
It's as if something was putting a limiter on my pattern recognition.
If I could somehow get that back… it would actually help my business, not hurt it.
So, I started intentionally taking more rest throughout the day.
As in forcing myself not to work even when I felt the urge.
It felt off at first. It felt like I was falling behind. But my mind is thanking me, slowly, then all at once.
My creativity is returning with a vengeance. I can think as clear as ever. And you can probably tell by this letter, that weaving ideas from multiple domains is no longer an issue.
My cookie cutter boringness of my recent YouTube videos isn't the result of a lack of output, it's the result of a lack of rest.
Work Like A Lion, Not A Cow
There are two approaches to work.
First, is like a cow who grazes the fields:
- Consistent long hours every day
- Steady and predictable output
- Trading time for money in a linear fashion
- Showing up regularly regardless of energy
- Often leads to burnout and diminishing returns
Second, is like a lion, which we share a similar psychological wiring in that we are hunters (at least when it comes to work).
Our brain craves the novelty and dopamine that comes along with discovering resources (like ideas) that aid in our survival:
- Intense bursts of focused, high-energy work
- Long periods of rest and recovery between hunts
- Work according to energy and creativity cycles
- Prioritize impact over number of hours logged
- Aim for leverage where results aren't tied to time
A lion, by today's perception, is a massive procrastinator, and people discourage that. They make you feel guilty for taking your time. They tell you that you lack discipline and you should take things more seriously.
If you're bad at texting people back, or you tend to put your work (or homework) off until the last second, it's not a character flaw, it's how many people are wired.
If that sounds like you, what you need to understand is that intensity is better than duration, rest is the most productive form of work, and results matter more than hours.
But there are a few moving pieces here.
First, is leveraging your unique strengths that give you an asymmetric advantage.
Second, is choosing to pursue work that allows you to put lifestyle first.
That way, you can work according to your energy cycles and make a conscious choice as to what you should be working on. Some creatives worked late into the night while others preferred the morning.
If someone tells you what to work on, you can't really change that, and your first priority must be to leave that work.
How To Work Less, Earn More, and Enjoy Life
To work like a lion, you need clarity.
Let's coin this Koe's Razor:
If you need to force yourself to work, you're working on the wrong thing.
If you have absolute clarity on the idea, project, or strategy that will take you one step closer to your vision, you don't need discipline. You can't help but work. You tap into the flow state and get it done quickly with extremely high quality.
This is how most of my best, most notable projects are completed.
I take my leisure, often to the point of feeling like I should be working, until the project deadline approaches and I have sufficient clarity on how to get it done.
Then, it's the only thing that's on my mind. My focus narrows and distractions become zero. And once the project is done, I return to a "maintenance mode" where I do the minimal amount of work required to sustain some form of progress, knowing that if I were to try to force more, from experience, I would be disappointed with the results.
Now, in order to work less, a few conditions need to be met:
- You must define and abide by your ideal lifestyle.
- Your unique strengths must align with a leverage based game.
- You need the awareness of tools and technology at your disposal to do more in less time as one person.
With that, let's begin:
1) Ideal Lifestyle Determines Focus
The best way to create your ideal life is to live it, right now, but on a smaller scale.
If you want to be a writer, and you aren't already writing, you will never become one.
But if you start writing now, even if you only have 30 minutes, you can slowly titrate up the amount of time you spend writing.
Because if you aren't writing—or designing, creating, coding, etc—you aren't engaged in the process of error correction. You aren't encountering the real world feedback that allows you to get better. Until you actually start, whether it be now or when you are more "knowledgeable," you are delaying how soon you will be good enough to do that thing full time.
To work less, every single decision you make must be filtered through your ideal lifestyle.
This image of your "ideal lifestyle" is not a static target, it's an evolving work of art. I can't tell you what it is, because it's up to your own self-reflection of the past experiences you don't want to live again and a gradual trial and error toward the future experiences you think you want until they become past experiences that you can see with clear eyes.
For now, one of the most useful things you can do is to set anti-goals.
In other words:
What are you not willing to sacrifice in order to achieve success?
Are you willing to sacrifice your health?
No?
Then 16 hour days are automatically ruled out.
What about time with your significant other? Your intellectual development? Social life?
Many people will see this as limiting when it is incredibly freeing, because creativity thrives within constraints.
