By Barnaby Lashbrooke

The Hard Work Myth

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 The Hard Work Myth

The Hard Work Myth copyright © 2019 Barnaby

Lashbrooke. ISBN 978-1-5272-5070-3

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by
any means, including photocopying, recording, or other
electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior
written permission of the publisher.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I talk a lot in this book about what I've achieved, but the
truth is none of it would have been possible without the
amazing team I work with at Time etc’s headquarters,
the incredible clients we support or the hundreds of
talented Virtual Assistants we work with. Thank you.

To Emily for your incredible work on this book, putting up

with all the edits and sticking with it until the very end.

To Penni for being such an inspiration to me.

Thanks to my Virtual Assistant, Lisa, for saving me from

my inbox in a world of ‘infobesity’.

For my amazing kids Maisy and Harry for being two

incredible reasons not to spend my life working.

For my partner Kirst for always believing in me and

encouraging me every step of the way. I couldn’t do it
without you.

To Lynne, David, Kirsty, Ben, Sam and Fran for

supporting me and helping shape who I am.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Barnaby Lashbrooke is an entrepreneur and investor. By

day, he is CEO of virtual assistant service Time Etc, a
job he loves, but to which he strictly devotes just
35-hours a week.

After suffering from crippling burnout for years, which

damaged his mental and physical health, affected his
personal relationships and threatened to derail his
business, Barnaby realized he needed to make some
dramatic changes in his life.

By studying the habits of some of the world’s most

successful people, and learning about the psychology
behind productivity, Barnaby worked out how to work
less and achieve more, which he reveals in The Hard
Work Myth.

His journey gave him a new respect for time and turned
his flailing startup business into a multi-million-dollar
enterprise operating in the U.K. and U.S.

Most importantly, it freed him up to spend more quality

time with his two favorite people, his kids Maisy and
Harry.

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CHAPTERS

Introduction
Chapter Six
Chapter One Failure By Freedom
Working Harder Is
Failing You Chapter Seven
Knowing What To Work
Chapter Two On
It Starts With
Self-Awareness Chapter Eight
Deconstructing
Chapter Three Delegation
Dealing With
Distractions Chapter Nine
Hiring Hurts
Chapter Four
Time For A Healthy Chapter Ten
Information Diet The Power Of The Tiny
Change
Chapter Five
Fear As A Force For Conclusion
Good

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INTRODUCTION

I’m in the bottom 19% of entrepreneurs and it’s one of

my greatest achievements.

Yes, you read that right. My 35-hour work week puts me

well and truly at the bottom of the entrepreneur league
tables, while almost half (49%) of entrepreneurs work
50+ hours a week1.

When people learn about the hours I work, they often

assume I’m running some sort of lifestyle business, the
kind that ticks-over in the background and makes me
just enough money to enjoy myself.

But they’d be wrong. Since I’ve been working a 35-hour

week my business has grown from less than $1million in
revenue to almost eight figures and is generating
multi-million-dollar profits.

1
According to a study of entrepreneurs’ working hours by The Alternative
Board

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Why do people make this assumption? It’s called The

Hard Work Myth: the widely held belief that the way you
achieve success and financial freedom is by working
harder... and harder.

Many of us believe in The Hard Work Myth, despite

proving to ourselves time and time again, throughout our
lives, that hard work alone very rarely ever equals huge
success.

I’m not the only one who’s figured this out. When I
studied some of the world’s most successful business
leaders, including Oprah Winfrey, Sir Richard Branson,
Jeff Bezos, Ariana Huffington, Bill Gates and Warren
Buffet, it became clear to me they don’t buy it either.
And, yet, the myth perpetuates.

The Hard Work Myth is the single biggest cause of

millions of the world’s brightest and most capable people
sacrificing more of their lives than they need to in the
pursuit of success.

The truth is you already have everything you need for

success. You are already infinitely capable of achieving
everything you could possibly wish for.

Once you’ve read The Hard Work Myth, my hope is that

you will give yourself permission to stop thrashing
yourself in an effort to achieve more, when this kind of
behavior is far more likely to be holding you back.

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But first, I’d like to take you back a few years, because I
didn’t always work 35-hours a week.

Why I wrote this book

This time a decade ago, it’s likely you would have found
me watching daytime television repeats in bed during
working hours. To me, that seemed preferable to going
into the office.

On paper, I was successful. My entrepreneurial exploits

began aged 17 making websites for friends’ bands and,
with the internet booming, this had quickly expanded
into selling domain names and hosting to the masses.
Before I knew it, I’d created a company with 24,000
customers from my bedroom on a computer I built
myself.

Six years later, I sold the business and did what many
24-year-olds might have done, bought a top floor
apartment and a Ferrari and set about plotting my next
big move.

Riding high on my success, it wasn’t long before I

started business number two, which I believed would be
as straightforward as the first.

The vision was to build a network of skilled, experienced

and carefully-vetted virtual assistants that time-poor
entrepreneurs could hire by the hour to perform

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administrative tasks, saving them hours of time and

freeing them up to achieve more.

I knew there was a market for this because I had been

desperate for this kind of support when I was building
my first business. For years, it had been just me, on my
own, wearing lots of different hats. Sales one minute,
technical support the next and admin when I could
squeeze it in. I had longed for someone to take on some
of the things I didn’t have time to do, or hated doing.

My early success had made me confident. As a young

millionaire I told people how fast I expected this new
company would grow as I set about building a website,
hiring staff and finding our first few customers, just as I
had done before.

But almost as soon as I’d started the business, things

began to get difficult. For reasons I couldn’t fathom, we
struggled to find customers and our workers kept
leaving. Month after month we hemorrhaged money.

Every day was like trying to run up a sand dune. I was

confronted with a hundred different problems that I didn’t
have answers to. All I could think of to do was keep on
running as the sand slipped beneath my feet. The
result? All my passion and enthusiasm drained away.

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In those early years, I never felt on top of things. I didn’t

matter how many hours I worked or how many things I
ticked off my to-do list every day, I couldn’t even keep
the wheels on, let alone find the time to develop into the
leader I knew I was capable of being.

And fear was crippling me. I was terrified I would never

get the business to profitability, that I would fail and have
to start over, that I could be treading water for years and
have nothing to show for it.

At the office, I physically and mentally shut the door.

Eventually, I became so unapproachable I figured I
should work from home. In the company I was trying to
lead and grow, I would make an appearance a couple of
days a week.

I had no trust in anyone and no one trusted me either,

which made employee retention even more of a
challenge.

My own output was low. Without deadlines I

procrastinated, which I hated. To compensate I’d work
longer hours, in an effort to salvage each day that went
by. I’d numb my sense of failure by drinking every night,
which made mornings a struggle.

Then, in 2011, my mother died after a four-year battle

with cancer. She lived for her children, long after we had
grown up and flown the nest. When she passed away, I

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felt isolated, as well as devastated. I lost the emotional

support she had given us so freely, and that I had long
used as a crutch. We had talked a lot about the
business, and she had often talked me down off the
edge.

In the months following her death, as I wrestled with the

grief and pain, I started to re-evaluate my life. Realizing
how short it can be, I started looking at what worked and
what didn’t.

And then, on a sunny Tuesday in May, when I was at my

lowest ebb, I had an epiphany while driving my car.

It probably saved my life.

I realized the way I had been trying to succeed was

flawed. My tactic was that if I worked all the hours
possible, everything would somehow slot into place. It
hadn’t worked.

Worse still, I realized that working harder had actually

put me further away from the success I so desperately
wanted.

That moment changed my life forever.

I started to view time as the most precious commodity of

all.

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After that epiphany, I would spend years researching

techniques on how to achieve more in less time,
conducting experiments on myself to find the
breakthroughs that would really work. I hacked my own
psychology and inverted the way I think about work and
success.

Instead of forcing myself to work fruitlessly on my ailing

business, I applied myself to becoming an expert in
achieving more while working less hard. For the first
time in years, things started looking up.

That self-transformation would also transform my

business, Time Etc, from an abject failure into a global
success story, which is now fast approaching total sales
of more than $35 million. The business has achieved its
purpose and changed the lives of thousands of
entrepreneurs and professionals by liberating them from
more than two million tasks, saving them half a million
hours to spend with their families or growing their
businesses.

Our company has won multiple awards, is ranked as a

top 1% business worldwide for employee engagement
by Gallup, has enjoyed one of the very highest
Glassdoor ratings possible and received hundreds of
five-star reviews from happy customers.

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Better still, my life working 100-hours a week is over. I

no longer live in a permanently burned-out state and my
business is growing. Most of my spare time is spent
having fun with my daughter Maisy and my son Harry.

I wrote this book because I see so many entrepreneurs

struggling to achieve success by working themselves to
the bone.

I’ve seen too many talented people fall for The Hard
Work Myth, only to end up feeling tired, empty and
drained, rather than fulfilled, successful and satisfied.

I care passionately about helping business owners to

avoid the hell I went through for several years.

My message to you is simple: the power to achieve

more is within you already and it has nothing to do with
working longer hours.

You can take control of your future by gaining a higher

level of awareness about why you are repeating
senseless habits.

If you’re suspicious that a person you’ve never heard of

is telling you it’s possible to achieve more and work less
hard, I understand, and I will endeavor to win you over
in the forthcoming chapters.

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But what you should be more suspicious of is our

capitalist system which promotes a whopper of a lie that
is damaging to our mental and physical health.

In pre-school they start teaching us that the harder we

work, the more successful we’ll be. In our teens we’re
told that the longer we sit in front of our books, the better
we’ll do in our exams. And the way our education
system works, that’s more or less true, so it’s no
surprise that we all end up believing it. But real life is
nothing like school.

What to expect from this book

What you won’t find in this book are complex theoretical

techniques devised by clever experts on time
management. You won’t find comparisons between
entrepreneurs and world-class athletes with suggestions
on how you can copy their approach to training, work
and diet to get ahead. You won’t find revelations from
real high performers about getting up at 4am and
partaking in cryotherapy before heading to the office
with a murky green juice.

Instead you’ll find suggested changes that you can start

making today to achieve more, without working harder,
designed specifically for normal people like us who are
juggling life with growing a business.

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I’m neither a guru nor a self-help expert. I’m just an

ordinary business owner, like you, sharing techniques
that have been refined, tested and proven over the last
20 years.

This might not be the book you think it is. There are no
productivity hacks or shortcuts. Instead, it will force you
to question yourself, change how you think and
approach tasks and hurdles. It will cause you to analyze
your attitude to time and how and why you waste it
every day. And it will help you gain a new level of
awareness that will help you get more out of every
minute you devote to work.

I may not work many hours each week, but I am

laser-focused, disciplined, passionate, hard-working and
extremely committed during the hours that I do work.

If this book does one thing, I hope it will help you realize
the damaging effects of thrashing yourself and help you
understand how much your own productivity is linked to
your happiness.

Who is this book for?

If you have found this book, I already know three things

about you:

1. You’re a hard-working entrepreneur, freelancer

or leader who calls the shots on your time.

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2. You know you want to achieve more but you

don’t know how other than to work even harder.
An unproductive day means you will sit at your
desk for another hour or use weekends to play
catch up. You write unachievable to-do lists and
feel guilty when you don’t cross everything off.
3. There is someone in your life to whom you are
not giving enough time. Is it a child, a partner, a
parent, or you?

You are reading this because you know how it feels

when those bursts of productivity take hold: it’s like you
can conquer the world, or just get home to enjoy the
simple pleasure of reading your children a bedtime story.
You want more days to feel like that.

You are reading this because you worry that in 10 years’

time you’ll be in exactly the same position as you are
now.

But you are not alone and, by contemplating what you

read in this book, you will realize the things that are
holding you back are the very same things that plague
us all.

I hope this book helps you achieve everything that

you’re capable of.

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CHAPTER ONE

WORKING HARDER IS FAILING YOU

“Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a

chance?”
– Edgar Bergen

I want to tell you a story about a guy called Jeff. Back in

1994, Jeff left the long-hours of a highly paid corporate
career on Wall Street to start his own business.

But Jeff doesn’t like to work too hard. He goes to bed

early, gets eight hours’ sleep and, after waking up, likes
to “putter” a while, enjoying his morning coffee, reading
the newspaper, cooking big breakfasts and hanging out
with his kids before they go to school.

After breakfast, he does the dishes before starting work

at 10am.

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Jeff realized a few years ago that he works best in the

mornings, so he likes to get any “high IQ” meetings
done and dusted before lunchtime. Jeff is well aware
that, due to decision fatigue, making good choices gets
harder throughout the day so, by 5pm, he’ll postpone
any decision making until 10am the next day.

Try to picture Jeff, and you might think of a relaxed

entrepreneur, with plenty of time for his friends and
family, perhaps running a lifestyle business or small
consultancy.

It’s unlikely you’ll have pictured Jeff Bezos2, the founder

and CEO of Amazon who, at the time of writing, has
built a $233 billion revenue business and a personal net
worth of $153.5 billion.

If Jeff Bezos can make billions and enjoy his life, why
are you sacrificing so much?

What are you sacrificing in the pursuit of

success?

I’m going to bet that, since you’ve been working for

yourself, you’ve sacrificed at least one of these:

● Evenings
● Vacations

2
Jeff Bezos’ daily routine, as reported by CNBC

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● Work-free weekends
● Sleeping for long enough to feel fully rested
● Keeping vaguely-normal working hours

I’m also going to bet that, when you do take a break

from work, you find yourself checking emails, reaching
for your phone or thinking about things you need to do
on your return.

The truth is that not knowing when to stop is an endemic

problem for high-achieving people. Working long hours
is a badge of honor, and it even earns you empathy and
camaraderie from your peers. Jokes about having no
work-life balance are parodied by the entrepreneurial
community:

“I’ll sleep when I die!”

“Weekend, what weekend?!”

Working long hours is widely accepted to be part of the

crazy, anti-social life of an entrepreneur who hopes that
putting in the hard yards now means retirement at 45
years old.

Few of us question this because, from our very first day

at school, we are heavily influenced to accept hard work
as a required component of success.

But the truth about working long hours without pause

– supported by science and economics – is that,

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actually, it takes you further away from success, not

closer to it.

THE SCOOP

The Hard Work Myth fuels the idea that we

can achieve more by working harder, but
study the world’s top business leaders and
you’ll see their success has nothing to do
longer hours, and everything to do with
working smart and respecting what is needed
to maximize peak productivity. Realize this,
and you’re closer to unlocking how to really
get ahead.

Proof that thrashing yourself doesn’t work

Japan is a nation that has coined a word for death by

overwork. Victims of ‘karoshi’ normally die by committing
suicide or suffer heart attacks and strokes.

So extreme, so punishing are some white-collar

workplaces that karoshi has been officially recognized
and documented by Japan’s Ministry of Labour since the
late 1980s.

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More than a fifth of Japanese workers clock up an

average of 49 hours or longer at work each week,
compared to 16.4% of workers in the US, 12.5% in
Britain and 10.1% in Germany3.

There’s also a Japanese word for napping at work,

‘inemuri’, which is perceived as a sign of diligence and
commitment to work.

And yet, Japan’s productivity statistics – based on Gross

Domestic Product per hour worked – are languishing at
the bottom of the G7.

Further evidence that output does not improve based on

increased hours put in, comes from the OECD (2015)
which lists productivity and hours worked in 35
countries. It reveals Mexico to be the least productive
while also having the world’s longest average working
week at 41.2 hours. That’s no coincidence, and neither
is the fact that Luxembourg, the most productive country
on that list, has an average working week of just 29
hours4.

Humans need rest. Unless you have a rare gene

mutation that means you can function beautifully on four
to six hours’ sleep per night – and only 1% of the human
race is thought to be blessed with it – then not getting
enough sleep can make you less productive by affecting

3
As reported by the Associated Press
4
See the OECD league table on Time.com

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your performance and even accelerate your journey on

the road to death.

