Hard Work is OVERRATED

Back in the summer of my freshman year of college, I was living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I worked for that summer at this landscaping company. Actually, this wasn’t my freshman year. This would have been my sophomore year, I believe. Yeah, it was my sophomore year. So I was working at this landscaping company for the summer in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And this was a brutal job. Job.

First of all, respect to anybody who is out in the blazing summer heat doing physical labor of any sort, whether that’s construction, that’s roofing. I’ve did roofing for a time. I did roofing for exactly one job once. I had a buddy who needed help with his roof, and he was like, you want to come help me with this? I was like, sure, why not? He paid me good money, and it was the worst experience of my life. I didn’t show up to help him on day two. I was like, this is the worst. But I did stick with this landscaping job for the entire summer, and it was brutal. We had 100 degree days out in the blazing heat.

You’re in jeans, and you’re shoveling, you’re moving rocks, you’re getting dirty. And just full disclosure, I hate working with my hands, first of all. But at that point in my life, I didn’t have any measurable, demonstrable skills that I could use to make money. So all I had was my 19 year old body. That was all I had to exchange for value. And so it was either this was before only fans, and so my only option was to go crack rocks and plant trees, and I sucked at it. I’ve talked about it a lot on this podcast that I was fired from many, many jobs over the years. This is one of the very few jobs I wasn’t fired for.

