The clever man may work smarter, not harder, they say, but the creative man doesn’t work at all.
I’ve been rereading one of my favorite books, Rest, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. I have a deep desire to share what I’ve learned, because I feel like the world is in dire need of hearing this right now:
Most people struggle to do good work because they work too much.
Their mind is always on.
Out of gas, pushing down the road because you “need” to get to whatever destination you’re heading to.
Stuck in doing mode, a narrow-minded state that, when left unchecked, leads to that hot ball of stress in your chest that you have difficulty identifying the source of.
That feeling of a closed mind.
The one that hurts your quality time with others. The one that makes you unappreciative of life’s innate richness. The one where you forget how it feels to have a clear line of thought.
These people wear overwork as a badge of honor.
They feel like they can’t stop working because they need to keep up in the imaginary race they thought themselves into.
I want to propose a different way of doing work.
We no longer live in a world that benefits the individual who works 40 to 80 hours a week (as a repetitive and eternal lifestyle, not as an occasional thing).
The world is shifting from technicians to creators.
With the entry-level turning into the senior-level thanks to AI and automation, technicians will be replaced, or they will be forced to become creators.
Technicians work toward the goals they are assigned.
Creators cultivate a lifestyle that naturally results in the goals they choose.
The ancient Greeks saw rest as a great gift, as the pinnacle of civilized life. The Roman Stoics argued that you cannot have a good life without good work. Indeed, virtually every ancient society, recognized that both work and rest were necessary for a good life: one provided the means to live, the other gave meaning to life.
If you want to get things done, work.
If you want to get the right things done, rest.
Rest is not wine and bubblebaths nor margaritas on a beach. Rest is a necessity for creative work; the type of work that actually leads to a good life.
It’s counterintuitive, but rest is how you get 6 years of work done in 6 months.
Proceed with an open mind, because the path to get there may threaten everything you believe is true. It may destroy the sense of security you had in your future, because it was an illusion to begin with.
Cracking The Work-Life Balance Code
Let’s do a thought experiment.
You have a 6-year goal of making $1 million.
The low-leverage way to achieve that would be to:
- Create a budget and avoid buying $5 Starbucks coffee
- Try to get a promotion or raise so your income increases a +/-10%
- Calculate how much you need to invest each month in the stock market
- Live below your means and fear for your life that nothing catastrophic happens to you
Now, this is going to sound a bit extreme.
“How in the world can you achieve that 6-year goal in 6 months?”
What you have to realize is that it is possible. That’s step one. Step two is realizing you just don’t have the knowledge and skill that makes it possible. You haven’t sought new knowledge from education that can’t be found in schools relevant to a financial goal you don’t have. Step three is truly understand what it takes to learn something of this magnitude: a metric f*ck ton of failures until you can afford to succeed.
I’m not saying this will make $1 million in 6 months.
I am just illustrating a point for this letter. I’m sure you’d be happy if this led to making $50K or $100K in that time frame.
- Set a big 6 month goal so your mind biases education toward that goal
- Start a business – yes, a business – so you have full control over the product, audience, and revenue
- That way, you’re forced to think creatively about how to achieve the goal
- Choose a business model that allows you to achieve that goal without sacrificing your interests
- 1x, 2x, or 3x your income year after year rather than getting a 10% raise on a six-figure salary
If you’re new to this newsletter, you may or may not have the knowledge or awareness that you don’t need a fancy fad-business model to do this.
Stop thinking about starting an agency or ecom store.
Start thinking from business principles – you need an audience and a way to monetize that audience.
Technology has created this beautiful new type of media (media is how you build, attract, or target an audience) called social media, which is where most of the attention is (you need attention if you want money).
Starting a personal brand, or being a myopically labeled “content creator” is how you attract an audience to you and sell whatever you want. A freelance service, digital product, physical product… anything that you see people selling online.
You are already a business. You have value to give. You just don’t know how to put yourself in front of the billions of people online and get them to pay you for your work. The internet is a necessary part of modern survival.