A study, published in the Journal of Sleep Research,

and based on data collected from a cohort of almost
44,000 adults in a lifestyle and medical survey
conducted in Sweden in 1997, followed the fate of
participants for up to 13 years after. It found that under
65s who got five hours of sleep or less on seven days
per week had a 65% higher mortality rate than those
getting six or seven hours of sleep5.

Are no-sleep entrepreneurs really prepared to take

premature death as an acceptable loss?

The hidden cost of working harder

When you have a powerful drive to achieve more,

pushing yourself harder seems the obvious solution,
especially to those of us who have grown up believing
The Hard Work Myth.

When faced with a stack of work we simply put in those

extra hours to clear the backlog, extending our time at
the office or squeezing it into the weekend. We figure it
won’t always be like this.

Before we know it, that increased workload is no longer

the exception, but the new normal.
5
Study published 22 May 2018 on Wiley.com

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You can’t ‘see’ or ‘count’ the cost. It’s insidious, slowly

creeping up on you – uninvited and totally undetectable
– until it’s too late.

You don’t have to be a scientist to know that the more

you work, the less energy you will have.

Every time you skip a break, power on late in to the

evening, or work weekends, you deplete those finite
energy levels. The good news is that your energy is a
renewable resource, but workaholics don’t give
themselves time to fully charge before going for it again.

Do this regularly for long enough, and you’re trapped in

a vicious circle. All the time, your energy levels get lower
and lower, because they have no chance to recover.

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Working harder and harder eats away, with an

ever-insatiable appetite, at your bottom line by slowly
eroding what you can achieve in a day. Eventually, you
end up exhausted, mentally, physically and emotionally.

This is known as the law of diminishing returns: there

comes a point at which the benefits gained are less than
the amount of energy invested. That point is slightly
different for everyone.

One study of British civil servants, which looked at the

association between long working hours and cognitive
function in middle age, found those who worked 55
hours per week scored lower on cognitive tests
spanning memory, reasoning and vocabulary compared
to those who worked up to a maximum of 40 hours a
week6. And an Australian study suggests mental health
may begin to decline once the 39 hours per week
threshold is breached7.

You might be thinking: “I enjoy hard work! I can style it

out. I’ll grab a coffee if I’m tired.” But let’s get to the real
cost of thrashing yourself.

The energy you’re losing by working harder is the very

same energy you need to be using on your strategy,
vision and ideas, in order to achieve more.
6
Long Working Hours and Cognitive Function: The Whitehall II Study (March
2009)
7
Hour-glass ceilings: Work-hour thresholds, gendered health inequities
(March 2017)

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In turn, your ability to ‘see’ where your business is

heading, to come up with the ideas, to solve problems
and to think about the future reduces and, eventually,
disappears.

Have you ever felt less able to cope when problems and
challenges arise? Have you ever felt deflated because
the reality of running your business seems to have got in
the way of your original idea? Do you often feel tired and
unusually emotional? Chances are, your work and
energy are out of balance.

Imagine sprinting while trying to read a map. Doing both

is almost impossible because you can’t hold the map
still enough to read it. The sensible solution is to stop for
a moment, catch your breath, look at the map and work
out where to go next. But many of us are nevertheless

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 The Hard Work Myth

attempting the impossible - to keep running at pace and

hope we’ve picked the right direction.

We all heed the notion of ‘quality over quantity’ and yet

many of us still believe the myth that hard work alone
can help us succeed.

In an interview with the president of the Economic Club

Washington DC David Rubenstein, Amazon founder Jeff
Bezos said: “If I make, like, three good decisions a day,
that’s enough. And they should be as high quality as I
can make them. Warren Buffett says he’s good if he
makes three good decisions a year.”

Here’s the exciting thing. Once you realize that by

working harder you are directly reducing the energy you
need to achieve more, you can start to make some
incredibly powerful changes.

When I was working 100 hours a week my business was

flatlining. It barely grew for about four years. I was
pushing and pushing, working longer and longer hours
and nothing seemed to work.

And what happened when I made my change and

started working 35-hour weeks? My business started to
grow. In the first year after that change, our revenue
grew by 275%, we launched in a second continent and
we welcomed thousands of new customers.

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Over-working is always your choice

When you call the shots in your business, you also call
the shots on your time, meaning fatigue and burnout
caused by failure to rest, break and refresh are
self-inflicted.

Motivated by success or money, or fuelled by the

commitment to an idea, entrepreneurs can become
obsessive. Many of us allow work to consume our
minds, our energy and our time.

You might recognize yourself as a micro-manager, also

known as a control freak. You are someone who cannot
trust and cannot delegate so you must take on
everything yourself, or check your team’s work
rigorously.

Or perhaps you are an overachiever running from

failure. You push yourself harder to postpone the reality
that you might fail, and paper over the cracks that
suggest you are already failing, instead of using the
opportunity to build something that really works.

If you don’t recognize yourself in any of these groups,

you could be a victim of FOMO (fear of missing out).

You believe that if you step away from the business for a
vacation you’ll miss the next big new business win. You

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 The Hard Work Myth

think the new client or new project pipeline will stagnate

if you’re not there to drive it.

Many people who work 100-hour weeks don’t realize

that it is their choice. It feels like something you have to
do. “I would have finished on time but then that email
came in” or “I don’t like to work at the weekends but I
had to get that pitch done before Monday”.

How to reduce the hours you work

Ask yourself this simple question: how many hours per

week would you like to work? For me, 35 hours seemed
like a realistic and sensible goal that would give me the
time I wanted with my family.

As soon as I’d set the number of hours I wanted to work,

I was forced to make some changes. I started
scheduling my time to avoid working late into the night. I
stopped checking my email an hour before leaving the
office to avoid getting dragged into last-minute issues.
And I began planning ahead so that I’d get things ready
for next week well ahead of time.

It wasn’t hard to implement a few little rules, but the

impact was immeasurable.

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 The Hard Work Myth

1. Swap working harder for working on the right

stuff

When growing a business or when faced with complex

problems, we all work harder by default, because it’s
easier to do that than it is to be selective about what
we’re working on.

Being picky about the tasks you’re working on takes an

enormous amount of thinking time, strategy and
discipline so many of us simply avoid it, preferring to
soldier on with our to-do lists instead. It’s easier to jump
straight in and start doing stuff, rather than taking the
time to pause and think.

But if you reduce the number of hours you work every

day, you’re forced to be much more selective over what
you work on. You very quickly have to work out what
things push your business forward, and commit to only
these tasks.

I’ve covered how to decide what to work on and how to

delegate elsewhere in this book, but here is a flavor of
what this meant for me:

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What sort of things did I delegate?

● Ordering snacks for the office (I kid you not…)

● Filing my emails into folders
● Screening CVs from people who wanted to work
for us

What sort of tasks did I keep for myself?

● One-on-one conversations with people on my

team
● Thinking about the direction I wanted the
business to go in
● Creative control of our website

2. Consider taking a regular ‘workcation’

It’s our perception that working harder and harder is the

way to make money, be successful and get ahead. As
we’ve seen, Japan and Mexico are proof that, in fact, it’s
doing quite the opposite.

Internal research by EY has found that breaks have a

direct and transformative effect on performance. In the
U.S. and Canada, the company found that for each 10
vacation hours a person took, performance reviews
were, on average 8 per cent higher.8

8
As reported on CNBC

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 The Hard Work Myth

Even so, the average U.S. employee only took 16.8

days of their average allowance of 22.6 days in 2016,
according to the Project: Time Off report9. The same
report also revealed that self-proclaimed ‘work martyrs’
are less likely to have had a raise or bonus in the past
three years and no more likely to have received a
promotion in the past year than those employees who
do not subscribe to the work martyrdom.

While these surveys were based on employees rather

than entrepreneurs, the findings are still relevant.
Clearly, those who sacrifice vacation to ‘get ahead’ are
failing, based on two metrics. The hours put in clearly
have no positive impact on success.

I’ve spoken to hundreds of high achieving entrepreneurs

who all have the same complaint. They say that it’s
impossible to take a vacation, despite their friends and
family urging them to.

I had the same problem. Even with my shorter weeks, I

found taking vacations tough. Often the backlog of work,
issues and communication when I got back would
dominate for at least a couple of weeks. It simply didn’t
feel worth it.

So I invented the ‘workcation’: every three months, I

step away from my business for three or four days to

9
Project: Time Off report: ustravel.org/research/state-american-vacation-2018

37
 The Hard Work Myth

take stock, celebrate wins, scrutinize losses and plan

our move for the next quarter.

This is not a vacation in the traditional sense. It’s a

working break that gives me the headspace to focus on
my business, not in my business, but with none of the
fall-out from going cold turkey and not touching my
business, email or phone for a week.

It’s a period of reflection and activity, and it always offers

perspective. When you see your future in three-month
blocks, rather than as an endless stretch of time to
retirement, everything suddenly seems easier, and
vastly more enjoyable.

Knowing when to walk away from your business takes

time to learn. This is not only an administrative change,
but it’s also a mindset change. It’s about seeing breaks
as something you have to take for the good of your
personal health and the good of your business.

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 The Hard Work Myth

CHAPTER TWO

IT STARTS WITH SELF-AWARENESS

“I think self-awareness is probably the most

important thing towards being a champion.”
– Billie Jean King

One sunny afternoon, I was working through a problem

at Time Etc HQ, which is on the 14th-floor of a building
overlooking a leafy part of Birmingham, Britain’s second
largest city. I wanted to figure out how to encourage our
newest clients to delegate their very first task to a virtual
assistant.

Because the prospect of handing over work can feel

daunting, we found new clients were putting off getting
started. We also knew that if we could just get them over
that first hurdle, they’d be so impressed, they’d send
over more work. But how to convince them?

39
 The Hard Work Myth

As I mulled this over at my desk, I had a ‘hey presto’

moment. By adding a simple five-minute countdown
timer to the page I could create a sense of urgency.

I turned to our chief operating officer, Kirsten Glaze, who

sits next to me, and said: “Can I talk to you for a
second?”. As I started to open my mouth to tell her
about my idea, she interrupted me.

“Stop”, she said, “You’ve just solved something haven’t

you?”. Surprised, I replied: “Well yes, but how on earth
did you know that?”

“Because in all the years we’ve worked together, you’ve

almost always come to me with your best ideas at
exactly the same time, just after 4pm. I can almost set
my watch by it!”

I was intrigued, was I really that predictable?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized what

Kirsten had noticed was true. Curious, I started to pay
closer attention to my productivity highs and lows.

The afternoons that produced the most powerful ideas

were always preceded by me having cleared my routine
tasks in the morning and either dealt with any
distractions that had come up early or ignored them
altogether. I’d eaten a good, healthy lunch and had a
couple of coffees.

40
 The Hard Work Myth

In contrast, the low-output days had seen me skip lunch

or bolt down something bad, procrastinate on my routine
tasks in the morning and allow distractions – like
meetings and phone calls – into my afternoon.

It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that I could

have more productive, satisfying and idea-filled work
days by simply controlling distractions, avoiding
procrastination in the mornings, eating a healthy lunch
every day and keeping the afternoons clear of meetings.

And that’s exactly what I started doing.

Why am I telling you this story? Time after time, I’ve

found that awareness, just like the awareness that
Kirsten triggered in me, is the most fundamental and
powerful tool in seeing off The Hard Work Myth and
achieving more, without working harder.

Swap your autopilot for awareness and, like me, you’ll

be able to optimize your days to get more done and feel
at your most productive.

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 The Hard Work Myth

THE SCOOP

Greater self-awareness leads to more work

completed in less time. Why? Because your
working week can be structured around your
personal productivity highs and lows. To beat
The Hard Work Myth, pay closer attention to
the times of day you work best and worst, and
the variable factors that can boost or damage
your output.

Many of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs are

highly self-aware. Just look at Jeff Bezos who – as we
saw in the previous chapter – plans his work day around
his cognitive abilities, which he knows are impaired by
the end of the day due to decision fatigue. He said: “By
5pm I'm like 'I can't think about this today, let's try that
again tomorrow at 10am’.”

By being incredibly self-aware, and openly embracing

his weaknesses, Bezos has smashed The Hard Work
Myth. He knows the value he can add to Amazon is in
the two or three high-quality decisions he can make
each day, before his energy fades. These decisions
have helped to make hundreds of billions of dollars for
Amazon over the past 25 years.

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 The Hard Work Myth

From the 1980s, Microsoft founder Bill Gates ritually cut

himself off from his business, family, friends and
colleagues twice a year to take a ‘Think Week’. Holed up
in a secluded cabin in a forest, Gates mainly used the
time to read through hundreds of innovation ideas from
employees. He knew this was the best way to commit to
the Herculean effort of reading, absorbing and
responding to all those papers, by removing all the
many distractions – including technology – that
threatened his productivity and clamored for his
attention every day.

Being self-aware – of your vulnerability to distractions,

or the fact you’re an utterly useless human being before
10am and a strong espresso – is arguably just as
important as being aware of your strengths, but it’s
something that many of us don’t like to share with our
employees.

By contrast, many of the world’s most successful

entrepreneurs are really open about their weaknesses.

Billionaire Sir Richard Branson, who has built hundreds

of businesses around the world, recently declared that
he hadn’t understood the difference between net and
gross profit until he was 50-years-old and someone

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 The Hard Work Myth

explained the concept to him using a fishing net and

some pieces of paper10.

Branson’s self-awareness led him to delegate all

financial responsibilities within his empire from the very
earliest days, but imagine if he hadn’t been so
self-aware. If he’d tried to do the numbers in his small
Virgin company, would it have grown into the
billion-dollar group that it is today with airlines, railways,
real estate and hundreds of other investments?

A 2010 study by Green Peak Partners and Cornell's

School of Industrial and Labor Relations found a high
self-awareness score to be the strongest predictor of
overall success11. The report added: “This is not
altogether surprising as executives who are aware of
their weaknesses are often better able to hire
subordinates who perform well in categories in which
the leader lacks acumen. These leaders are also more
able to entertain the idea that someone on their team
may have an idea that is even better than their own."

To summarize, knowing yourself well lets you optimize

how to work, when to work and what to work on.

10
Read this at
www.virgin.com/richard-branson/how-i-learned-difference-between-net-and-gr
oss
11
As reported on Forbes

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 The Hard Work Myth

How to develop better self-awareness

The discoveries I’ve made about myself have not only

helped me to achieve more without working harder,
they’ve also contributed more to my personal life than
anything else that I’ve learned, invested in or done in
that time.

My relationships have improved, I am less irritable, I feel

less stressed and, most of the time, I am able to truly
switch off from my work when I get home. I’ve learned to
control my compulsions and even managed to conquer
some seriously ingrained habits, built over many years.

As my awareness has increased, so has the revenue

and profit in my business. Why? Because I’m able to
focus like never before. My self-awareness keeps me
laser-focused on the things that directly contribute to our
goals as a business. I’m able to detect when we’re
drifting off focus as a team, and put us back on track.

If you want to achieve more without working harder, and

beat The Hard Work Myth, then self-awareness is half
the battle. You’ll be able to make sure that you’re at your
desk during the hours when you produce your best
work, and in meetings when you feel most able to
engage with others. You’ll be able to time your breaks
when your productivity habitually plummets.

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 The Hard Work Myth

Building your self-awareness is a prerequisite for getting

the maximum impact from the rest of this book.

Everything that follows will become easier and more

powerful when combined with a healthy level of
self-awareness.

I can’t give you self-awareness, only you can do that.

The great thing is that you can start improving it today.
This isn’t about meditating or going on retreats to find
yourself, this is about noticing and observing small
things that repeat.

You might already know some of the following

statements to be true about yourself:

● I like to leave my afternoons free to focus on one

thing
● I cannot multitask
● I procrastinate if a task is too big or requires a lot
of brainpower
● Towards the end of the week, I find it easier to
get into a flow
● I can do more in one 1.5-hour slot late in the
afternoon than the whole morning
● If I skip lunch, I’ll have crashed by 3pm
● If I do some exercise before work, I concentrate
better all morning
● If I drink even one glass of wine in the evening,
I’ll feel groggy until 11am the next day

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 The Hard Work Myth

Some of these are really basic nuggets of

self-awareness. Some you’ll already know about. But
there are many more that you won’t have unearthed yet.

