Most of the work you're doing is unnecessary

You'd get more work done if you stopped working

90% of the work most people do simply doesn’t need to be done.

They sit at their desk.

They tell themselves they are being productive.

But in reality, they sit down for 12 hours a day because they are afraid that they are wasting their time if they don’t.

They’re afraid that the productivity tribe won’t accept them.

They’re afraid that if they don’t sit down and stare at a screen, they will somehow end up mediocre.

Ironic, isn’t it?

The very thing you are trying to escape is the very thing you are becoming.

Before we continue, I want you to rid your mind of any prior conditioning around productivity.

I don’t care if you work for 30 minutes or 30 hours straight. If you think what I am saying is impossible, then you’re obviously never going to try it, because you aren’t open to it.

Now, think about this:

Someone can write a social media post that goes viral and make tens of thousands of dollars from traffic driven to their product.

Someone can DM the right person who is the perfect fit for their services and close $10,000+ dollars then and there, without a sales call.

Someone can spend 10,000 hours writing 10 books just for them to never be seen by more than 50 readers.

This exposes a few critical insights:

1) Quality matters more than quantity. One person can work 1 hour a day and make millions while another can work 12 hours a day and make absolutely nothing.

2) You live in the age of permissionless leverage. There are digital assets and traditional assets. The difference is that anybody can start building digital assets because they can learn anything and build anything on the internet.

3) A job teaches you that money is bound to time. Entrepreneurship teaches you that money is bound to value... unless you bring your conditioning from a job to entrepreneurship.

4) If you are building your own thing, your 2 levers are building a good product and getting that product in front of other people. If you don’t have a product, that’s priority number 1. If you don’t have an audience, that’s priority number 2. Simple.

Further, if you were to record yourself working, you would probably find that most of what you are doing does not directly contribute to the goal you are trying to achieve.

You would probably look like this:

Granted... this guy could be interacting with potential customers and making a decent income, but you get the point. My highest leverage work when I started on social media was simply being active on social media - studying what works, talking to people so they know who I am, testing ideas, etc.

But if you just removed all of the busy work, you’d be left with an hour of lever-moving work, and you’d probably make even more progress because you wouldn’t be so stressed and dopamine-insensitive.

“What would I do with the rest of my time?”

Really?

Is that even a question?

You are a human. Read some books. Talk to people. Go outside. Cook your meals. Train in the gym. Spend some time being bored for once so your brain can recover (and so the ideas required to do lever-moving work can finally start coming back to you).

Or, just set a goal that doesn’t involve money and work. There are other domains of life y’know.

The cool thing is that once you start improving other areas of your life, that improvement spills over into your business, work, and finances.

What is your actual goal?

What are the 2-3 things you can do every day for 1-3 hours at a time that increase in potential returns as you increase your skill?

Do those things.

First thing in the morning, when your mind doesn’t have 10 open loops limiting your ability to focus.

If you aren’t able to sit down and execute, you might as well take a break to gain clarity on how to best execute.

If you were honest with yourself, you’d realize that you’re sitting down to work for 4 hours but are kinda just bouncing around between ideas and tasks. You aren’t really doing anything productive.

If your best work is done when you have peak, absolute clarity, then why don’t we prioritize that instead of prioritizing sitting down at your desk?

Your brain is wired to hunt, like a lion.

You don’t sit around grazing like a cow at your screen all day, because we’ve learned that linear output does not lead to linear results. In fact, it often leads to zero results, because when you’re stuck in “doing mode,” your mind is narrow, and you will not birth the ideas that lead to results.

You can feel, right now, how narrow your mind is. Try to come up with 10 good ideas right now. If you’re mind doesn’t go anywhere, you have some work to do. The optimal state of mind is like that of a child who can imagine entire new worlds on command.

If you wanted to build muscle, you wouldn’t go to the gym from 9am to 5pm.

You go for 30-90 minutes.

You train as hard as you can.

You rest. You eat. You recover.

If you don’t provide your body with the resources to achieve its goal, you will simply spin your wheels for multiple years. If you don’t provide your mind with the resources (ideas and clarity), your work will slowly suffer, and you’ll waste most of your life at your desk.

Most people would be much more productive if they took a day off.

But they hate doing that.

In a weightlifting routine, you schedule “deload weeks” 5 or so weeks apart where you do about 60% of the weight you normally do. People skip these because they’re addicted to seeing how much weight they can lift. They psyop themselves into thinking they are wasting their time if they aren’t redlining their mind and body all day.

The magic you’re looking for is hiding in the rest you’re avoiding.

Take a day off.

Hell, take two days off.

Allow yourself to be bored until the right amount of clarity forms and you can’t help but work.

That’s when you knock out 6 months of work in 6 weeks.

– Dan

For those looking for more:

• If your dopamine receptors are fried and life feels mundane, take the Superhuman90 challenge (a 90 day complete life reset).

• If you want to learn a high-leverage skill so you can build your own thing, enroll in 2 Hour Writer.