So, to use this meta-business model to reach that 6-month goal:
- Study social media, but don’t fall into thinking it’s a business model (yes, you have to study it and practice it if you want to grow, shocker)
- Write content on platforms like X or LinkedIn to build a quality audience
- Start a newsletter to keep and nurture that audience with longer, trust-building writing (like this)
- If you want, repurpose that writing to all other platforms like I teach in 2 Hour Writer
- As your audience grows, launch digital products and services (courses, templates, freelance, coaching, etc) that allow you to build cash flow without spending your life savings to actually start the business (they are free to create)
- Promote your valuable product or service to your audience in a systemized fashion
Let’s say you’ve studied social media, write a post, and it gets shared by an account with 100K followers (because you have the skill, yes skill, to do that).
Now that post is getting a few hundred thousand impressions.
You promote your newsletter (or your product) to nurture that audience.
You write emails that deliver more value than basic social content and promote your product.
Since you have an audience flow in the hundreds of thousands, and if you stick that out for 6-12 months, and if you iterate and improve on your process when you notice things aren’t working, I find it difficult to believe that you won’t be able to convert a fraction of that audience into buyers. I’ll let you do the math on if that would equal a million dollars.
Some may say, “Well not everyone can do this.”
I think you forgot above where I say, “sell whatever you want.”
Most if not all local businesses are online doing the same thing. You don’t market a business with direct physical mail and billboards anymore. Maybe sometimes, but we’re aiming for high leverage.
So yes, everyone can do this, if they are the niche. If they don’t conform to agency models and templated ecom stores. If they lean into their interests, personality, solve their own problems, and sell the solution.
The Minimalist Workday Philosophy
One of his contemporaries said that Watson had time for girls and tennis because he was a genius. But Woolf and Kay made me think: Maybe he was a genius because he made time for girls and tennis. Maybe creative achievement needs to be approached obliquely.
My 4-hour workday philosophy has evolved to an extent.
I am not only building my personal business with the methods we just discussed.
I’m learning animation, building a startup, and the rest.
But how I work hasn’t changed. I feel as if I still get outsized results because of what I choose to give my attention.
Minimalism is not about having less, it’s about making room for more of what matters.
It’s about leverage.
It’s about releasing the things that you think are bringing you progress, but are actually slowing you down (like watching tutorials without actively building a project – I don’t just watch tutorials, I find a tutorial I want to implement directly and learn the skill through building along with it).
It’s about focusing on the few tasks that bring outsized results and systemizing, outsourcing, or delegating the rest.
But how do you find the select few tasks that allow you to achieve your goals in record time?
Well, you definitely aren’t going to find it by following a path that your parents or teachers told you to follow – because you can directly observe what kind of high-pressure lifestyle that leads to.
That’s step 1.
Choosing the right vessel that allows you to control all of the variables. In work, that means a business. In modern day, that means an internet business.
Step 2 is to study all perspectives and identify patterns and principles. If you study online business, you notice that all of them build an audience and monetize that audience.
Step 3 is understanding Koe’s Law, which states that leveraged work evolves to earn more in the time allotted for its completion.
If I wanted to make $1 million as 1 person while working 4 hours or less:
- The allotted time for completion is 4 hours, don’t work more than that (so you can identify problems that make you extend beyond that timeframe and solve them with systemization, automation, or delegation).
- Begin building an audience on the internet however you deem fit. Ads, content, etc. I would obviously recommend content as the highest leverage. You write once and spread it to thousands > millions as you get better.
- Create a minimum viable product or service and start selling fast (as soon as you notice a problem, like the first person not buying, begin to test new strategies and iterate until you see results).
- Study new techniques and acquire new skills to enhance how effective you are in those 4 hours.
If you were to simply adhere to step 1, persist with steps 2 and 3, and not forget about step 4 – you would have a growing audience and a product that sells. Boom, a $1 million (and increasing) income.
That’s the power of minimalism backed trial and error, the essence of any form of improvement.
The 4 Cycles Of Progress
I’ll make this quick, but we need to talk about it.
I’ve seen quite a few well-known people say that your 20s are meant to pull 12-hour days and never stop working.
I agree…
1/4 of the time.
Life unfolds in chapters and phases.
Everything, and I mean everything, goes through cycles.