Some, you will have been oblivious to for years.

I have used these little bits of self-awareness to create

some simple rules I work by:

● I never try to work on two things at once because

I cannot multitask
● I break big tasks down into smaller ones to avoid
procrastinating
● I book at least one day off once a month that’s
just for me
● I plan an easy Monday as I’m always tired from
the weekend
● I plan all my creative and writing work for Fridays
when I find I can focus better

Making these simple changes has had big results.

Having worked long hours for years with hardly anything

to show for it, I can almost guarantee that every day is
now productive and enjoyable so I can go home feeling
satisfied and happy.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself today to

begin growing your self-awareness. Jot down the
answers to create your own set of rules:

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 The Hard Work Myth

● What environment do you work best in?

● When do you work best?
● At what time of day do you have your best
ideas?
● How much sleep do you need?
● Do you prefer lists or schedules?
● Do you work better with the pressure of
deadlines or without?
● What excites you about work?
● What angers you about work?
● When do you tend to feel happiest or saddest?
● What has happened on the ‘good’ days?
● What are you always distracted by?

The answers to these questions will help you map out

your perfect working week and working environment.

Self-awareness is a truly powerful thing. It’s your fuel for

optimizing what you’re able to get done in a day, and for
creating a routine that suits your energy highs and lows.

And it is fundamental to shattering The Hard Work Myth.

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 The Hard Work Myth

CHAPTER THREE

DEALING WITH DISTRACTIONS

“There are always distractions, if you allow them.”

– Tony La Russa

I love taking my kids to the circus. Even for a man in his

mid-thirties, there is still magic to be found inside that
big top tent. But when I was a child, it was a very
different experience: live animals were part of the show.

One act – the lion tamer – always fascinated me. While

he always carried a whip and a chair into the ring, the
whip was never used. How could a vulnerable human
control such a huge beast that could maul and kill him at
will?

It wasn’t until years later that I discovered the answer. In

his amusing book, How Does Aspirin Find A Headache?
author David Feldman explains that, rather than being
scared of the whip, the lion is, in fact, distracted by the

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 The Hard Work Myth

chair. The lion tries to focus on all four legs at once, and,
as a result, is frozen to the spot.

I’d like to put it to you that you are that frozen lion, only,
instead of a chair, you’re faced with the barrage of daily
distractions.

THE SCOOP

Distractions are all around us, all the time. If

you want to beat The Hard Work Myth and
achieve more without working harder then
you must build a defense mechanism against
them. This starts with learning to identify the
difference between a distraction and a
legitimate task for your to-do list.

Distractions threaten our success

How often do you begin the day with great intentions,

only to finish it feeling like you never really started what
you set out to do? A feeling that you’ve been busy all
day, but somehow lacking the sense of fulfillment you’d
hoped for?

50
 The Hard Work Myth

Distractions are the culprit: that sales call from an

insurance company, that email from your accountant,
the news headlines, social media feeds, the customer
who needs urgent attention, the car service you urgently
need to schedule.

Distractions – some created by work, others a product of

life – sneak in, legitimized by us as things we absolutely
have to do at this very moment. We allow them to take
number one priority without question.

Humans enjoy distractions, which explains why we’re

always trying to find them. Why? They spare us from the
really difficult tasks we need to devote time to and
exhaust brain power on. They rescue us from having to
face the reality of figuring out how to solve complex
problems.

And some distractions – like planning that dream

vacation to wine country – can even be downright
enjoyable.

We feel good about being able to complete a simple

task like answering an email. Sure, it’s distracting us
from the bigger task at hand, but at least you’ve done
something. Right? WRONG!

That little endorphin hit – that lovely buzz we get from

finishing a task – is addictive. If you replace your big
goal for the day with smaller distractions, even if each

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 The Hard Work Myth

one only takes 10 minutes to finish, it pushes you further

away from that goal and from achieving more.

A study by researchers at the University of California,

Irvine, found the typical office worker is interrupted, or
switches tasks, every three minutes and five seconds.
And, after an interruption, it can take just over 23
minutes to refocus and get back to the original task at
hand12. Suddenly, it becomes clear how easy it is to lose
a whole working day to dealing with distractions.

Reacting to distractions means that you’re giving your

mind, at once, to anyone and anything. Every time
you’re distracted, you’re diverting time, energy and
focus away from work that makes you achieve more and
replacing it with work that simply fills a time void. It’s a
really bad value exchange.

Distractions steal your time and elongate your working

day. But eliminate them, and you will have done The
Hard Work Myth some serious damage.

Technology: the new distraction threat

Distractions aren’t a new problem. According to Jamie

Kreiner, associate professor of history at the University
of Georgia, medieval monks had a big problem with
distraction: they complained about information overload,
being distracted by staring out of the window, and
12
Results of the study are at www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/chi08-mark.pdf

52
 The Hard Work Myth

finding themselves thinking about food or sex when they

were supposed to be thinking about God13.

Ancient Buddhists coined the term Vikṣepa, which can

be translated as ‘distraction’ or ‘mental wandering’.
Along with laziness and inattentiveness, it was believed
to be one of the 20 destabilizing factors of the mind.

Today, when it comes to eliminating distractions, we

have a distinct disadvantage over the medieval monks
and ancient Buddhists: technology.

We all live in a permanent state of distraction. With

smartphones at our fingertips, we no longer have any
reason to be bored. The result is that we’ve forgotten
how to focus.

How often does your hand reach for your phone without
the conscious mind telling it to? How much time passes
as you scroll through feeds on Instagram, Facebook,
and Twitter, or watching videos on YouTube?

Americans spend more than four hours a day on their

phones14. The average person checks their cell 47 times
per day; 89% do so within an hour of waking up and
81% within an hour of going to sleep15.

13
As summarised at
aeon.co/ideas/how-to-reduce-digital-distractions-advice-from-medieval-monks
14
As referenced on FT.com
15
According to Deloitte’s 2018 global mobile consumer survey: US edition

53
 The Hard Work Myth

The feeling of boredom now triggers an habitual action:

we reach for our smartphones to connect with others, or
to find a podcast, game, e-book or article that passes
the time.

We’ve all formed now-ingrained habits, prompted by

clever notifications designed to elicit responses, like that
little dopamine hit from receiving likes and messages
that keeps you craving more. In short, our smartphone
apps have been engineered by software designers to be
addictive and distracting.

Ex-Facebook President Sean Parker made a

then-startling announcement while speaking at an event
in 2017 when he said the social media site was built to
exploit "a vulnerability in human psychology" using a
“social-validation feedback loop”16.

Parker admitted that Facebook “probably interferes with

your productivity in weird ways” and said the team who
launched the social media platform was trying to figure
out from the start how to “consume as much of your time
and conscious attention as possible".

This idea was given further fuel by ex-Googler Tristan

Harris in his TED Talk: How a handful of tech companies
control billions of minds every day17. In it, he talks about
how global dotcoms are in a “race for our attention” and

16
Watch the interview in full on the Axios website
17
It’s 17 minutes long and well worth a watch on Ted.com

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 The Hard Work Myth

competing over who can “go lower” to get it. He believes

humans must acknowledge they are “persuadable” if we
are to move forward with technology in a healthy and
positive way.

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. You bought

your smartphone to make your working and personal life
easier to manage on the go. If it makes you unhappy,
keeps you awake at night, distracts you, or helps you to
procrastinate, then it’s not doing its job.

Thrive Global and HuffPost founder Ariana Huffington

wrote: “Technology is granting us unprecedented power
and opportunities to do amazing things  -  but it’s also
accelerated the pace of our lives beyond our capacity to
keep up. We all feel it  -  we’re being controlled by
something we should be controlling... This  –  our
relationship with technology  –  is what’s going to be the
protagonist of the next ten years of this story.”18

How to beat distractions

Some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs

have created techniques for dealing with emails which,
though unavoidable, are also widely regarded as one of
the biggest distractions to work productivity.

18
For more on Huffington’s struggle with burnout, visit https://bit.ly/2OQlD6W

55
 The Hard Work Myth

Like many business owners, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner

relies heavily on email, and describes his inbox as “the
central hub of [his] workflow.” But, he has learned to
send fewer emails so that he receives fewer emails19.
His realization came after two people he worked closely
with, who were “highly effective communicators”, left the
company and his inbox traffic reduced by 20-30%.

Similarly, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, after finding that it

was virtually impossible to reach “inbox zero” started an
email management technique he dubbed ‘Yesterbox’20.
In short, he deals with yesterday’s emails today. This
way, he knows exactly how many emails he has to deal
with, and there’s a satisfying sense of completion once
the job is done.

A simple five-step process for dealing with

distractions

It’s time to realize that dealing with constant distractions

– however fast and efficiently you can rattle through
them – is false productivity.

Distractions are masterful at preventing you from

achieving growth. They are ultimately doing a brilliant
job at keeping your business small. But you have the

19
Published on LinkedIn in a piece titled 7 Ways to Manage Email So It
Doesn’t Manage You
20
There is even a dedicated Yesterbox website

56
 The Hard Work Myth

power to stop them. Here is the five-step process I use

for identifying and handling distractions.

By adopting this system, you can dramatically reduce

the frequency, volume and impact of distractions on your
productivity and, as a result, be intensely focused during
the very limited hours you plan to work.

1. Identify them

First, realize and accept how distracted we all are. If we

can identify and be conscious of distractions, we can
start building a defense against them.

This is easier said than done. It’s easy to realize after

dealing with something that it was a distraction, but
much more difficult in the moment.

Train yourself to pause after you’ve received an email,

or a colleague stops to speak to you. Simply pausing,
momentarily, to ask the question: “Is this a distraction?”
can be a very powerful change.

2. Make a list

Compiling a list of your top distractions will help you

build awareness so you can begin to shut them down as
they arise.

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 The Hard Work Myth

The key here is to identify the enemy because, once we

know what we’re likely to be distracted by, it’s so much
easier to prevent it from taking our time.

I bet my list of distractions looks a lot like yours:

● My phone
● Responding to emails
● Meetings
● Requests for help from my team
● Social media feeds and notifications

If you’re struggling to come up with a list of distractions,

you can flip this around and do it another way by
compiling a daily shortlist of the goals you need to
achieve by close of business. Anything not on that list is
a distraction to be avoided.

3. Challenge every distraction

When a distraction on your list next arises, ask yourself

this question: “Will doing this task now directly help me
achieve my goals?” If the answer is no, then don’t take
any action. If the answer is yes, then ask yourself:
“Exactly how will this help me reach my goals?”

A word of warning here. The number one issue with

distractions is that we legitimize them. We say: “I need
to get back to this client otherwise they’ll take their
business elsewhere and if they do that my revenue will

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 The Hard Work Myth

drop which means I won’t reach my revenue target.”

This might feel very plausible, but it’s your mind
maneuvering to justify the distraction. Will the client
really go elsewhere if they don’t get a reply instantly?
What’s the likelihood of them actually leaving?

A leap of faith may be required here. When you first stop

immediately acting on distractions, especially ones that
seem of critical importance, it can feel like a step
backward. Many of us pride ourselves on our rapid
responses or attentive service.

But very rarely does not reacting immediately cause the

other person to question our service to them. In fact,
over time, people get used to your typical response
time.

If you’re really concerned, add a note to your email

signature, such as: “So I can work effectively, I usually
only deal with my inbox between 4pm and 5pm, so
please forgive any short delays in my response time.”

We also need to look at the much bigger picture here.

As you grow and develop as an entrepreneur, freelancer
or leader, you need to find new ways of working that
aren’t just reactive and distraction led. By learning how
to manage distractions and prevent them from getting in
the way, you’re proactively giving yourself the space to
grow your leadership, talent and service to others, which
benefits everyone.

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 The Hard Work Myth

4. If they can’t disappear, store them up for later

I estimate that 70% of the distractions that interrupt my

day can be safely left without me needing to take any
action. These distractions simply disappear in time.

For me, these tend to be cold sales approaches by

email, LinkedIn requests from people I don’t know,
voicemails from service providers who want to check in
with me or upsell to me and so on.

The other 30% of distractions won’t just disappear,

however, and need to be dealt with. Your brain may trick
you into thinking these distractions are urgent, so how
can we stop them stealing your time and focus?

The answer is to write them down and then schedule a

strictly limited time slot in your day to perform a
‘Distraction Demolition’. This is an intensive period in
which you deal with everything that has made the
distraction list in one fell swoop.

I schedule my Distraction Demolition for an hour every

other morning. In that hour I’ll quickly blitz my list, firing
off emails in response, taking actions and resolving
things. When the hour is up, I move on to my day's
work, leaving anything I didn’t get to for next time.

By compressing your distractions into a limited time

period you win back control of your time and focus.

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 The Hard Work Myth

5. Delegate repeating distractions

Chances are, once you start looking in detail at your

distractions you’ll notice that some occur time and
again, daily, weekly or monthly.

If these distractions can’t be prevented, you should

delegate them to someone who can handle them on
your behalf, such as an assistant or member of your
team, or look to automate them.

Business expenses, booking travel tickets, and setting

up meetings are all things that can be delegated, leaving
you distraction-free.

If you’re not in the habit, passing over tasks can take

some getting used to, but if you start with distractions
you’re guaranteed to feel an instant benefit.

And delegating handling distractions that recur is a

double win: not only will you be free from something that
repeatedly steals your focus but, more than likely, you’ll
only have to delegate it once, saving you potentially
hundreds of hours over the next few years with a small
investment of your time.

We’ll take a closer look at this in the chapter

Deconstructing Delegation.

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The Hard Work Myth

62
 The Hard Work Myth

CHAPTER FOUR

TIME FOR A HEALTHY

INFORMATION DIET

“Getting information off the internet is like taking a

drink from a fire hydrant.”
– Mitch Kapor

On a frosty morning in January 2015 I was working from

my home office. My house was freezing, so I made
myself a large cup of coffee, sunk into my big leather
armchair and started browsing the MailOnline.

Reading this opinionated U.K. tabloid was, at the time, a

habit of mine, that continued throughout the day.

As I scrolled down the homepage on that particular day,

I noticed a headline about a Jordanian pilot who’d been
captured and tortured by terrorists. Without really

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 The Hard Work Myth

thinking about it, I clicked the link. To this day, I wish I

hadn’t.

What I saw on that page was an auto-playing video

showing the very public and barbaric murder of Muath
Safi Yousef al-Kasasbeh, who was burned to death.

As soon as I realized what I was watching, I felt sick. I

was in shock, faced with the horror and sadness of
seeing a fellow human murdered in front of my eyes as
he frantically tried to escape.

That experience had a profound effect on me.

Something changed. Over the coming weeks,
concerned by how simply reading the news could cause
such intense fear and anxiety, I started to unpick the
content machine and became far more protective over
what I would consume. As I did so, I started to notice a
positive impact on my life and my work.

Content, content, everywhere

News, social media platforms and websites feed us

articles, videos, podcasts, opinions, ideas, comments,
photos and data of varying quality, every minute of every
day.

Much of what we consume is in a state of partial sleep,

unconsciously picking up our smartphones without being
fully aware of what we’re doing. If we were more aware,

64
 The Hard Work Myth

we might notice that much of the content we consume is

distracting, boring, plagiarized and possibly even fake.

News has never stopped, and now we need never stop

reading it. This feeds The Hard Work Myth, because the
distractions that have the power to change our moods
and emotions are the most threatening of all. If you’re
thrown off course by a harrowing story, it’s very difficult
to cast it out of your mind and refocus. The result is that
we end up working harder to compensate for the time
lost.

