People Lazier Than You Are Making Millions

So in a lot of videos and different articles that I’ve written, I’ve started by saying I am actually kind of a lazy person, right? I’ve done a video about how I don’t really subscribe to hustle porn, hustle culture of, like, rising and grinding, waking up early and, like, burning the midnight oil and all that stuff. Like, my personality is kind of lazy. And for a while, I always. I took that to be kind of a negative. Like, oh, I’m never going to live up to my greatness. I’m never going to catch everybody else because I’m just not as motivated, not as driven as they are, and therefore they’re going to beat me. But what I’ve come to realize over the last couple of years, as I’ve had more exposure to what I consider wildly successful people, is that the most successful people in the world are also some of the laziest. Here’s what I mean by that is, if you look at the daily schedule of people that you look up to or people, you know, creators.

If you look at my schedule, for instance, my schedule, I think to the average person would look wildly unproductive. And it would look as though I’m not really doing very much. And I used to really struggle with this, honestly, because, like, the process of creating content of, you know, running businesses, it doesn’t look how a lot of people think it does. I lead through meetings and through phone calls and through quick touch points, but I’m not really the one that’s like, nose to the grindstone doing the actual work every single day. It’s one level remove, like a higher level above that and kind of pointing the direction. And a lot of times, the person that’s pointing the direction there are not the ones that’s doing the hardest work. The hardest I’ve ever worked, truthfully, was back when I was doing, like, physical labor. It was.

I was working landscaping, you know, digging holes. That was some of the hardest work I’ve ever done. And yet I wasn’t making very good money. I wasn’t getting ahead in life. And so the idea that hard work equals success or financial security, it’s like, we know this is wrong, right? But as you ascend, you will notice that, like, rich people, successful people tend to be really lazy. Cause they get really good at identifying what are the highest leverage activities that they could spend their time on. And then they surround themselves with the team, with the people who complement their weaknesses, who can then do the work that requires pushing the flywheel. What you will notice in life is that the person pushing the flywheel typically is the one making the least money.
It’s the person directing where that flywheel goes and where the energy is directed from that. If they can lead people, they can delegate, if they can train people, that’s where the real value is. And so the laziest people not always like lazy. You can’t just be a lazy person and become successful, but by the time you become successful, it looks a lot like you’re being lazy and you’re not really doing much because the activities that you do have so much more leverage. Now, Bill Gates said something a number of years ago, which influenced a lot of how I thought about hiring when we were escape climbing. And I want to share this with you because I think it’s a really good mental framework to take towards the process of who do you want on your team? And he said this, he said, I would rather have a lazy a player than a hard working b player because the lazy a player figures out how to get the job done in less time. And I took that to heart because I felt like the kid in school in all my previous w two employed jobs. I felt like the person who was really good at finding the solution and getting the job done in the easiest, quickest way possible.
That then would free me up to not. Here’s where it went wrong for me is I’d figure out how to, like, systematize the job that was given to me, right. And that would free up a lot of time. Cause I could do the task faster than somebody else could. But then I didn’t fill the time that I had now freed up with other activities. And so what would happen is I would stand around, I would look as though I wasn’t doing any work. And that the perception of people’s output is often more important than the actual output. And I didn’t understand the politics of this.
And that’s why I got fired a lot from those jobs. Also, I had a lot of oppositional defiance. So I wasn’t very good with authority. I was like, this is the job you asked me to do. I did it. I figured out how to do it. Doesn’t matter if it took me an hour or 8 hours like it’s done, right? Anywho, that mindset is actually quite valuable as an entrepreneur, and it is the type of person that you want to hire, but you also then want to figure out, okay, when they created the system that produces this in less time, what can I do with their times, their genius, their, their abilities, outside of that, that’s a different topic. But I find the hardworking b player will only produce work up to a certain level.
And it’s. It’s only through brute force putting in the labor that they get to that point. I like lazy a players cause they figure out how to use leverage much better. And so I want you to think about that. And ideally, to really win at the game of business, you need to be hard working and you need to be smart, so you need to be putting in the hours and you need to be using high leverage. But as you get to a certain level, you’ll notice that the leverage is more important than your particular input of hard work, because you can hire people, you can delegate, you can train people. I can hire ten people to do far more physical input than I ever could. And so it’s less important for me to be working around the clock, putting in the time, and more for me to identify how do I.
How do I hire, how do I find those people? How do I train them? How do I create the system that they can succeed in? So that higher leverage activity, it’s going to look very different. And you might struggle with this as your business becomes more and more successful, as you get further and further removed from the actual inputs of work that used to lead to making money, let’s say. And now as you sit more in, like, the ivory tower kind of directing traffic, you often feel like, what am I doing? I’m actually meaningfully contributing to my team here. And every time that I’ve felt that way, I’ve made the mistake of then reintroducing myself into the system in an artificial way. That just puts me in the way. And the team is like, what are you doing? Can you just step aside, get out of the way, let us do our job. Like, in my own need, my own ego, as attempt to feel useful, I actually make myself, I make the team less effective. So I wanted to share all this with you because it’s an interesting idea that rich people are inherently lazy and that’s, you know, a little bit of clickbait.

But hopefully we’ve unpacked this idea enough for you now to understand, here’s how I can use this concept to move forward in my business and my life. So I appreciate you guys being here. We’ll catch you in the next episode. But until then, stay hyperfocus, my friends.