There are macro cycles and micro cycles. Cycles of the universe (like seasons), cycles of culture (like holidays), cycles of your day (like going to the bathroom and satisfying your sexual desire), and more.
This is a generalized principle of reality. The principle of impermanence and entropy.
The 4 cycles of progress are:
- Perplexity – you feel lost and don’t know what to do next in your life.
- Curiosity – you discover an inkling of opportunity and dive down the rabbit hole.
- Intensity – you gain absolute clarity and can’t pull yourself away from your work (12-hour workdays).
- Consistency – you systemize what works, lean back, develop a sustainable routine, and make rest an essential part of your creative life (4-hour workdays). Then, you can repeat the process if you so please.
Doing intense work, day in day out, often on mindless, low leverage tasks is only going to add bloat to your mind and business. You’ll try pushing through a perplexity phase of life with intensity when it is solved with curiosity.
Keep in mind, these are meta states of consciousness. Trying to force your way into a new one will not work.
Sure, go ahead and work 12-hour days on a task that you chose to work on just because you felt like you had to.
I’ll see you in my DMs with the hundreds of others who feel cheated by the labor theory of value.
How To Do 6 Years Of Work In 6 Months
But it’s clear that the brain’s creative work is never done, that even in its resting state the brain is plugging away at problems, examining and tossing out possible answers, looking for novelty. This is a process we can’t really control. But by learning to rest better, we can support it, let it work, and take notice when it’s found something that deserves our attention.
Let’s condense what we’ve learned into practical steps.
But first, if you want rest, you have to take it, because nobody in this world is going to give it to you.
Rest is what allows your mind to filter signal from noise.
Intentional rest is how you break out of the narrow-minded stress of doing mode that most of us are addicted to.
Rest, like walking, lifting, reading, leisure, or what we can define as anything aside from giving attention to work, is what activates the Default Mode Network.
In short, that means your brain is as active, or more active, when you are at rest.
Your brain works for you when you rest.
Think of it like “shower thoughts” or the times right before you fall asleep where you can’t stop having potentially life changing ideas.
If you are always in doing mode, good luck having the idea that allows for more results in your work.
The secret to the creative worker’s ability to make massive progress in such short periods of time is that they have the ideas that spring up the awareness to work on the right tasks with quality and grace.
Here’s how you begin to leverage this power:
Build Your Own Thing
There is something special about working on a project of your own. I wouldn’t say exactly that you’re happier. A better word would be excited, or engaged. You’re happy when things are going well, but often they aren’t… So why do it at all? Because to the kind of people who like working this way, nothing else feels as right. You feel as if you’re an animal in its natural habitat, doing what you were meant to do — not always happy, maybe, but awake and alive. – Paul Graham
If you want to get more lever-moving work done, I hate to break it to you, but that’s going to be very difficult if all you do is work on projects that are assigned to you.
So, if you’ve made it this far, I’m sorry for the tease.
Maybe it’s time to take a brutal look at your situation and stop trying to force finding meaning in the meaningless. Maybe it’s time to finally take the leap. The leap you’ve been wanting to make, because you know it’s the only logical long term option, but shy away because you may have to sacrifice a few comforts you have now (that can ultimately be replaced with something more fulfilling).
When you build your own thing, you actually want to work. It only feels like work when you are going through a lull, but it’s work you can still tolerate.
When you are in control of the project, you can control the variables for creating the flow state of consciousness, the key to achieving the impossible:
Curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, mastery.
I would argue that 90% of people publicly hate their jobs, 9% of people lie to themselves that they love their jobs (or they just don’t have the awareness of something better because they’ve never explored the unknown), and 1% of people have the few jobs that allow them to create the conditions above.
Not everyone can have those jobs.
What if you don’t know what to build?
Refer to what I said previously.
Choose a meta business model. One that prioritizes the two principles of business: build an audience, monetize the audience.
That way, you can explore your interests, stack second-order future-proof skills like writing and persuasion, and use modern marketable skills like email, graphic design, and video to monetize those interests.
Being a “creator” is a way of being that is currently channeled through the internet until the best way to harness your human capabilities evolves, not the myopic internet job people make it seem like it is.