Three major problems with today’s online

content

1. Headlines are deliberately alluring, but the

content is often poor

Headlines are written to hook you. So-called ‘clickbait’ is

used by reliable media outlets, as well as more
unscrupulous media companies, to convert you from a
feed browser to a page reader, because if you don’t
click, the publishers don’t make any money.

Now, more than ever, the news we consume provides

little or no value. Ever tapped on a headline that warns
of extreme weather events heading in your direction,
only to find the article says nothing of the sort?

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 The Hard Work Myth

There’s a reason for this. Weather stories are among the

biggest drivers of traffic to news websites. These sites
aren’t producing content because it’s in the public
interest, they’re producing content that gets people in
front of ads.

Google a “how-to” on almost any subject and you’ll

discover the first few pages of search results are packed
with generic and low-value articles that don’t really give
you the answer you’re looking for.

Why don’t these articles help? Many are not written by

experts but by search engine optimization (SEO)
experts working for brands and companies who use a
series of cleverly constructed keywords and phrases to
make sure you land on their content first.

These articles are designed for one thing: to get your

click.

How many times have you clicked on a headline in your

Facebook feed and been disappointed by what
appears? How often have you felt misled by the promise
of the headline? How many times have you idly browsed
your ‘news’ feed on LinkedIn and thought, well that’s 15
minutes of my life I’ll never get back?

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2. We are hooked on sites that deliver garbage

The apps and social platforms we use every day have

been engineered by developers to get us hooked. The
aforementioned MailOnline – one of the biggest news
sites in the world with more than 180 million monthly
unique browsers at the time of writing – has a column of
thumbnail pictures down the right-hand side of its
homepage that has been dubbed ‘the sidebar of shame’.

It is notoriously difficult to stop clicking on despite

offering lowbrow, gossip-fuelled articles.

Striking a healthier balance with technology has little to

do with willpower. We’re fighting multi-billion-dollar
technology companies who are manipulating the human
brain for their bottom lines.

Worth adding to your reading list is behavioral

psychologist Nir Eyal’s book Hooked: How to Build
Habit-Forming Products. In it, he explains how we have
become attached to social media and the cunning ways
tech giants get us addicted to their products.

In short, he explains how user behavior is engineered by

guiding us through a series of the same ‘hooks’ time and
again. This makes us form habits, at which point
external triggers like push notifications are no longer
needed because they have been replaced by internal
triggers. Essentially, we become hardwired to associate

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social media content and reactions with serving our own

emotional needs and we pick up our phones to get that
fix.

Ever noticed that you spend more time on social media

when you find yourself bored, procrastinating or when
you’re feeling stressed? This suggests you have learned
to associate content on your social media feed with
preferable emotions. You are hooked.

This, explains Eyal, allows companies to bring users

back repeatedly, saving money on costly marketing and
advertising.

4. Most ‘real’ news is really sad

There’s a good reason news stations finish a broadcast

with stories about skateboarding cats or pug fashion
shows. And there’s a reason you occasionally find
yourself watching home video edits of babies laughing
hysterically, or sloths being massaged. It’s because
news today is so rarely positive.

We, as a society, are desperate for escapism from the

reports on crime, political upheaval, injustice and chaos,
the environmental crisis, frequently delivered with a
dose of drama and hyperbole by subjective news
anchors. It’s enough to turn even the most optimistic
person into a quivering heap.

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A survey by the American Psychological Association

found that people feel conflicted between their desire to
stay informed and their view of the media as a source of
stress21. It found that while 95% of adults follow the
news regularly, 56% say doing so causes them stress,
and 72% believe the media blows things out of
proportion. But 9% check the news at least every hour
and 20% look at social media constantly.

THE SCOOP

The content we see every day has great

power over us. It can affect our mood, throw
our focus, and dominate our thoughts as we
ruminate over what we’ve just read, or share
articles with friends in an effort to make
sense of them. Given its irrelevance over
what we do at work – and the fact that it's
simply not conducive to productivity – this
kind of distraction should be far more
unwelcome. Adjusting how we consume
content is, therefore, key to busting The Hard
Work Myth.

21
See the APA survey here: https://bit.ly/2MeBDxT

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High achievers read differently

I’m not saying don’t read. Most successful people read

heavily. But being able to do that requires sacrificing the
unnecessary, by which I mean articles written for content
marketing purposes, the never-ending stream of public
opinion on social media, and up-to-the-minute rolling
news that has little bearing over how you make a living.

Successful people don’t read to be entertained – that’s a

bonus – they read to nourish themselves, to deepen
their knowledge and to be educated.

Microsoft mogul Bill Gates famously finds the time to

devour 50 books a year, and Berkshire Hathaway
chairman and CEO Warren Buffett credits reading as the
key to his business success. He gets through 500 pages
a day – sometimes double that in the early years of his
investing career – and he devotes an incredible 80% of
his day to reading.

Self-made billionaire Oprah Winfrey started reading at

three years old. She started Oprah’s Book Club in 1996
and distributes free books to member libraries all over
the US. She credits her success with the education she
received from reading books, and has said they “set her
free”.

What you read is just as important as how much. In his

book Rich Habits: The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy

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Individuals, Tom Corley contrasts the reading habits of

the rich and the poor.

He defines the rich as having an annual income of

$160,000+ and a liquid net worth of $3.2million+, while
the poor are classed as having an annual income of
$35,000 or less and a liquid net worth of $5,000 or less.

He found 79% of poor people read for entertainment,

compared to just 11% of rich people, and 85% of rich
people read two or more education, career-related or
self-improvement books every month, compared to just
15% of poor people22.

When you’re busy, reading two or more books a month

is no easy feat; I used to struggle to even read one
every six months. But successful, time-poor people are
prioritizing their education and self-development through
reading, while carefully curating what content they
consume, because information makes them more
successful.

We must defend ourselves from the ‘infobesity’

epidemic

22
For a summary of Corley’s book see https://bit.ly/2qfPOKF

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Bestselling author Sam Horn – a mentor and friend of

mine – uses the brilliant term ‘infobesity’ to describe, in
a single word, the deluge of information that threatens to
drown us mentally, all day, every day.

Our human brains have a finite capacity for new

information. They were never designed to cope with the
rapid and non-stop influx of information that we’re
expected to digest every day.

Behavioral neuroscientist and psychologist Daniel

Levitin, who wrote the book: The Organized Mind:
Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload,
said: “Our brains are equipped to deal with the world the
way it was many thousands of years ago when we were
hunter-gatherers… Back then the amount of information
that was coming at us was much less and it came at us
much more slowly.”

If you want to achieve more amid this infobesity

epidemic you must put yourself on a strict information
diet, refining what goes into your head in order to be
more productive, and more successful.

It works like this: when we consume a low-value piece of

content there is a consequence. We have less time, less
attention and less energy to read, process and store a
high-value piece of content - one that could help us
achieve more or push our business forward.

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You need to be swapping the poor-quality content for

powerful content that sparks ideas and helps you
achieve more.

How to design the perfect information diet

A healthy information diet can do wonderful things for

your entrepreneurial progress and state of mind. You’ll
find it easy to stick to because, unlike other diets, you’re
not having to give up the stuff you really enjoy
consuming.

With this diet, you’re prioritizing the tastiest, juiciest and

most rewarding information and throwing away the
garbage that leaves you ruminating, feeling bad or
simply wastes your time.

1. Create a list of reading material that takes you

closer to your goals

Research what you want to know more about. Look for

books, audiobooks, and podcasts with advice and
learnings from proven experts that might improve and
develop you.

To find out how to develop your own reading list, let’s go

back to Warren Buffett and his business partner at
Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger, an equally

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voracious reader. What are they reading so fervently,

and what do they do with the information they absorb?

Speaking to author Michael D. Eisner for his book

Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed,
Buffett said: "We don't read other people's opinions. We
want to get the facts, and then think."

Munger once said: "We read a lot. I don't know anyone

who's wise who doesn't read a lot. But that's not
enough: You have to have a temperament to grab ideas
and do sensible things. Most people don't grab the right
ideas or don't know what to do with them."

Carefully curated reading, then, needs to become a part

of your work goals. By skimming off the fat – junk
content that distracts – and replacing it with quality
reading material that educates you and deepens your
experience, you will have the time for it.

Actioning the ideas you reap from your new and

improved reading experience is part and parcel of being
a successful business leader, or finding success in your
chosen career.

See books as minefields for ideas and their authors as

your business mentors. Make time to read and make
time to see connections between what you’re reading
and the next steps to take in your business or career. By

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putting yourself on a strict information diet you’ll be sure

you’re reading with intent, not reading to procrastinate.

Reading books might be the most valuable thing you do

this year for your self-development – because of the
value they can add to your life and career – as well as to
improve your concentration.

If you’re dyslexic and find reading a struggle, learning to

give your whole attention and full concentration to an
audiobook or podcast could be your goal.

My major goals are to turn my company into a $100M

business, enable each member of my team to grow
individually and to maintain one of the best company
cultures out there, so my reading list is curated to
include texts that’ll help me reach those goals.

A snapshot of my current reading list:

● Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

● Pig Wrestling by Pete Lindsay
● Influence by Robert Cialdini
● Dare to Lead by Brene Brown
● Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh

2. Cull news and social media from your day

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News and social media organizations are very clever.

They know they need to manufacture either fear or
intrigue to drive traffic.

In his book, News: A User’s Manual, philosopher Alain

de Botton says: “Always remember that the news is
always trying to make you scared. It’s bad for us, but
very good for news organizations: the easiest way to get
an audience is through frightening people.”

Keeping yourself informed about what’s going on in the

world, your industry, and the decisions influencing and
affecting how you run your business is obviously
important. But know this: if something truly important
happens, I promise that you will hear about it.

3. Use that time to consume high-quality content

Now that you’ve identified what content you’d like to

consume to help you achieve your goals, you’re ready to
do the swap.

An easy hack to encourage good reading habits is to

have your preferred, quality reading material within easy
reach at all times. But replacing the time you’d have
spent consuming low-value news and social media
content with high-value content isn’t a straightforward
swap.

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Often, low-value content bombards us and distracts

throughout our working day, every time we pick up our
smartphones. To avoid this you have to create new
habits. Start by making a tiny behavior change when
you pick up your smartphone - freeze news and social
media apps (or better still, remove them completely),
and open Kindle or Audible instead.

If you want to make your content consumption even

more of a priority, block out time for the high-value stuff
by scheduling time in the day to read or listen.

This should be a pleasurable exercise, so make it an

event. Move away from your desk, find a comfortable
chair in a quiet place, and get a really good cup of
coffee. Give yourself an hour.

Alternatively, make better use of your commute, by only

reading what’s on your list. This can transform dead time
into personal development time, twice a day, every day.

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CHAPTER FIVE

FEAR AS A FORCE FOR GOOD

“The beautiful thing about fear is, when you run to

it, it runs away.”
– Robin Sharma

A few years ago, I got invited to apply to give a TEDx

talk. These smaller independent events mimic the
format of TED which began in 1984 and has secured
some incredible speakers, from Bill Clinton to Bono.

At the time, public speaking was one of my greatest

fears. The notion of standing up in front of a room full of
people was, to me, repulsive. I had successfully avoided
hundreds of public speaking opportunities over the
years, but this one felt different.

I would have been mad to throw away such a great

opportunity for exposure so I threw my hat into the ring,
and proposed a talk on why breaking the rules is good

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for you. At this point, I didn’t feel scared because I had

convinced myself that no one would be interested in
what I had to say.

TEDx came back and told me I’d made it through to

round two. This was when fear and panic began to kick
in. What if I actually had to do this? I forced those
familiar, gut-twisting sensations away and filled out the
second part of the application.

The organizers came back and accepted my proposal

with a list of rules. I was to speak for 15-20 minutes
without notes in front of an audience of 200 people. My
story had to engage and inspire. I felt like someone had
punched me in the stomach.

When I sat down to try and write my speech I found I

couldn’t form any words because the fear of delivering it
was already paralyzing me. The thought of what might
go wrong on stage in front of a couple of hundred
people was terrifying.

My stomach was already churning and I wasn’t even

anywhere near a stage. I realized then that I needed to
find a way to leave the fear right there and move forward
without it or I’d never get my talk written let alone deliver
it. So I faced it. I felt my fear and I accepted it.

That simple mindset change meant that, in the coming

weeks, I wrote several drafts, memorized the final

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speech and then practised as though my life depended

on it. Turns out, I was the only person who turned up to
the rehearsal ready to speak without notes.

I delivered a strong talk I can proudly watch back on

YouTube23. I was given top billing and opened the whole
event. I felt strangely comfortable on stage and I have
the fear to thank for that because it gave me the energy
to get it right. I learned you can cheat fear by confronting
and accepting it, and by not trying to suppress it.

It wasn’t a perfect performance; I forgot what I was

saying halfway through, but you can’t tell because
instead of getting upset about it, my brain solved the
problem and sewed it all back together.

One speaker on the billing for that same day was

terrified. She had to stop 10 or 15 times in her live talk
because she was absolutely paralyzed by fear. I could
have been in exactly the same boat if I hadn’t addressed
my fear early on.

Why am I telling you this? Because to achieve more

without working harder, you have to function like a
well-oiled machine. There is no time for fear, which
paralyzes you, cripples you, and slows you down while
you ruminate. Learn to harness fear, though, and it can
push you closer to your goals. Doing that TEDx talk, for

23
If you have a burning desire to watch a man overcome his greatest fear,
watch my Tedx talk here: https://bit.ly/2sXZCJZ

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example, put us on the map, helped position me as an

authoritative leader and has been viewed by thousands,
including many of the people who decided to join our
team.

THE SCOOP

Fear can do two things: cripple us or fuel us.

The Hard Work Myth is dependent on the
former. When you’re too scared to act, your
business stands still, as you distract yourself
with easier, less complex tasks in an effort to
feel fulfilled. To beat the myth, learn how to
live with fear.

Forge a new, healthy relationship with fear

We’re all familiar with fear’s myriad manifestations.

Often an aching or twisting sensation in the pit of the
stomach, coupled with the sweats or shivers and a
painfully clenched jaw. The heart beats faster and
breathing becomes shallow. The bathroom calls.
Rational thoughts abandon ship and the mind goes
horribly blank.

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If you trace it right back, fear is a primal instinct. That

adrenaline rush is designed to keep us alive when
confronted by the risk of injury or death.

Today, this fear-response mode is not required because

we’re not running from lions or tigers or bears. These
symptoms are more likely to precede a public speaking
event than a near-death experience – unless you’re into
base jumping – but they are still concerned with keeping
us safe by making us choose between fight or flight.

While it’s easy to recognize fear once we’re in the grip of

it and it’s smacking us around the face, many business
leaders fail to realize – or will not admit – that fear is
stopping them from making a big gutsy move that could
shoot them to the next level.

Perhaps because we’re grown-ups with dependents, or

perhaps because people look to us for leadership and
life security in the form of a monthly paycheck, many of
us don’t want to admit that, actually, we’re terrified of
making a change or a decision that could have big bad
consequences.

The symptoms of fear are so blinding, so overwhelming,

that it massively clouds reality and upsets our core belief
system. Think back to when you quit that job you didn’t
love, or before you started your business, and
remember how fearful you felt. Everything felt risky and

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less possible, didn’t it? Now, with hindsight, do you still

feel such strong fear?

There is a way to change your relationship with fear and

to win back control. And win it you must, because the
alternative is months or years of stagnation. Without
taking planned, strategic risks you cannot expect to
grow or achieve more.

I’m not suggesting that you remove fear from your life
(it’s impossible) or deny it’s there - but simply get a little
better at recognizing when you’re feeling it and how it’s
impacting your judgments.

Recognizing, understanding and accepting fear is a

powerful way to unlock fantastic decisions, strategy and
action in your business and will help you achieve more,
without working harder.

The fear of fear can be just as crippling

Being scared of public speaking is an interesting fear to

consider. What are we actually scared of? There’s a
primal argument that speaking up in a group scenario
puts you at risk of being outcast by your pack, or
rejected socially and therefore left vulnerable to attack,
but that explanation didn’t seem right to me.

