If You Were Less Stupid, You Wouldn’t Need To Work So Hard.
In my winners vs losers blog I said that what differentiates winners and losers is their willingness to pay the price and the accumulation and compounding of their small advantages over time.
The main way I mentioned that the advantage was earned was through hard work e.g. sitting in a chair for longer, working an extra hour, being more focused, saying no to drinks on the weekend etc.
This is true & it felt right in the moment, but now that I think about it more, there are more aspects of this iceberg that I haven’t yet explored.
Warren Buffett doesn’t work hard…
Hard work has very little to do with the highest levels of the game. Warren Buffet doesn't work hard. He doesnt wake up at 4am and instantly jump into a cold shower before doing 5 mins of Wim Hof breathing and smoothing transitioning into a 10hr block deep focused work (that he pre planned the night before on his google calendar - whilst using blue light blockers of course!).
In fact, he does quite the opposite. He wakes up, reaches into his fridge and starts his day with a healthy cold can of Coca-Cola (I’m not lying, google it for yourself). Then he sits in his office diligently (sarcasm) and reads books or watches news on the TV (must be tough!). Around 5-6pm, he finishes work and goes to a McDonalds drive thru before arriving back home (6pm! - man this guy is putting in some long shifts!).
So how is this lazy old man with man boobs making more money than all the hustlers on instagram who claim that “no one can outwork me!”.
The output equation…
Alex Hormozi uses this formula: Output = volume of activity x leverage of activity.
Newbies measure output at the beginning only by the volume e.g. hours. Meanwhile, veterans focus on leverage.
There are only 24 hours in a day. Assuming 6 hours of sleep and 2 hours of maintenance work (eat, shower, poop etc) and we don't waste any time transitioning from one thing to another, we have 16 hours to dedicate to work.
Single migrant mother vs Elon - who works harder?…
The single Mexican migrant mother working 3 jobs probably puts in 16 hours a day. Elon also probably works 16hr days on some days. If hard work alone was the answer, why is that single mom still struggling to pay rent and feed her kids, and Elon spending $44 billion to buy twitter?
The second component of Alex Hormozi’s equation: leverage.
“Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.” - Archimedes
Archimedes agrees. Sheer hard work doesn’t move the earth, but leverage could.
Naval Ravikant adds:
“It’s not really about hard work. You can work in a restaurant eighty hours a week, and you’re not going to get rich.
Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it. It is much more about understanding than purely hard work. Yes, hard work matters, and you can’t skimp on it. But it has to be directed in the right way.
If you don’t know yet what you should work on, the most important thing is to figure it out. You should not grind at a lot of hard work until you figure out what you should be working on.”
Therefore, the question is not how many hours do I work, but rather what do I do, who do I do it with, when do I do it and how do I apply maximum leverage?
These are not questions that can be answered with hard work, but rather with good decision making skills.
Good decisions = less (hard) work…
If You (me - Hassan) Were Less Stupid, You Wouldn’t Need To Work So Hard.
If I could make the right decisions, I could place myself in a position of leverage where the importance of hard work would not be a determining factor.
I am now starting to see that decision making is the most important skill of all.
As Naval says, a big part of winning is choosing the right game to play, who to play it with and when to start playing. Where do you direct your hard work… that is the most important decision.
This whole blog has opened my own eyes up to how important decision making is and the more I write, the more I realise this.
I previously said that the difference between winners and losers is the winner’s willingness to make the necessary sacrifices and the consistent marginal compounding of their minor percentile advantage is the differentiating factor.
I still believe this. But now I understand that the bedrock of the statement is that the winner gained marginal advantages through decision making, not just hard work.
“We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting.” - Naval
Hustle culture has been greatly popularised on social media. But these days it is not a question of how hard you work, it is a question of the quality of decisions you can make and the amount of leverage you can apply.