Think Bigger.
We all operate on a 24-hour clock.
You can choose to open a coffee shop and be limited to the foot traffic of that shop, or you can choose to start a coffee brand limited to the billions of people on the internet.
Imagine a line of locals at your coffee shop. Every 30-60 seconds for the morning rush people swipe their cards and you collect a few $5 to $20 transactions.
Now imagine building an audience of 10, 20, or 50,000 people over the course of a few years. You promote your coffee brand, and there is no line. You get notifications every second. So much so that you become numb to it.
You chose the path of leverage, so once the systems are created, you barely have to work unless you choose to grow even more.
The point is that both the local shop and the online shop owners work the same amount of time, but the online shop owner has the potential to make exponentially more and has the choice to work less.
Your mental capacity is limited by the potential of the business you are building.
If your mind is limited to a small local shop, you hinder your ability to raise dopamine levels in the brain through novelty, discovery, and pattern recognition (the fuel that keeps drawing you back to the project you are building).
Eventually, skill acquisition and growth slow down, and you reach the same point you did when you started hating your 9-5.
So, to tie this together, thing big and reverse engineer how to get there.
Vision > 10 year goal > 1 year goals > monthly goals > weekly goals > daily levers…
Then, forget about the goals like I talk about here.
The Creative Daily Routine
You need 3 habits:
One to fill your mind.
One to empty your mind.
One to use your mind.
When you consume too much and create too little, you get anxious.
When you create too much and consume too little, you get bored, because you’ve run out of fuel to create with, so you repeat old patterns and lose the challenge of the craft you enjoyed.
This is what I call the fill, empty, use framework.
A big-picture, sustainable routine that allows you to experiment with the details.
Experiment with filling your mind in the afternoon with books, podcasts, content, courses.
Experiment with emptying your mind in the evening with journaling, planning, or meditation.
Experiment with using your mind in the morning writing, deep work, and building.
Or, front load all of those habits first thing in the morning.
Or, pull out a piece of paper to start the creation of a system. Plan out those 3 habits over a week and start doing them. If something doesn’t flow, change it and try until it does.
You can’t get 6 years of work done in 6 months because you aren’t aware of a way to do that. You aren’t aware of a way to do that because you don’t have great ideas flowing through your mind.
Your mind has 3 functions: consume, connect, create.
Ideaflow.
If you don’t connect ideas or create with ideas, they sit in your head and weigh you down.
You have to actualize an idea in order to discover the one that can only be discovered once it’s actualized.
The tractor couldn’t be conceived without the plow.
What you may or may not understand is that you can’t generate a life-changing idea if you haven’t already acted on the “boring” or “shallow” ideas that lead to that life-changing idea.
You should probably focus on solving the problems staring you in the face – your health, money, and competency – before you focus on solving more profound, more complex issues that require a more developed mind to benefit from.
Tasks Prioritized By Leverage
What is the one thing you can do, that both increases in effectiveness with consistent failure and brings you closer to your goal?
Now, focus only on that.
Do it first thing in the morning, every morning.
If you only have 1 hour to build your own thing in the morning, then do only that and be okay with it. You don’t need to, and can’t, work 12 hours if you only have 1.
And no, successful entrepreneurs don’t start by working 12 hours a day on their projects. If they’re anything like you and I, which they are, they have a current life they need to exchange with gradual effort.
If you have more time, or are already deep into building your own thing, tier out the rest of your work from highest to lowest leverage, or lowest to highest entropy.
My workday is as follows:
- Writing first thing because that’s the entire fuel of my business. Writing content, newsletters, landing pages, promotions, etc is the business model. Typing at a computer.
- Go on a walk and attempt to learn something new for the day.
- Do admin work for Kortex and start opening myself up to conversations and responding to people.
Unless I have a new project I’m building, that’s really it.
The new project will demand more time until it is systemized and I return back to a baseline ~4 hours of work.
The last tasks in your workday, when ordered by priority, are probably optional or easily automated or outsources, so consider doing that.
Thank you for reading.
We’ll talk in the next letter.
– Dan