My subject matter wasn’t particularly alienating or

controversial. I wasn’t particularly scared of being

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judged because I didn’t know the audience personally

and I’d probably never see them again.

No, I was scared of those horrible, blinding symptoms of

fear; I was scared that they might stop me from
delivering my speech, and make me run off stage, or
freeze. I feared fear itself.

Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson said: “A touch of the

jitters sharpens the mind, gets the adrenaline flowing
and helps you focus. It is important not to fear fear, but
to harness it — use it as fuel to take your business to
the next level. After all, fear is energy.” 24

Branson is right. The adrenaline rush we get when we

experience fear is designed to give us superhuman
speed to run away, or the strength to fight. It allows us to
focus better on the scenario that’s presented to us.

Have you ever considered that adrenaline junkies

always experience fear in a controlled environment?
They are fully prepared for that experience, either
because they have trained for years for one particular
moment, or because they trust their gear and equipment
and ability.

When a person decides to jump off a bridge tethered to

a bungee cord, the conscious mind reasons the
scenario is safe, allowing that person to feel the fear,

24
From a guest post in Forbes

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know they won’t die, laugh afterwards with the relief they
indeed survived, and then move on.

Entrepreneurs, then, need to channel adrenaline

junkies. Because entrepreneurs are scared, all the time.
But if you push the fear away, it becomes scarier. Feel
the fear, prepare well to mitigate the risks, then
acknowledge that you are safe because of your
preparation.

Fear leads to bad decisions

Fear not only holds us back from taking the plunge and
leaping into new projects and ventures but it can also
severely impact our decision making.

Studies have found that when fearful people make

decisions they are more likely to consider the future to
be pessimistic25. Fear also introduces a sense of low
certainty and a low sense of control into those making
decisions. In short, it seriously clouds and changes our
judgment.

How does this impact our decision making in real life?

Let’s say your very best employee comes to you and
says they need a change of role. They say they love
working with you but desperately need a change of
pace. They say they’re not sure whether that’ll be within

25
Source: Emotion and Decision Making (June 2014)

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your business or whether they need to leave and look

elsewhere. This is a sensitive and tough situation for
anyone to be in, but let’s look at how looking at this
situation through a lens of fear changes things.

Because you’re likely to see a pessimistic outcome

when you feel fear, you might believe that the employee
secretly wants to go and work elsewhere and that
there’s no point in trying to accommodate them in your
business by changing their role. Because of fear, you
might believe that even if you find them a new role
they’ll go anyway. And fear will also tell you that,
whatever you do, the outcome is uncertain.

Take fear away and you might see this situation as an

opportunity to take your very best employee and put
them in a more productive position in your business. You
might see the fact that they came to you first, rather than
just leaving, as a huge advantage and be excited to play
with their role until they feel the change of pace they
crave. You might see their loyalty to you and reward it,
to everyone’s advantage, by creating a fantastic new
role for them.

By being aware of your fear and treating it differently

you’ll make better decisions, and better decisions mean
less wasted time working on the wrong things.

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Use fear as energy

The great news is that you can directly convert your fear
from a paralyzing feeling into useful energy. You can
develop a technique for harnessing the fears you feel to
bring good to your business and help you achieve more,
rather than letting them consume you, cause stress or
harm your business.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Feel the fear, recognize it’s there

2. Confront it: write down the cause of the fear
3. Consider your two options: what will happen if
you do react to the fear and if you don’t
4. Choose one option immediately
5. Leave the fear behind you

Let’s look at a real-life example of how fear can get in

the way of achieving more if you don’t take control of it.
Say you’ve got an unhappy customer in your business.
That’s a pretty fear-filled situation for most of us. What if
they ask for their money back? What if they write a
negative review online and harm our reputation? What if
I can’t make them happy?

If you’re not aware of it, the fear wrapped up in all of

these questions can dictate how you respond to your
unhappy customer and, at worse, completely paralyze

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you, forcing you to avoid dealing with the unhappy

customer altogether.

So how can we use fear in this situation?

1. Feel the fear

Perhaps it kicks in when you open an email from your

unhappy customer.

2. Confront it

“I’m feeling fear because I’m worried this customer is

going to leave and perhaps even ask for a refund. If they
do, they might also write a negative review online which
could harm our reputation.”

3. Consider your options

Those might be:

● “If I don’t react to this fear, I’ll think clearly and
carefully about what would help make this
customer happy again.”
● Or “If I react to this fear, I might never get back to
this customer because I don’t know what to say.”
● Or “If I react to this fear, I might assume the
worst and miss a chance to put things right for
this customer.”

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4. Choose one option immediately

The best option is clearly the first as it’s both proactive

and positive, and offers the highest chance of rescuing
the situation. It could even turn a disgruntled customer
into a happy one.

5. Let the fear go

Now that you’ve chosen an option, you no longer need

the fear, and you can safely let it go. Go for a walk, have
a breather, move on and release the fear. You’ve dealt
with it!

If you struggle with this, I find something helpful that a

friend of mine once suggested, which is to ‘jetlag’ your
fear. In short, you deal with the problem you’re facing,
and choose to delay confronting the fear until later. By
then, more often than not, the fear has simply
disappeared.

Changing how you deal with fear, by getting better at

recognizing its presence and observing to how you
normally respond to it, can directly help you achieve
more.

By carefully managing it, you can turn fear from

something that can get in the way of you performing at
your best and achieving more into a force for good and

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a positive energy that can be harnessed - helping you

make faster, clearer decisions.

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CHAPTER SIX

FAILURE BY FREEDOM

“My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s

really clear that the most precious resource we all
have is time.”
– Steve Jobs

I will never forget the moment I first experienced true

freedom. I was five years old and I ran across our little
garden, pushed through the old gate at the end and ran
into the small field beyond. As I got to the middle of the
field, I stopped, took a huge breath and looked up. A
bird was soaring high above me, silhouetted against the
bright blue sky, and I was awestruck. In that very
moment, I understood exactly what freedom felt like.

Fast forward 13 years and I’m coming to the end of high

school. My parents are desperate for me to continue
with my education and get a university degree, following
in the footsteps of my older brother and sister who are

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well on their way to becoming doctors. But I keep

thinking about that day in the field. I want to feel it again,
that sense of complete freedom, like anything is
possible.

Like many people craving freedom, I don’t follow my

friends to university or pursue the path my parents want
me to take. Instead, I start my own business. Life feels
good. There is no one telling me what to do, no rules,
and no routine.

Things start to move quickly. My company quickly

challenges the established businesses in the market
who have long been overcharging people and it’s doing
well, generating profits. I have no time to stop and think
about what I’m doing.

But after two years of growth, my drive begins to stall

and my productivity nosedives. I begin each day with
good intentions but never quite get to strike off the
big-ticket item on my to-do list: there are just too many
small jobs to do.

Each day ends with me feeling despondent and irritated.

There aren’t enough hours in the day and my goals
always seem out of reach.

Eventually, the days start blurring into one another until

I’m living one long day that spans several months.

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I start to procrastinate chronically, so much so I probably

get less done in a week than one person on my team
gets done in a day.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. In my bid for total

freedom, I had taken my new entrepreneurial lifestyle to
the extreme and totally overlooked the very human need
for structure, direction and accountability to function, let
alone to perform.

The inconvenient truth about entrepreneurial freedom is

this: we all love working when we want, deciding what
we work on and reporting to absolutely no-one, but
these very same benefits can kill our dreams completely.

To beat The Hard Work Myth and achieve more without

working harder, you need to take a long, hard look at the
freedom you have and consider, is it really serving me?

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THE SCOOP

Many of us become entrepreneurs because we

crave freedom and power over our time, but a
work life without boundaries can be really
damaging to our productivity. To compensate,
we force ourselves to stay longer at our desks
until we’ve produced something fruitful. Then
we beat ourselves up when we give up, tired
and frustrated. Freedom is a poisoned chalice.
To beat the Hard Work Myth, set your own
parameters.

Freedom is rarely what we hope it will be

There is a good reason that millions of skilled,

experienced people all over the world choose to work for
organizations as employees, rather than for themselves.

The structure, direction, and hierarchy keep people

on-track, motivated and productive. Remove these
things and most people struggle.

Flexible and agile working is in huge demand in modern

workplaces. But, make no mistake, even in companies
where employees appear to be granted complete
creative freedom, total autonomy, and the ability to work

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from wherever and whenever they like, boundaries still

exist in abundance.

Retail giant Zappos – now owned by Amazon – is

famous for its authentic culture and exceptional
customer service. Since early 2014, it has operated as a
Holacracy, a self-management practice for running
purpose-driven companies, created and trademarked by
software developer Brian Robertson26.

Partly designed to stop employees feeling the need to

seek approval from management for every small
decision and causing gridlock, decisions are made
locally by teams. The flat organizational structure is
regularly tweaked with small iterations and each team is
responsible for organizing itself.

It offers empowerment and autonomy but the whole

system is well managed and well structured. In short,
the structure enables the freedom.

As Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh explains: “In Holacracy, one

of the principles is to make the implicit explicit – tons of
it is about creating clarity: who is in charge of what, who
is taking what kind of decision – and there is also a
system for defining that, and changing that, so it’s very
flexible at the same time.”

26
For more on this see the Holacracy website

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At Time Etc, we experimented with offering unlimited

flexible working and were surprised that people
struggled with it. It demotivated our team and made
them uncomfortable. Next, we gave our team the option
to work flexibly for three days per month. This has
proved far more popular - but why did putting a limit on
flexible working get better results?

The workforce today craves flexibility. That’s the

message employers are getting loud and clear. But the
pendulum can swing too far.

Academic research found that empowering workers can

cause uncertainty and resentment, while freedom to
make their own decisions and work without monitoring
can be detrimental to productivity27.

Total freedom is a poisoned chalice. To be productive

and engaged, people need to know what they’re doing,
and why they’re doing it. And the same goes for
entrepreneurs, too.

Think back to when you last worked for someone else.

I’d put money on these statements being true:

27
More details of the 2017 study by University of Exeter Business School,
Alliance Manchester Business School and Curtin Business School can be
read at https://bit.ly/2q8bOXF

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● You had a clear sense of what was required from

you
● Goals, expectations or targets were
communicated to you
● You took direction from a boss or manager
● You had some sort of routine in the form of set
working hours and breaks

Learnings from a cheese factory

The last time I was an employee I was 14-years-old

(child labor was allowed back then!) and I worked in a
cheese factory near my house. My job, as a warehouse
operator, was to unpack large shipments of cheese and
store them safely.

I’ll never forget that job, and not because I enjoyed

lugging 40lbs blocks of cheese around a freezing cold
warehouse. No, what’s burned into my mind is my place
as a small cog in that big machine. My role was clearly
defined and it never changed.

I knew exactly what was required from me: I had a

target number of cheeses to unpack per hour, there was
a supervisor keeping a close eye to make sure I met my
target and, every day, I stuck to the same time schedule.

If the factory had tried to run any other way, it would

have failed. Imagine if I’d been able to turn up whenever
I wanted, could do as much cheese shifting as I felt like

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and had no one to report to. I’ll make an educated guess

that, as a 14-year-old, I probably wouldn’t have been
found diligently working under my own steam.

Somehow, in the context of the cheese factory, it’s easy

to understand why guidelines, boundaries and
processes were essential. In our own businesses,
however, it’s much harder to accept.

Both employees and entrepreneurs can fall foul of

failure by freedom. Do not mistake this for laziness; this
is a failure to recognize what humans need to be
productive.

The happy medium between the desire for freedom and

the need for boundaries is difficult to find because
everyone needs slightly different things to work at their
optimum, but the basics are the same.

Successful people even designate ‘free’ time

I mentor several entrepreneurs who are desperate to

achieve success and conquer their goals. A handful of
those seem committed to their ideas, but are way too
relaxed. They drift from task to task with no plan, no
hard deadlines and no implications if they don’t deliver.

They call me up, tell me they’re nearby right now and

ask if I have an hour for a coffee. I can never spare an

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hour because every hour is accounted for. I plan

everything I do.

If you can drop everything and meet for an impromptu

coffee, chances are you’re not being as productive as
you could be and you need more structure. Successful
people rarely leave things open and flexible.

‘They’ say if you want something done, give it to a busy

person. Busy people are masters and mistresses of time
management because they have little choice but to use
every minute wisely. They cannot afford to be distracted.

It takes determination, self-discipline and training to

overcome failure by freedom. When you start a
business, that liberating feeling of having escaped the
nine to five grind and being your own boss is a cocktail
that can overpower even rational process-driven people.

So what do you do? If there is no immediate incentive to

progress for short-term gain and no real deadlines, then
you must manufacture urgency: create deadlines,
timetable work, set goals and find ways to hold yourself
accountable.

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How to be the architect of your working week

1. Write a job description for yourself

If, like me, you were delighted to leave behind all the
formal corporate processes big companies love when
you became an entrepreneur, you might shudder at the
thought of writing a job description for yourself, but bear
with me.

Taking the time to think clearly about your role in your

company might seem basic, but many of us never stop
to do it, and it can really help to keep us focused on the
core things we need to do.

Before I took this step, I’d never really thought too much
about what I did every day, preferring to flip between
different challenges as they came up. The problem was,
I wasn’t working on the right things. As soon as I thought
about what I should be doing every day and wrote it
down, it all seemed to fit into place. I would arrive at my
office every day knowing clearly what it is I should be
doing, and more importantly what I shouldn’t.

2. Create a routine that suits your productivity highs

and lows

As covered in the earlier chapter on self-awareness, we

can achieve more in less time by knowing when we
work best, and when we’re pretty useless.

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In many traditional jobs, our daily routine is shaped by

our employers, but entrepreneurs have the luxury of
being able to design a weekly routine that matches their
workload to their productivity levels, with fantastic
results.

To do this, you must map out your productivity peaks

and troughs, and look at what factors improve your
focus, be that caffeine, background noise, total silence,
or the pressure of deadlines. Revisit Chapter One to
follow the steps towards greater self-awareness before
plotting your ideal work week.

3. Use your calendar to timetable your week

The humble calendar app is, in my opinion, one of the

most under-utilized tools available to an entrepreneur
who wants to achieve more without working harder.

A calendar should double up as a to-do list. As tasks

present themselves, block off time to complete a
specified job and set alerts and reminders for added
time pressure.

By using your calendar as a to-do list, you’re more likely

to be ruthless about what can be scrapped and what
makes it into the calendar - because the limits of your
time are right there in front of you, in black and white. It
forces you to protect your time from being used for

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non-essential tasks.

A word of warning. It can be tempting to fill your

calendar with six, seven or even more tasks per day.

You’ll quickly realize that it’s only possible to do between

one and three tasks to a high standard every day. For
this to work, it’s crucial to establish your pace as soon
as you can, and to be realistic.

4. Create your own accountability

One study found that people are 65 percent more likely

to meet a goal after committing to another person. That
figure increases to 95 per cent when they build in
ongoing meetings with someone who can check on their
progress. The sheer act of someone else being involved
with your goal or objective is enough to hugely boost
your chances of completing it28.

As entrepreneurs, we can use this powerful psychology

hack to beat freedom failure and procrastination.

Share your objectives, and your calendar, with the

people around you and you have an added incentive to
deliver what you’ve set out to. It also helps us to feel
connected, less isolated and more supported. My
calendar has been public for years, and people on my

28
Study by The American Society of Training and Development, as reported
by Entrepreneur

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team still seek me out to offer their help with what I’m
working on.

Otherwise, grab a coffee and run through your calendar

with your business partner or assistant. If you’ve got a
team, try a daily meeting. At Time Etc, every day starts
with a ‘huddle’ when we each share a success from
yesterday and choose a new challenge for today. It’s
hugely popular, and a great example of how
peer-to-peer accountability can drive a company
forward.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

KNOWING WHAT TO WORK ON

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time

that is given to us.”
– Gandalf the Grey

Let me take you back to 3am on a summer Sunday. I’m

21 and about four years into my first business. At that
time on a Sunday morning, many twenty-somethings are
still out partying somewhere. Not me. I’m at work,
desperately trying to get through my to-do list so I can
go to sleep.