With the constraint of not sacrificing your health, you are required to (1) choose a career or business model that favors that (2) say "no" to more commitments, freeing up more focus and (3) prioritize quality over quantity of work.
When you can't extend your working hours indefinitely, you're forced to make the most of the time you do have, leading to more focused and often better results.
2) Permissionless Leverage
We've missed one crucial point so far, and that is the difference between mechanical and creative work.
Mechanical work can be done for 16 hours a day with relative ease because it doesn't demand that much mental energy.
But that's not where leverage comes from.
And, you are still neglecting the rest of your life.
So if you still arguing with me in your head that you can work all day and get a lot of high quality work done, it is probably mechanical work, and you are still probably better off working less so you don't procrastinate all of the other work you should have done in other areas of your life for 40 years.
None of this is to say that working a lot is always bad, but it is the lowest form of leverage out of the 3:
- Labor leverage – increasing your time spent on tasks or outsourcing work to others. (Cons: management overhead and complexity)
- Capital leverage – your money works for you through investments. (Cons: requires existing wealth or something worth investing in)
- Permissionless leverage – the most powerful form of modern leverage. (Cons: most people look like they're doing the same thing)
All have their pros, but we live in the most permissionless time in history.
Permissionless leverage comes in the form of code, media, books, podcasts, tweets, newsletters, courses, etc.
These have zero marginal cost of replication.
In other words, build once, sell as many times as you'd like.
Once a piece of software, content, or digital asset is created, you can distribute additional copies at virtually zero cost. One digital product can serve one million users.
Why is this important?
Because never has their been a time where so much power lies in the hands of the individual.
- One person (or a small team) can reach global scale without gatekeepers thanks to the internet
- Digital products don't require permission to build or distribute
- They often have exponential rather than linear returns on investment of time
This is where people get confused:
One, they think they have to (again) grind out content to build any form of an audience. But if you think critically, you know that's not true. You know that with quality and consistent output you have more of a chance at being spread to more people who love your work.
I wrote 3 tweets a day for 2 years (with the occasional thread) and grew to over 100k followers.
3 measly tweets doesn't require anywhere close to a "grind." Neither do the other strategies for growth. I spent maybe 5-10 hours a week on it.
A digital product takes some time (well, not anymore really, because AI can expedite that process if you have clarity on what you want to build) say, 1-2 hours a day for a month depending on the type of product.
And a landing page takes a few hours to build (again, you can use AI for this now), but once they're built, you're literally just focused on generating traffic with content.
If I wanted to stay as one person and make a reasonable income, I don't see why I couldn't work 5-10 hours a week with content alone and a digital product that's already built.
Of course, I'm not wired that way (there comes a time where I feel the urge to hunt) so I filled my time with other projects and endeavors as I acquired the resources to do so.
Lastly, this path isn't reserved for anyone.
Any interest or skill of yours can be turned into a digital product and content that others with similar interests or skills resonate with.
If you want to work less, this is one of the best beginner routes to take to build that initial leverage.
Once you have enough cash, capital, skill, and distribution in the form of an audience, it's really up to you what you build next.
3) A New Perspective On AI
The more I use AI, the more I realize that I'm not outsourcing my thinking, I'm enhancing it.
When I try to have AI perform a task (in a more accurate way than yelling at it to "write me an entire book" in a one sentence prompt) I am exposed to clear and intelligent thinking. I am reading more. I am understanding more. I am revealing my own blindspots more because much of my instructions aren't clear the first time around.
I find it so powerful that instead of creating multiple newsletters on it, I put all of my AI use cases into this free mini course (the only caveat is that I use my software to teach it).
When I write a newsletter or read a book, I often look to AI to help me learn. I'll ask for clarification on things like "permissionless leverage," which I had a solid grasp on, but AI helped deepen that understanding. It's like reading a book that's tailored to you in real time.
AI is closing the gap between learning in doing.
Since AI can accomplish tasks according to your instructions, like writing landing page copywriting or creating a viral marketing plan, you are both completing the task and learning how to better complete it the next time.
A "prompt" that you refine and reuse is a reflection of your understanding of the task. It is a externalized clone of a creative process that no longer needs to sit in your head or in a static SOP document.