And I’ll tell you exactly why that is. For whatever reason, the foreman of this landscaping crew, this guy was an asshole. This guy was such a dick, and he hated me. Of everybody on the crew, he hated me the most. I was the lightning rod for all of his ire, and I think I probably deserved it in hindsight. I don’t remember much of the details. When you’re in the moment and you’re the victim, you’re like, I didn’t do anything to deserve this. I’m sure I did a lot to deserve his hatred and his dickery, but he was addicted to everybody.
So one of the purest pleasures in my life was he would never let anybody else use the bobcat. He was like, I’m the only one certified and trained on this thing. Maybe that’s true. And one day he was trying to show off, and he was, like, spinning donuts, like, doing little 360s in this bobcat. And I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. The wheel on the bobcat popped off. It’s hard to imagine what was actually occurring there for this to happen. But, yeah, the wheel on the bobcat flew off.
This guy that we all hate, we’re like, yeah, look at you, Dick. Okay, anyways, we’ve all had this, right? We’ve all had that boss in our life who we just absolutely despise, and they despise us. For a lot of people, that’s the reason that they go into entrepreneurship, is that that one boss breaks their back and they’re like, I’m done with this. I wouldn’t discover the beauty of entrepreneurship for many, many more years. For that summer, though, I was committed, for whatever reason, that I wasn’t going to let this guy break me. Like I said, I’ve been fired from so many jobs, but this is the one that I wasn’t fired from. I made it through the entire summer despite this guy. He made it his life’s mission that he wasn’t going to fire me.
He was just going to make my life miserable. And so what he would do is he would separate me from the rest of the crew. He’d put me out in the middle of a field, and he would just have me dig a hole. And then he’d come back a couple of hours later and be like, that’s a good hole. Go ahead and fill it back up. So I was just digging holes and filling the holes. It had nothing to do with the projects of the jobs. I’m sure if the owner of the company realized that he had a guy in the crew that he was just paying to go literally dig a hole and fill a hole.
Talk about abject futility, right? What a waste. But I was committed. I was not going to be broken. I was going to do this job. I was going to dig the hole. I was going to fill the hole. And I knew that this all I really had to look forward to pretty much every single day. If it wasn’t that, then it was whatever is like the other shittiest grunt work imaginable on the crew, which usually the crew would cycle through and take turns, like, okay, now I’m going to do this thing this time.
You’ll do it next time. I was just the gopher. I was doing all the shitty jobs, and that’s fine, whatever. But I was committed. I knew what this guy was trying to do. I knew he was trying to get me to break and get me to quit. And I was like, I’m not going to do it. Not going to do it.
This is the worst job I’ve ever had in my life. I absolutely despise every single second of it, but I’m not going to do it. And I share this with you because that is the hardest I have ever worked. In a job like physically demanding, brutal, grueling work. The hardest I’ve ever worked, I was making minimum wage. And I share this with you because one of the greatest fallacies that keeps people poor is that they believe hard work will make you rich. That the way to make money is by working hard. And it’s not.
It’s simply not. It’s not about how hard you row. It’s about what boat you’re in. I could have rode that boat as hard as I possibly could have. It wasn’t going to go any faster. I was never going to make significantly more than I was making in that moment. Now, the thing is, you do probably need hard work along the path once you get into the right boat. But more important is simply getting into the right boat and not getting locked into this mindset that hard work is what’s going to make you rich.
It wasn’t until I learned the powers of leverage and utilizing labor, capital, technology, and media that life started to get a lot easier. And as a consequence, these days, my life looks a whole lot different. Despite having multiple businesses that are generating, they’re doing very, very well. My life is not. I’m not working any harder. Truthfully. I work maybe four to 5 hours a day. If I’m being truthful, it’s only four to 5 hours of concentrated work.
But because I get so much leverage for my time, I can get a lot more output. But it’s not as a result of working harder. Now, I had to work hard to get that leverage. True, but more valuable, I think, is rethinking in your life. What are you doing right now? How are you working on the things that you’re working? Are you applying maximum leverage? Is there a better way that you could move that boulder rather than just trying to deadlift it? Could you create a fulcrum? Could you get a piece of old wood from over in the corner and use that to get some leverage on that thing? And that’s so important because you will never be able to grind your way to true wealth. It’s not possible. And I know this because I see it around me every single day. I don’t think hard work is this rare thing.
When you look at people on instagram and twitter, you might get the impression that the thing that separates the really successful people from the less successful people is that they work so much harder. They will convince themselves that they are so much more disciplined and so much more motivated, whatever. That’s not the truth. Like, the most successful people I know, they’re not more disciplined, more motivated, they’re not working harder, just not working on smarter things. They’re applying maybe the same amount of hard work, if not less. They’re just putting it towards the right things, things that just generally have more potential upside. Whereas, like, the lady who cleans this building, she’s grinding every single day. She wakes up and she’s at work before I’m even out of bed.
She is crushing me in the hard work department. But she will never get ahead because she’s working on something that fundamentally doesn’t have the same leverage that I do. And so if you’re at that point where you’re grinding and you’re grinding and you’re grinding, you’re like, I’m working hard. What’s not working hard? Work is only one part of the variable. It’s necessary, but it’s not the only thing. And it’s not the thing that, in the end, is going to change the game in your favor. You need to couple hard work with leverage. And this is where people talk about, don’t work harder, work smarter.
You need to work hard to get to the point where you can work smart, but beyond a certain point, and you might be there right now. Depending on where you are in your life and where you can reduce your expenses, you might be at the point where you can stop working so hard and start applying that work towards the right opportunities. And so that’s the thing I really want to encourage you to think about today, is like, what are the opportunities that you’re pursuing? Are they actually high leverage activities that could move you meaningfully towards your goals? Or is this something that is like a low leverage, low input, low output equation that’s never going to work for you? I did another video on this on the YouTube channel, Anthony Vasino. Just go check that out. It’s called four passive income ideas. And the spoiler is that there are no passive income ideas. These are all what I call leveraged income ideas where you can learn about labor, you can learn about code, you can learn about capital, and you can learn about media. So go watch that if you’re tired of working so damn hard all the time.

I’m not saying hard work isn’t necessary. I’m just saying it’s not the only thing, and it’s not going to get you there on its own. So hope this brings you guys some value. As always, I appreciate you being here. We’ll catch you in the next episode. If you got any value out of this, do me a favor. Just hit that share button. Just go share it with somebody that you think that you should.

Listen to this. Like, hey, you’re busting your ass. You’re working too hard. Stop digging that hole to fill the hole. Go work on something smarter. Go share that with them. It might just change their life, but it will, at minimum, make me feel good. So thank you for that.

I’ll catch you guys in the next episode.