This wasn’t an isolated incident. Back then, long stints

working through the night, fuelled by strong black coffee
and energy drinks, was normal for me. This didn’t just
happen on occasion, this was every single day.

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When my family and friends noticed I was exhausted, I

told them it wasn’t possible to stop because I had too
much to do. Sound familiar?

My work pattern carried on for years until I met a guy

called Dan.

Dan had started a very similar business to mine. He was

the same age, we were targeting the same sort of
customers, and he’d had the same start: neither of us
had taken any investment and we’d both built our
businesses alone from a single computer to a sizeable
enterprise.

But somehow Dan had built a web hosting business that

was twice the size of mine, and he didn’t work all night.

Dan ended up selling his business to a major company

and, in his new position as CEO, bought mine too, for
less than half the money that he sold his business for.

You can probably imagine how that made me feel. I

ended up thinking about it a lot. It bothered me so much,
I decided to work out exactly how Dan had done it.

Eventually, I realized a few things about Dan:

a) When it came to work, he was a machine. He

very rarely, if ever, started a day wondering
“where will this day take me?”.

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b) Dan was incredible at delegating and he always

had people around him to do stuff.
c) Dan seemed to have an in-built sense of what
tasks were important, and what wasn’t worth his
time and energy.

When I asked him how he knows what to work on, his

answer was so simple it hurt: “I set a goal that I want to
achieve. Then I don’t do anything if it doesn’t directly
help me hit that goal”. He described it as “kind of like a
compass but the needle is pointing to my goal”.

This was a complete contrast to how I was working. I

had no goals other than “to grow bigger”. Because of
this, I had no compass to help me decide what to work
on.

I did have a few long-term plans – like trying to build a

new website – but I’d end up getting side-tracked almost
every day by other tasks that seemed more urgent.

On top of that, I kept having new ideas. It became

almost an addiction to play with these ideas instead of
working on things that really mattered. A new phone
system here, a new ticket system there. Every day I’d
end up being busy, but not on things that actually helped
me get the business to where I wanted it to be.

After dissecting how Dan had achieved more than me, I

was determined to never make the same mistakes

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again. I wanted a high-growth business and I wanted to

know I was working on the right things, so I developed a
framework.

This framework has helped me to grow my own

business by 400% over the past few years while working
35 hours a week. Since adopting it, there hasn’t been a
single day when I’ve been unclear about what to work
on. Instead, the crucial tasks that I need to do every day
are obvious to me, because they’re linked to my overall
goal.

Adopt this framework and you will be on a fast track to

achieving more, without working any harder.

THE SCOOP

The Hard Work Myth wins when you can’t

figure out what you should be working on now,
and what tasks should be delegated, binned or
saved for later. There’s only one way to tackle
a sprawling list of things to do, work harder!
But learn how to be selective, and you’ll waste
no time or energy.

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Why goal setting hasn’t worked for you

Goals work. There’s a reason that entrepreneurs with

investors breathing over them work so intensively. They
are being held accountable by a higher, better-funded
power. But goals also keep us focused and, by making
and hitting them, we can define our success and grow
faster.

Goal setting focuses the mind and steers you, mentally,

towards your target in a way that nothing else can. The
clever part is that a lot of this work happens behind the
scenes, completely out of your conscious thought.

Slowly but surely, your goal will help to shape the little
decisions you make every day. You’ll suddenly stop
wasting time on activities that you know or sense won’t
take you closer to your goal. You’ll start to look critically
at what you’re devoting time to, and you ask pertinent
questions like: Should I really be doing this now? Who
could do this for me and do it better? What would I be
doing if I wasn’t doing this task? Am I allowing myself to
be distracted?

Think of your goal as the destination in your sat-nav. It’s

much easier to plan your journey if you enter the end
point before you set out, not when you’re halfway there.

So far, so basic. But, while setting a goal might seem

like a very simple thing to be suggesting in a book

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designed for entrepreneurs to achieve more in less time,

I am stunned almost every week by the lack of goal
setting among the 15,000+ entrepreneurs I have
assisted and mentored.

I’ve discovered two main reasons that goal-setting

ultimately fails:

● Firstly, we set huge, lofty and unrealistic goals

which end up being demotivating. “I want to be in
100 countries” is a big, unfocused, scary goal.

● Secondly, we don’t keep our goals in our minds

as we run our businesses, so our day to day
work and the tasks we’re accomplishing don’t
directly contribute to hitting that goal.

It sounds simple, but these two principles are why many

of us will never reach the goals we set, transforming
them from valuable motivators to, at worse, powerful
demotivators.

The only goals you’ll ever need

That’s why you need two goals: a BIG goal and a NOW
goal.

Your big goal is your strategic vision, your long-term

ambition. For me, it’s growing my business to $100
million revenue.

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My big goal reminds me where we’re going with this

business and how much further we’ve got to go. It
reminds me that I’m trying to build a large, sustainable
business that employs thousands of people and will be
around for generations to come. It helps me justify
investments in the best people and systems because I
know they’ll need to scale with the business as it grows.

What my big goal doesn’t do, however, is show me how

I’m going to get there. In fact, I have absolutely no idea
how to grow our revenue to $100 million.

That’s where my ‘now goal’ fits in. This is a goal that’s

attainable within the next few months e.g. to amplify
marketing and advertising with a hard-hitting social
media campaign, to double the sales team, or to secure
five new clients.

The only rules are that this goal must be directly

contribute to achieving your big goal and it must be
quantifiable, such as a revenue figure, an increase in
customers, or a sales target, that can function as a clear
marker of success.

Now that you’ve set your goals, write them down

somewhere and keep them visible at all times. This is
crucial.

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Next, write down five things you should do every week

to achieve your now goal.

Here’s my example:

My NOW goal: To get Time Etc to $10 million annual

revenue within five to 10 years

My five things list:

1. Check new sales, upgrades and downgrades
data so I know where we’re at
2. Do at least one thing to increase client retention
3. Do at least one thing to drive new potential
customers
4. Do at least one thing to improve conversion rate
on our website
5. Write or produce at least one piece of content for
our client base

Based on my list, my typical day consists of only

performing tasks and executing ideas that I believe or
know will help us to achieve our revenue goal, like
increasing our customer retention and finding new and
successful ways to nurture our clients, make them
happy, and keep them loyal.

Next, control what you work on

When I first asked Dan how he achieved more than me,

it felt like he just instinctively knew what to work on and

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when. He seemed to spend all of his time on high-value

tasks and never appeared to be reacting to urgent or
low-value tasks, despite plenty of those coming up on a
regular basis.

I assumed Dan possessed superhuman levels of control

and self-discipline but, in fact, he had developed a
simple system that helped him stay focused: he created
a buffer for his tasks and ideas, rather than trying to
execute them as soon as they appeared.

You can do this too. Create a ‘holding pen’ in which to

drop in all new tasks and ideas as soon as you think of
them. This could be a list in a notebook, or an online
document. Crucially, this is not your to-do list.

Many of us have a natural instinct to respond to tasks

and ideas as they come up: we’ve all had days when
we’ve set out to accomplish something big, only to be
completely blindsided by an urgent-sounding email
that’s taken us down a completely different path.

Dan’s method acts as a filter and a decision-making tool,

catching everything that comes in so nothing important
is forgotten.

Next, schedule time to go through your tasks and ideas

list once a month or so and apply the following
questions to each idea on your list:

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● Would doing this task or developing this idea

directly help me hit my goal?
● Does this task or idea fit with my top five list of
things to focus on?
● Will something bad happen if I don’t do it?

These questions will help you to extract only the tasks

and ideas that really help you achieve your goal. These
are the ones that you should be working on personally,
either now or later.

For any tasks and ideas that don’t meet these criteria,
you have two options, either delegate them to someone
else or get rid of them altogether.

Being selective and prepared to reject ideas and tasks is

a productivity skill, but one that many people struggle to
learn without better understanding themselves, and
recognizing they are distracted.

Why is it so important?

When you study very successful people – ranging from

entrepreneurs to celebrities to scientists – it becomes
clear that being selective is an obvious component in
their success.
Movie stars are often extremely selective over the films
that they’ll make, despite receiving piles of scripts and
tons of offers at the peak of their careers.

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Scientists cannot cure pancreatic cancer in the morning,

Parkinson’s after lunch, and solve the world’s antibiotic
immunity crisis in their spare time, or even do all this in a
lifetime. They must specialize.

The length of your to-do list and the number of creative

ideas you have in a week isn’t a badge of honor. As a
leader, you should be trying to do as few tasks as
possible, but do them really well.

Therefore, it’s important to think about your true capacity

to get things done. I work on the basis that I can only
complete two to three tasks a day, sometimes even
fewer.

To decide what YOU should work on, use

Eisenhower’s technique

In a 1954 address, then-President Dwight D.

Eisenhower quoted these words which he said were “a
dilemma of modern man”:

“I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the

important. The urgent are not important, and the
important are never urgent.”

Thus, Eisenhower is credited with the creation of a

simple four-square grid, said to have improved his
efficiency. Called the Eisenhower Matrix – or sometimes
the Urgent Important Matrix – it involves taking every

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item on your to-do list and plotting it onto a grid, to help

a busy person decide what to tackle first, what to
delegate and what not to waste time on.

These are the rules:

Urgent and important: Do it yourself, and do it right

now
Important, not urgent: Do it yourself, but schedule it for
later
Urgent, not important: Delegate or outsource to
someone else
Not urgent and not important: Eliminate it

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The reason this presidential productivity method is so

useful is because urgent tasks can quite easily push the
important ones to the bottom of the pile.

Hacking up a to-do list, applying a liberal dose of

ruthlessness, and putting it through this stress test
before taking any action is a good way to make sure no
time is wasted on tasks that are a) irrelevant or b)
something that someone else could be doing, and
possibly doing better.

We are naturally inclined to move on the urgent tasks

first, before tackling the quick and easy bits that offer
small bursts of satisfaction with every strike-through. But
this approach distracts us from the big, important, and
often complex, stuff.

Finally, learn how to deal with ‘great’ ideas

Something else I noticed about Dan was that he was

never distracted by the latest ‘big idea’. In fact, he didn’t
seem to talk about ideas very much at all, despite being
one of the most innovative people I know. This surprised
me.

As entrepreneurs, we try to solve problems and plug

gaps in the market. You don’t do those things unless you
are naturally curious and unless ideas for resolving pain
points you’ve identified flow freely.

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Because of that, many entrepreneurs may feel their

brains are hardwired for ideas generation, but it’s vitally
important to know when and where to apply ideas in
your business, and what to discard.

Ideas are incredibly distracting, never fully formed, and

prone to fizzling out. The mistake lots of creative people
make is to treat tasks and ideas as one and the same.

Part of the problem is that ideas are really exciting,

especially when you’re feeling a bit stuck and they seem
like an obvious solution to the problem you’re facing, or
if you feel like you want to be distracted from a task
that’s complex or boring.
To know whether executing your ideas are worth your
time and effort, put them through this three-stage stress
test to see how they stand up to scrutiny.

The idea stress test

1. Destroy the idea

Prove it won’t work, or isn't needed, and you’ll either end

up with an idea that is even stronger or you’ll know not
to waste your time. At Time Etc we thought one of the
best ideas we’d ever had was to create a bespoke video
conferencing tool for our virtual assistants and clients to
communicate through. But with a market already
saturated with existing tools, building our own would
have been a waste of time. Even so, at the time of

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having the idea, it really felt like this should have been
an urgent priority for our business.

2. Give it time

If you sit on a good idea and let your subconscious mull

it over, things emerge that weren’t there when it first
came to you.

Having attended a Facebook conference on virtual

reality, I came away desperate to join the bleeding edge.
I wanted to use VR to create meaningful connections
between our virtual assistants and clients who are often
many miles apart and unlikely to ever meet in person.
The time test solved this one: years on and VR is
struggling to make waves beyond the gaming industry,
and especially in the business world. This would have
been a major distraction for us had we moved on it
already. This one is now in the ‘distant future’ ideas file.

3. Improve it

It probably took me five years to know for sure that my

own business was a good idea. It started as very
unscalable – with full-time virtual assistants based in an
office – before morphing again into the scalable model it
is today with hundreds of freelance virtual assistants
based all over the world.

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You can improve an idea during the execution, or you

can try to improve it before you start, which is a far
superior plan of action. Sharing your idea with people
you trust, including your team, because they already
know your business, is recommended.

The iPhone has taught us that improving upon original

ideas never really stops. Apple's smartphone is a
cracking example of an idea that has withstood the test
of time, and which continues to be iterated, arguably
taking a step closer to perfection every year.

Be rough with your ideas to prove they’re worth

your time

This three-stage stress test is not dissimilar to the

invention process. As British inventor Sir James Dyson
said: "When you’re experimenting, you’ll often have one
idea at the start of the design process, and arrive at a
completely different one by the end." That's what you're
looking to do. If your initial idea really was strong
enough, it will withstand.

But many ideas are destined for improvement. The

mouthwash Listerine started life on the shelf as an
antiseptic, sold as both floor cleaner and gonorrhea
treatment. But it wasn't a runaway success until it was
marketed as a remedy for bad breath.

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 The Hard Work Myth

Many of us have ideas every day but very few of us

handle them in a meaningful way. Be rough with your
ideas, challenge them, break them, sit on them and mull
them over.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

DECONSTRUCTING DELEGATION

“It’s easier to do it myself.”

– Unknown failed entrepreneur

Penni Pike served as Sir Richard Branson’s closest

assistant for some 31 years after the charismatic
English businessman poached her from Virgin’s finance
division in 1975. For the past decade, she’s been the
special advisor to my company, Time Etc.

Keen to understand more about how the Virgin empire

was built, and Penni’s role in it, I asked her to tell me
some stories about her incredible career.

She recalled: “I was working from a small, dark and

damp cramped room in Richard’s houseboat which was
moored on the canal at Little Venice. Despite
appearances, the houseboat was very much the nerve
center for a rapidly expanding Virgin group and the 10

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telephones on my desk took up pretty much all of the

space.”

Penni continued: “One particularly cold autumn morning

one of the phones rang, as it did throughout the day and
night, and I answered. It was a lawyer called Randolph
Fields who said he had started an airline and wanted to
see if Richard would be interested in buying into it for
£1.

“I immediately knew that Richard would be and wasted

no time in setting up a call between Randolph and
Richard. The rest, as they say, is history. Virgin Atlantic
commenced its operations a short while later and is now
one of the world’s best-known multi-billion-dollar
revenue airlines.”

I asked Penni how Richard could trust her to know what

was important and what wasn’t out of the hundreds of
calls she was fielding for him daily, and she explained:
“Richard’s approach to delegation is just to trust people.
From the very first day I worked with him, there was
never any doubt as to whether or not I could fulfil my
role. When I left the finance division at Virgin we’d never
worked together before and I had no official training, but
he chose to trust me.”

Most of us view having an assistant as a luxury, perhaps

something we’d consider after having become
successful. This is a big mistake. Many of the most

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successful high-profile entrepreneurs recruited an

assistant at an embryonic stage in their journey.

Successful entrepreneurs understand assistants aren’t a

luxury or status symbol, they are a fundamental
requirement to being able to achieve more.

Could this be a major factor in what makes some people

successful and others not so? I think so. Delegating in
business gives you a competitive advantage: in short,
there’s more time to focus on the ‘big stuff’ if you hand
over the jobs you don’t need to be doing yourself. And
yet, it’s a problem for millions of people.

THE SCOOP

Delegation is one of the hardest skills to

master, particularly as many entrepreneurs
need to be in control. But there are countless
tasks that need doing that are not worth your
time and effort. Anything that doesn’t
contribute to the growth of your business or
take you closer to your goals must be
delegated, or the Hard Work Myth will
perpetuate.