Here's how I like to use AI right now:
- I choose a task to complete, like making a better YouTube introduction
- I find a YouTube video, PDF, or reference text and have AI break it down into replicable steps
- I turn that into a meta prompt I can reuse over and over again
- I refine the prompt as I use it
As another example, I saw a brand get 11 million views on their product launch on Twitter the other day. I want those results, so I pasted all of their marketing material into AI following the steps above.
Now, I have a "paradigm shift marketing" strategy for our next big Kortex release.
Another thing you could do, if you've read the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is download the PDF to the book, feed it to AI, and create multiple things like:
- A morning exercise to get you into the flow state for the task you plan to work on
- A clarity advisor that helps you choose skills and careers that bring more meaning into your life
- A personal therapist to turn boredom into interest and anxiety into action
Books, videos, courses, and other sources of information are no longer static. That information can do things for you now. If you fed it my 2 hour writer course in a smart way, you could have it write posts, threads, and newsletters a lot better than you would be able to on your own.
Is that not insane? Do you not see how powerful that can be? AI is so much more than a place to pop boring questions into. I guess you could say the quality of your AI responses matches your level of vision and agency.
The point of AI now, in my opinion, is to spend more time on what you enjoy doing (your unique strengths) and build AI workflows and prompts that allow you to do the rest at a surprisingly high quality if you take the time to build once, use forever.
I personally don't care for marketing, so I plan to focus on my writing as I always have.
AI can help enhance my writing, and it can write persuasive copy for landing pages, emails, promotional posts, and more.
This is only the tip of the iceberg of what AI can allow you to do.
4) Types Of Leisure
We all understand what work is.
But when it comes to leisure, I often get the question:
"If you don't work that long, what do you do for the rest of your day? Do you just sit around?"
My friend, I feel very bad for you if you think the only thing you can do in life is work.
For the sake of definition, leisure is a mindset.
You can write for fun, leisure, or rest, but once it's tied to an obligatory outcome for the purpose of work, that's when it ceases to be leisure.
You can go on a long walk with the external goal of 3,000 steps, but that goal is often a way to free the mind from thinking about the walk. You gain more mental energy that can be allocated to solving subconscious problems.
You can read a book, but once you start analyzing and trying to get something from it, it becomes work.
You can go to the gym, go on a run, do yoga, take a nap, cook, clean, socialize with friends, and your mind may oscillate between a type of work and rest, but the purpose of rest should be a lack of focus on work.
The beautiful thing about this, for creative work, is that these are often direct fuel for that work.
Since creative work is largely dependent on the quality of ideas you have, and most of your best ideas don't come while you're working, leisure is how you begin to create a life where work, rest, and play blur into one.
If long walks are considered a part of my work, which in many cases they are, then I work all day, every day. Even my sleep is a direct contributor to work.
5) A Responsible Life Has Deadlines Built In
It's common advice for successful people to tell you to work as hard as you possibly can in your 20s.
To give up most of your life.
But I think most people misinterpret what that means.
What they're trying to say is take bigger risks.
Bet on yourself and create your own path.
That doesn't require 16 hours of work, because you can work hard on more things than your business.
You have a mind, a body, and spirit that also need developing.
You have relationships that probably shouldn't go neglected, because that can absolutely load rogue thoughts into your mind that dampens the quality of your work.
With that, a responsible life has deadlines built in.
If you truly value your intellect, physique, connection to others and reality, and a standard of health that envelopes them all, you cannot sustain 16 hours of work. It's impossible. Those who work 16 hours day in day out expose that they do not value those things, and I would question your trust in their methods.
If I value my health, and understand that my gym performance will decrease later in the day if I am tired, then I need a mid day deadline for my work so my performance in the gym is closer to optimal.
If I value my relationship with my significant other, and the fact that good things demand consistent watering, I cannot end the night in a stressed state where all I can think about is work.
This is not a downgrade but an upgrade for the quality of your work.
Why?
Because deadlines narrow your mind and create a sense of urgency which act as rocket fuel for deep work.
When you strive to be multidimensionally jacked, and hold that as your standard, you will feel that sense of urgency in the morning to complete the tasks you can during that time with the creative fuel you acquired during your previous day's rest.
Tack on Parkinson's Law, that work expands to fill the time allotted for completion, and you'll be shocked with how much you can get done in such little time.
The results may not show up immediately, of course.
It takes a few weeks to adapt to that new lifestyle.
But if you stick it out, I promise that your life will improve more than you could have imagined.
– Dan