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 The Hard Work Myth

Everyone knows that successful leaders must delegate,

but many find it hard or impossible to do. If you’ve fallen
for The Hard Work Myth you might find yourself saying
things like “I’m too busy to delegate” or “they wouldn’t do
it as well as me anyway”. It seems easier to simply work
harder ourselves.

Gary Vaynerchuk, the high-profile founder of Vayner

Media, has a strong view on this, and blames ego. He
said: “If you can learn to let go and realize that most
work is not that important, it becomes a hell of a lot
easier to let someone else do it. Recognize that not
every task requires your skill level and understanding;
some tasks are perfectly doable by the multitude of
bright, interesting people you hired. It’s all about
humility. Ego is the number one issue people can run
into with delegation. Even though I have a ton of ego, I
have a boatload more of humility than you think.”29

Since 2007 when I founded Time Etc, I have seen first

hand the power of delegation. Our clients have
delegated more than 2 million tasks to our network of
virtual assistants. It’s pretty sobering to realize that this
has given our clients back 57 years (and counting) to
spend with their loved ones and to focus on growing
their businesses.

Over the years, I’ve witnessed everything on the scale,

from expert delegators, to whom it all comes easily, to

29
You can read the full article on Gary Vaynerchuk’s website

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people who have really struggled to hand over work,

despite having good intentions to change their working
habits for the better when signing up.

Through studying some of the world’s most successful

entrepreneurs and the habits of our clients over the
years, I’ve discovered five pillars that will make your
delegation efforts a breeze.

The five pillars of delegation

Pillar 1: Delegate the right stuff

The single biggest reason that new delegators get their

fingers burned is because they don’t pass over the right
tasks. I learned this lesson through my own painful
experiences.

When I started Time Etc I decided it was time to figure

out delegation once and for all. After all, if I was going to
run a company that expected clients to delegate, I’d
better be an expert at it.

So, I delegated everything. At home I hired people to do

the cleaning, lawn mowing and even driving. At work I
passed over almost all of my responsibilities including
sales, marketing and leading our team.

There is no doubt I saved a lot of time this way. Most of

these tasks were done fairly well by others and I was

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free to focus on whatever I liked. However, things soon

started to unravel. People suddenly started quitting, and
there was an air of unhappiness in the office. I had
delegated too much.

It sounds silly now, but it took me months to realize that

handing the leadership reins over to someone else was
a terrible choice. People wanted me to lead them. They
wanted direction from the person who had hired them.

They expected me to be present. Delegating these vital

responsibilities had caused a huge motivation issue in
the team. It was no-one’s fault other than mine, and it
caused plenty of damage.

At Time Etc we will often turn away potential clients who

want to delegate vital parts of their business – such as
finding new customers – because we know that, in a
small business, there are absolutely some tasks that
you must do yourself to succeed. To expect someone
else to have the same care, attention and passion as
you on a key task linked to the success of your business
is flawed.

Pillar 2: Good enough is good enough

The fear of tasks not being done perfectly is a major

driver in putting people off delegating in the first place
and a leading cause of perceived “failure” when it goes
wrong. However, seasoned delegators expect tasks not

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to be done perfectly and, in fact, they embrace it.

Not only do they accept tasks may not be done perfectly

but, more often than not, they’ll use this knowledge to
carefully select the kind of tasks they delegate - picking
low value but time-consuming tasks rather than tasks
that are of critical importance.

Shark Tank’s Barbara Corcoran wrote on Twitter: “I

delegate everything I don’t like to somebody else and
realize that a job done 80% as well as you would do it, is
good enough.”

Remember, this is less about trying to force a critical

task through the process of perfection and more about
getting low-value non-critical tasks done fairly well.

Pillar 3: Be prepared to muck in

The very best painters and decorators know that 90% of

the job is preparation, and just 10% is applying the
paint. With delegation, the same principle applies.

Good preparation is key to improving the quality of what

you get back once you’ve delegated a task. Take the
time to document exactly what you want done, make
sure they fully understand what it is you want them to do
and clearly communicate your expectations.

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Many people that struggle to delegate want to hand over

tasks, save time and expect to receive a polished piece
of work at the end. This is a near impossibility.

Successful delegators make their expectations very

clear and are happy to answer questions in order to help
get the task done. Rather than seeing requests for help
as a failure in the delegation process, they see it as an
opportunity to finesse the outcome.

Actually, the worst delegators can be really good at this,

too. If you’re a self-confessed control freak, and you’re
on hand to shape and improve the way a task you’ve set
gets done, you’ll probably feel far more comfortable
about handing it over.

Pillar 4: Only expect a 25% return

Many of us do something very strange when we

delegate work. We expect that:

a) We’ll never have to touch that task again. Once it’s

gone, it’s entirely the responsibility of the person doing
it. We’ve handed it over, now it’s theirs not ours.
b) We’ll save the exact amount of time we think a task
would have taken us to complete. So, if we think writing
a blog might take two hours, we expect to save a full two
hours by delegating.

Neither of these statements is true.

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Seasoned delegators know that even when you hand

over a task they’re still fully responsible for it. In reality,
you’re only lending it to them. You’re still going to need
to be fully invested in the task, available to answer
questions and perhaps even contribute to the
completion of the task yourself. Delegating is just one
step in a delicate dance of collaboration to get a task
finished. They know the act of delegation isn’t the end of
the story.

Expert delegators also know they will normally only save

a small amount of time on each task they hand over.
This is always true at the start of a new delegating
relationship and often remains true even when two
people have worked together for a long time.

One-hour task → Novice delegator expects they’ll

save one hour

One-hour task → Pro delegator expects they’ll save

15-20 minutes

When you delegate a task that would have taken you an

hour to complete yourself, by the time you’ve delegated
it, offered guidance, assisted with queries and perhaps
even helped to complete the task yourself you’ll only
save a small fraction of the time it would have taken you
to do the task.

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The key is that as long as you’re saving some time,

you’re winning - and successful delegators use this to
their advantage. Rather than seeing it as a failure that
they’ve spent 40 minutes delegating a one-hour task,
they see it as a success that they’ve still saved 20
minutes.

Let’s take an example from my company. I work with a

talented marketing assistant called Harriet and one of
her jobs is to help me create a weekly video where I’ll
tackle a particular business or productivity challenge30. It
takes about an hour of prep, an hour for filming and a
further hour for editing to put one of our videos together.

It’s logical, therefore, to think that I should be able to

save at least two hours for each video because I’ve
delegated all responsibility to Harriet, but this isn’t the
case. I have to provide direction on the content, help to
solidify each idea, be available for filming and give
feedback on edits.

The end result is that I probably save an hour in total but

I am very happy with that saving - it’s a whole hour I
wouldn’t otherwise have if I was doing the task myself.

And, of course, the more tasks you delegate, the more

time you save.

30
Curious?! You can watch our videos at timeetc.com

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Pillar 5: Bestow instant trust

Normally, trust is earned over time. But here’s some

news for you: in business there is absolutely zero time
for trust-building in that way - and Penni Pike’s story
teaches us that.

The secret is this: to get the very best out of people,

take a leap of blind faith and give your trust them before
it’s been earned. In other words, create trust by
declaring (and meaning) it.

This has an almost magical effect on the person you’re

delegating to. They feel empowered, responsible and
accountable, meaning they’re more likely to do their best
work.

How to know what to delegate

Have you ever considered that you might not be the

best person to complete the many tasks on your to-do
list?

Some of the most of the most brilliant business people

of our time will tell you that delegation is central to their
success because they’ve learned what not to do
themselves.

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In the New York Times, Sir Richard Branson wrote:

“When I try a new task and find it’s not my cup of tea, or
I’m simply not cut out to do it, I delegate it to someone
who is passionate about the work, knowing that person
will do a great job.”31

Branson explains that when he started Virgin, he lacked

vital knowledge in accounting and wasn’t good with
numbers, and so hired an accountant - which you might
well have done yourself. From that experience, he
realized delegating held the key to growth.

Putting your faith in others, while making yourself

available to help them, might just be the best business
move you ever make.

In the previous chapter we looked at how the

Eisenhower Matrix can help you decide what tasks you
should perform yourself. It also helps you decide what to
delegate i.e. anything that’s urgent but not important.

If the Eisenhower Matrix isn’t for you, try the bucket

technique.

Imagine a bucket that’s holding all of the tasks that really

matter to you or your business. These are the things
that you want and need to take great care of, such as
redesigning a website or meeting an important client.

31
You can read the full article here https://bit.ly/2BfVWF4

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The bucket is already pretty full, now top it up with all

the things that aren’t vitally urgent but need to be done,
such as reading emails, calling back various suppliers or
job candidates. The bucket’s contents is now spilling
over the sides. Only the things at the top of the bucket
will ever spill over – the non-critical tasks – leaving the
vital tasks safely in the bucket for me to complete
myself.

To maximize my chances of delegating the right tasks, I

also choose the repetitive tasks that I would otherwise
find myself doing all the time. Delegate them once and I
benefit from them being done by someone else time
after time. The math doesn’t lie: saving just 20 minutes a
day through delegating saves me a total of 76 hours
over a year.

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CHAPTER NINE

HIRING HURTS

“I'd rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone

than hire the wrong person.”
– Jeff Bezos

Picture this scene. It’s half-past nine in the evening and

I’m the last person left in the office.

I’m in the women’s toilets where the floor is flooded with

murky brown water and the air stinks.

Earlier that day, a member of our team had blocked the

toilet. Unfortunately, her panicked, frantic attempts to
flush the blockage had caused a colossal flood.

I could hardly delegate this unhappy task to one of my

team so, it fell to me, the business owner, to fix the
problem.

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As I pushed at the blockage with a plunger, I was

plagued by the realization that hiring a small team had
caused me more work, worry and hassle than it had
ever saved me.

Employees were supposed to have made my life simpler

but, here I was, late at night, desperately attempting to
dislodge someone’s poop from a U-bend instead of
enjoying an evening at home with my family.

I managed to see the funny side, but unblocking that

toilet also served as a wake-up call. I made a promise
that night that I would never hire again without really
needing to.

I’m aware this is a controversial point of view, but it’s

one I’m passionate about. Far from saving time for small
business owners, hiring your first few employees can in
fact consume pretty much all of it.

THE SCOOP

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Don’t confuse hiring with delegation. You can

delegate most tasks to virtual assistants and
freelance consultants without taking on the
risk of hiring. In fact, hiring too early fuels The
Hard Work Myth. Although it feels like more
employees supporting you should make life
easier, hiring always involves a lot more time
and effort than many realize, and it changes
your job description whether you like it or not.
Put off hiring until all other avenues –
including freelancers and automation software
– and are exhausted first.

Over the years, I’ve recruited hundreds of employees,

and refined a number of techniques designed to attract,
manage, motivate and retain those people. These days,
brilliant coaches and managers help look after, manage
and motivate my team, yet I still find it challenging.

I know I’m not alone. My company, Time Etc, works with

small business clients. Some of them use our virtual
assistants before making their first hire. I’ve lost count of
the number of clients who have hired their first full-time
employee, stopped using their virtual assistant, and
then, several months later, come back to us and asked
for their VA back because their hire has gone wrong.

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Why? Because hiring demands a whole new set of skills

on top of learning to delegate.

When I started the business, it was me and two other

co-founders, Vic and Fran. For months we shared ideas,
planned and developed strategies on how the business
would function and grow.

I spent my days, and some nights, coding our platform,

building it from scratch at my leisure. Life as an
entrepreneur then was exciting, enjoyable and fairly
straightforward.

That all changed when we started to hire. For months,

I’d had a burning desire to build a team because it felt
like that would signal to others that we were a ‘proper’
business. So one day, without pausing to think, I started
interviewing.

Employing people seen as a badge of honor. People

commented that we must be doing well as we were
hiring. It was nice to hear those endorsements, though I
see now they weren’t based on fact.

It also felt good to be able to recruit a few brilliant and

talented local people to join us on our journey. We
leased an office to accommodate our growing team and
set about turning it into the best place to work.

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Fast forward a few short months and things were not

going so well. The business had failed to pick up as
many new customers as we had anticipated. Suddenly
$26,000 a month needed to be budgeted for payroll and
we were running low on funds.

Added to that, our small and initially enthusiastic team

didn’t have enough to do and, as a result, employees
were demotivated. I could keep myself motivated, but I
didn’t know the first thing about how to inspire other
people, which meant we were dealing with people
issues left right and center.

My day was now consumed with juggling the finances,

firefighting and in meetings with our team. Developing
our platform and growing the business fell by the
wayside.

I had totally failed to predict that, by making the decision

to bring employees into our business, my role would
have to change.

I’d gone from having the freedom to be creative and do

what I loved – coding – and morphed into a reluctant
and underprepared full-time manager. Suddenly I had to
provide constant direction, instruction and motivation
and I was completely unprepared.

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My financial security had gone from perfect to being

compromised, and the relationship between us
co-founders was strained as a result.

In the end, we ended up losing most of that team within

a couple of years. It took about six years to find and be
able to afford team leaders that would finally let me
employ and retain a team while I focused on the things I
really wanted to, like product development.

Hiring is inevitable for most businesses, especially those

that undergo rapid growth. I’m not saying you shouldn’t
aim to hire people. Being able to provide talented people
with a great place to work and a real career is surely
one of the hugely rewarding aspects of being an
entrepreneur, but we shouldn’t see it as the holy grail of
company growth.

And, if possible, we should delay the complexity, cost,

regulation and commitment for as long as possible to
give our businesses a fighting chance.

If I could go back, I would put off hiring for as long as

possible and consider instead the many alternatives.
Resisting hiring where possible has served my business
well: our automated technology platform does much of
the work and we have only 25 talented full-time staff
running what is now a profitable international business.

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I found to my cost that hiring early on doesn’t reduce

your workload but increases it, putting you further away
from your goal of achieving more without working
harder.

What happens when you hire?

Hiring is rather like the touch paper on a firework: once

lit there’s nothing you can do to stop it. As soon as
you’ve agreed to hire your first employee, there’s no
stopping the following:

1. The dynamic changes for you. You switch roles from

entrepreneur to manager. You go from having the
freedom to do what you like to having serious HR
obligations that, if not met, can cause big problems
for your business.

2. You’ll be expected to become an expert in people

and understand their individual needs and
motivations. You’ll also be expected to make time for
everyone, on a weekly or even daily basis. I found
this really tough, on top of an already packed diary.

3. You will go from setting your own goals and keeping

your motivation and energy up to having to do that
for others as well. Early on, I struggled with knowing
how to find goals that were actually motivating for
my team.

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4. You will have more mouths to feed. You go from

ensuring you can survive financially to feeling
completely responsible for the survival and financial
security of your team and their families and, as
best-selling author Simon Sinek says, “leaders eat
last”. You will feel the pressure of ensuring that,
month after month, no matter what happens to your
business, you cannot let them down. The scary
reality of needing to pay salaries that people depend
on can keep you awake at night.

It’s harder than ever to keep employees

According to an analysis of resumés by Glassdoor – a

website where employees can anonymously review
companies and their management – the average worker
is now spending only 15 months in a role32. And Gallup
reports that 51% of American workers are ready to leave
their current jobs33.

Jobs and careers are no longer for life. As a small

business owner, you can no longer assume the people
you bring into the fold are going to be around in two
years’ time.

It’s extremely difficult to motivate yourself to devote time

and resources to training people up when you know that

32
According to a Glassdoor survey here: https://bit.ly/2VOrKtZ
33
Gallup’s State of the American Workplace report: https://bit.ly/2xL6ae6

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you’re highly likely to have to replace that person very

soon. And yet, that’s what many of us do every day.

I have a friend called Mark who is an inspirational

business leader. He is a well-known entrepreneur who
has grown multiple businesses to tens of millions of
dollars in revenue. His specialty is working with
medium-sized businesses to help them expand
overseas.

He has won multiple awards for building incredible

cultures and great places to work. He has employed
– directly or indirectly – thousands of people.

This guy practically wrote the book on culture,

employment and growing businesses that people love to
work for. And now he is in demand all over the world as
a consultant that helps companies do the same.

A couple of years ago Mark set up a micro-business to

run alongside his consultancy work, so he recruited a
little team to work with him.

And can you guess what happened? He struggled. This

guy who knew everything about happy company
cultures experienced failure after failure as person after
person came into his business and rapidly quit. I know
this because, after yet another person left, Mark came to
me and asked me to find him a virtual assistant to help.

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Why did this happen? Because big businesses, like the

companies Mark has either built or long worked with,
had all the stuff you could ever need to attract and retain
incredible people. Great teams to work with, established
cultures and systems, beautiful offices, superb benefits
packages, amazing salaries, you name it.

But when we go out on our own as small entrepreneurs,

we may have none of those resources. It is simply much
harder to attract the best people and retain them -
especially if you've never done it before and the only
unique selling point you can offer is ‘greater
responsibility and autonomy’.

If even Mark has found it almost impossible to hire

successfully, what hope do the rest of us have?

Hiring may be the least efficient way to grow

When Phil Keeling started his plumbing business back

in 2007, one of the first things he learned was that hiring
full-time can be extremely inefficient.

Phil was snowed under with work and, to solve the

problem, he hired an engineer, offering him a generous
salary. To get him around town, he went out and leased
and branded van for his new worker to use.

Before he knew it, Phil had a fleet of five vans and five
engineers. For a little while, he had a thriving plumbing

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business doing hundreds of jobs a month for happy

customers. Until the following summer.

That year was one of the longest, warmest summers on

record. Britain was in the grip of a prolonged heatwave
which quickly put an end to Phil’s expansion. With no
one in the U.K. using their heating, work suddenly dried
up for those five engineers. Phil was forced to act fast.

Nervous that he was going to have to lay people off, Phil

approached his engineers and asked them if they’d
agree to work with him on a freelance basis, sharing a
much larger portion of the profits and leaving them free
to fill in any gaps with their own jobs on the side. He
would split the hourly fee that his clients paid him 50/50
with the engineers.

Thankfully, Phil’s team stood behind him and, before

long, they navigated out of the tight spot they found
themselves in by working together.

When winter finally arrived, the engineers made more

money for their families than they’d ever done before,
and Phil was able to relax knowing when the next slow
summer came, his business would continue to prosper.

What Phil learned here is that hiring people full-time in a

small business is often the least financially sensible
thing you can do because overheads always need to be
met, even when sales dry up.

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Unless you’re taking a carefully calculated risk, having

employees doing nothing, waiting for work to come in, is
hugely wasteful to any business.

There are more good alternatives than ever

before

It used to be that the only way you could find someone

to help in your small business was to find someone local
and employ them.

Now, we’re spoilt for choice. In the past decade, there

has been a revolution in how you can run and resource
your small business with subscriptions and software
platforms replacing big, inflexible overheads, like
salaries (think Xero replacing bookkeepers).

When only human help will do, there are literally

thousands of options available. Marketplaces like
Freelancer.com and Elance.com are packed full of
skilled people who will happily work for your business on
a flexible and part-time basis to help you achieve more.

If you’re looking for a way of getting administrative tasks

done in your business, and life, with none of the risk and
hassle of hiring, my company, Time Etc, will pair you
with a highly-experienced virtual assistant who you’ll get
to know and trust, and we’ll take care of all the finer
details like payments too.

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Happily, the freelance economy in the U.S. is thriving.

An estimated 57.3 million Americans freelanced in 2017,
which is 36% of the workforce, contributing
approximately $1.4 trillion annually to the economy34.

All that talent is on tap, waiting to be called upon. Small

businesses can enlist the skills of literally millions of
quality, experienced freelancers for a fraction of the cost
of hiring.

Making use of the world’s huge freelance talent pool

means that you can focus on running your business
without needing to become a full-time people manager
or HR expert. You can continue to work from wherever
you like, rather than having to get an office. You can flex
your overheads up and down as you can afford to,
rather than having to fund full-time salaries throughout
the year.

What does this mean for you? Resource your business

wisely and you’ll be well on your way to achieving more,
without working harder. The Hard Work Myth can be
busted simply by tasking talented freelancers with the
jobs you should have never been doing in the first place,
and delegating expertly.

34
According to a study of 6,000 U.S.workers conducted by independent
research firm Edelman Intelligence and commissioned in partnership by
Upwork and Freelancers Union (2017)

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CHAPTER TEN

THE POWER OF THE TINY CHANGE

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that

won’t work.“
– Thomas A. Edison

I remember the very first time I hit The Wall. I was a

teenager and only months into running my first
business. To make it financially viable for me to
continue, I needed to find 20 new paying customers
every day.

The number of daily sign-ups had increased from two to

five to eight to 10. But then it started to flatline.

My tactic was to advertise in print magazines, which

meant a delay of several weeks between paying for an
advertisement to appear and seeing a response. I would
excitedly hold my breath for the uplift. Surely this latest

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campaign would be the one that got me to the 20 paying

customers I needed?

It didn’t. Nothing seemed to work. I ran ad after ad,

using up a lot of the little money I had, and nothing
happened.

I’m not the only one who has encountered a hurdle that
seems impossible to overcome, whether it’s increasing
sales, driving your revenue past a certain point, or
beating procrastination.

THE SCOOP

Problem solving is never about slogging your

guts out. It’s about intelligence, agility and the
courage to try something new. The Hard Work
Myth feeds off our belief that spending hours
upon hours breaking down walls is the
solution. Think about the last time you made a
breakthrough in your business. How did you
do it?

Every day, thousands of entrepreneurs around the world

encounter hurdles. Clear these hurdles and you’ll unlock
growth, profits and success. Don’t, and it might just be
the end of your journey as an entrepreneur.

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The odds are not stacked in our favor either: only 20.6%
of first time entrepreneurs make it35. Worse still, a
staggering 94% of companies will never hit $1M in
annual revenue36.

The secret is not to work harder

The really big problem with encountering walls is that

they feed The Hard Work Myth. I know business owners
who think they’ve overcome a major blockage with
sheer hard work, but that is rarely the case.

The solution to my problem had nothing to do with the

days I spent re-designing those print adverts or the long
hours spent on the phone carefully negotiating for more
advertising space, or even working for a month into the
small hours on building a new website that would
capture as many new customers as possible.

Actually, I made one very tiny change to my approach. A

change that felt almost insignificant at the time.

The great power of tiny change

Instead of redesigning my adverts for the tenth time, I

emailed both editors of the two magazines I was
advertising in and asked them to write about my

35
According to this very interesting 2006 paper about Skill vs. Luck in
Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital: https://bit.ly/2piXCuL
36
As cited by David Cummings here: https://bit.ly/23ELdL7

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company. And it worked. Within just a couple of months,

that press coverage helped me exceed my goal of 20
paying customers a day by 100%.

It was a valuable lesson: breaking down walls has

absolutely nothing to do with striking them harder. In
fact, I barely did any “work” to make it happen, short of
firing off a couple of emails that took minutes to write. I
just tried something different.

As an entrepreneur, you are absolutely guaranteed to

face roadblocks repeatedly throughout your business
career.

How you respond will dictate whether you succeed or

not, and it will threaten the work-life balance you have
worked so hard to create.

Problem solving is one of the best ways a business

owner can spend his or her time, because every solution
clears the way towards growth and success and helps
you understand your business and customers a little bit
more.

Successful business people are just good

problem solvers

Look at some of the world’s most successful people and

you’ll see they have two things in common, none of
which involve working longer hours or working harder.

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Don’t get me wrong, grit, determination and

perseverance do feature heavily in all success stories.

Milton Hershey started three unsuccessful candy

companies before his fourth – the Lancaster Caramel
Company – succeeded. His fifth business, The Hershey
Company, of course, needs no introduction.

In the 1990s, author JK Rowling – whose 2019 net

worth is estimated by The Sunday Times Rich List to be
$911M – was famously turned down by 12 different
publishers before Bloomsbury agreed to print the first
Harry Potter manuscript. She wrote it while receiving
welfare benefits during a dark period in her life.

But the ability to execute probable solutions with speed

and bravery is also a trope.

Cable channel The Oprah Winfrey Network, led by the

media mogul herself, struggled with an identity crisis
after it launched in 2011, offering a below-par program
line up to viewers keen to immerse themselves in Brand
Oprah.

The initial plan was to offer factual shows themed

around Winfrey’s personal philosophy – ‘living your best
life’ – covering topics like spirituality and health. But it
wasn’t until the network changed tack and targeted
African American women with premium scripted dramas

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that OWN found its stride and became a ratings

success.

And then there is business tycoon Sir Richard Branson,

whose aim for Virgin Atlantic was to give passengers an
unparalleled flying experience. He knew he could offer a
service like no other, but he lacked knowledge of the
industry. Still, he persisted and rented a Boeing 747 –
Virgin’s only plane – to complete a test flight.

But, during the flight, a flock of birds flew into the

engine, causing extensive damage. The airline couldn’t
get certified to start carrying passengers without a
working plane, and Branson didn’t have the money to
get it fixed.

At this point, many would have given up, but instead, he

worked out a way around the problem. He restructured
all of his companies and pulled money from other
ventures to get the plane fixed. Thanks to his ability to
find a solution, and action it, his airline got the
certification it needed to make its first flight and it quickly
became a huge success.

Of course, not every business is as well-resourced as

Virgin. But businesses of all sizes are making tiny yet
powerful changes all the time. Laura Jennings founded
online gift store of KnackShops.com, which lets
customers personalize their purchases.

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She told me: "Two years ago the principle of my ad

agency made an off-hand comment about her
experience as a customer on my site: she said she
loved the gift she created but ‘was surprised at how
many clicks it took’. I pondered that for a day or two and
still couldn't make sense of it - ‘lots of clicks’ is not how
our site works!

“So I asked her to come into the office and make a gift
while my entire company silently observed. We were
amazed – and embarrassed – by what we saw her do.

She was bypassing the ‘obvious’ path to pursue a much

more convoluted process we had never even imagined
someone might take. And if a brilliant digital native like
her was using our site this way, what were other site
visitors doing?”

The next day, Jennings and her team placed a sandwich

board on the sidewalk outside their office. It read: If you
give us 10 minutes to test our site, we'll give you $20.

She said: “Whenever someone would walk in to take us

up on the offer, everyone in the company would drop
what they were doing to silently observe the new person
interacting with our site. When the visitor had left, we'd
debrief and address whatever had confused them. We
iterated like this for weeks, until visitor after visitor easily
found the quickest path to creating something unique."

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Matt Schmidt is CEO of Diabetes Life Solutions, which

sells affordable life insurance to people with Type 1 and
Type 2 diabetes. Two years ago, he noticed referral
traffic from existing clients – which created some of its
most profitable leads – was starting to drop off.

Schmidt told me: “Our head of marketing recommended

that we offer to donate a portion of our commissions to a
diabetes charity of the client’s choice, if they'd
recommend others in the diabetes community to us. A
simple gesture like this turned around referral traffic by
about 1000%."

Today, the company still donates 25% of its

commissions to diabetes charities.

Kyra Schaefer, founder of As You Wish Publishing, a

business dedicated to making book publishing
accessible for aspiring authors, was experiencing a
sales problem: she was undervaluing and underpricing
her offering.

She recalled: “I would adjust my price based on how I

felt the sales conversation was going. It came from a
lack of confidence which showed up time and again.
This lack of confidence resulted in me underpricing my
service, which led to customers undervaluing my
service, my time and my energy.”

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What did she do? “I did something so simple it was

ridiculous. I shut up. Yes, once I asked for the sale, I
shut my mouth. The silence gave my customer time to
evaluate their options and think of questions. I would
answer their follow-up questions but wouldn’t lower my
price.”

Schaefer credits this simple strategy with taking her

small company from barely getting by to turning over six
figures a year.

Think about the tiny changes you’ve made in your

business that have had a really big impact on usability,
referrals or sales. Did they involve hours of hard labor,
or creativity?

Note that working nights and weekends doesn’t feature

here. What these stories teach us is that curiosity and
humility – to pinpoint problems and speedily test
creative remedies – can put your business back on the
path to growth. This agile approach – implementing tiny
powerful changes without delay – is far more effective
than flogging yourself. Don’t believe the Hard Work
Myth: it really does no one any favors.

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CONCLUSION

I want to thank you for taking the time to read this book
and, hopefully, for taking its message to heart. Because
the Hard Work Myth deserves to be laid bare.

For decades it has been damaging health and hindering

success without being called out.

Unpicking such a widely held belief is not easy when we

are all products of a system that teaches us that
success is dependent on hours worked.

That’s why, to bust The Hard Work Myth, we must

reprogram ourselves and our belief system.

You have to choose to ignore that great big lie spread by

teachers, parents and employers, who don’t know any
better, that the more we work, the more we’ll achieve.

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Because if you don’t, it will not only hamper your

success, it could even ruin your life, like it almost ruined
mine.

You can be a successful entrepreneur, achieve

everything you want to and find plenty of time to watch
your kids grow up and devote to nurturing your
friendships and relationships.

The methods and principles we’ve covered in this book

make this possible for you and me. They also happen to
be the very same methods and principles already
adopted by many of the world’s most successful
business folk.

I am living proof that it’s possible to grow a multi-national

business by 400%, selling almost $35 million worth of
services, in a few short years with no external
investment, all while working 35 hours a week or less.

All I’ve done is gain greater self-awareness, change my

mindset, and put routines and structures in place to
support that change.

If you’re anything like I was, you’ve been fighting to

achieve more for years. You know you’re spending too
long reading the news, that your inbox has become a
distraction and that you should be delegating more.
You’ve tried working harder but it’s not leading to greater
success.

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Your life has immense value. By failing to achieve all

that you’re capable of while working harder, you’re
undermining your own financial potential, as well as your
health and wellbeing.

You have as much potential as any of the high profile

ultra-successful entrepreneurs I’ve mentioned in this
book, many of whom are billionaires.

But it’s not really about the money. Imagine how your life
would feel without the daily tussle between what you
want to achieve and what’s possible fitted around family,
home and friends.

Imagine how you’d feel if you achieved everything you

want at work and still managed to get home to tuck your
kids in and read them a bedtime story.

Our routines and obligations weigh us down. And the

‘knowledge’ that floats around – like delegating is more
hassle than it’s worth or that no entrepreneur that’s in it
to win it should get the luxury of weekends – fast
become truth.

Understanding that none of these things need to apply

to you is key.
My personal experience is the more I have understood
myself and what I need to achieve, the more I have
achieved.

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Tweaking how I think worked for me where traditional

management techniques and fast ‘productivity hacks’
that are all over the internet did not.

As you’ve seen, achieving more by working less hard,

oddly enough, requires immense discipline. To make a
start right now, you can begin by questioning absolutely
every task you're doing and becoming self-aware.

If nothing else, I hope that by reading this book you truly

understand that with some quite small changes you can
achieve success without sacrificing your life.

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IT’S TIME TO TAKE ACTION

Thank you for taking the time to read my book.

I want to help you achieve your goals, find balance and

grow a successful business, without working harder.

At Time etc, we’ll connect you with an experienced

assistant who’ll take care of the tasks that waste your
time, for a fraction of the cost of hiring one full-time.

Join more than 22,000 of your fellow entrepreneurs and

leaders who have used a Time etc assistant as their
secret weapon to get more done, in less time.

Join us today at timeetc.com/myth

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WANT MORE?

Free bonus extras

For exclusive extras including a special unpublished

bonus chapter register for free at timeetc.com/myth

The Achievement Institute

For expert articles on how to achieve more, stay

productive and delegate check out The Achievement
Institute at https://web.timeetc.com/resources

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