This website is not financial advice. Posts may contain affiliate links from which I earn commissions at no additional cost to you.
Graphic © WealthPowerBoost.com. Background image – Pixabay (PD)
If your first thought was “too many”.. you’re fired! 😉
Let’s be serious though. It may well be that the reason you are struggling to get ahead is that you just don’t work hard enough…
Once you hear Elon Musk explaining this, it sounds so ridiculously obvious. Not only is it true but it illustrates how often we over-complicate things (perhaps as an elaborate excuse?)
Musk is famous not only for his extremely ambitious goals but for his heroic work ethic. 100+ hour weeks are normal, 120 hour weeks are not unheard of (sheesh) and there are numerous well known stories of him sleeping in the office so that he can wake up and get cracking without wasting a moment.
The most hours I have ever clocked in a week was 114. It was really intense! Basically work-eat-sleep-shower and nothing else.
Elon’s been doing it for years… When he arrived in USA with his brother Kimbal, they only had one computer. They would code in shifts with one working while the other slept. This is a masterclass in drive and the results that it can generate:
Now Elon is an ‘extreme case’. But then again – if you want extreme success you have to take extreme actions. Can you handle that? I hope so – because if there is a way round it, I haven’t heard of it.
Now there is this idea of the “work life balance”. You are “supposed to” keep it all in balance and essentially… be soft on yourself. That’s what they tell you.
But I’ve got bad news… all the while you are doing that, someone else is working.
Let’s ask multimillionaire business coach Dan Pena what he thinks about this:
[The CEO of AOL said] “I want someone who works 28 hours per day and bleeds through his eyeballs.”
“… So you think more work is better” … “No. More smart work. Most people play at their work. Just because you might work 12 hours per day, doesn’t mean you are working 12 hours per day. You are staying busy 12 hours per day… I am retired and I still work 60-70 hours per week… when I was your age I worked 100 to 120 hours per week.”
Do you see a pattern here?
A strange idea seems to have come around in the modern world that you can somehow float your way to success and that the only reason you are not successful is that you are just “not dreaming about it hard enough”, or even that you are actually working too hard!
I beg to differ. All the success I have ever had was gained through determination, work, struggle and crawling forward inch by inch.
Elon has made his billions. He could freewheel and be served fine wine on an island every day for the rest of his life – if he wanted to. But no – he’s there at SpaceX and Tesla powering forward with every drop of energy that he has.
Work and health: Note however that I do believe it important to take the best care of your health you can. But find a way to do that while still driving forward. It is important to get good sleep. Study [1] has shown that 7 nights in a row of only 5 hours of time in bed have negatively affected cognitive performance, subjective sleepiness, and mood in adolescents.
However, even if you sleep 8 hours per night and then have 2 further hours for shower, eating etc that still leaves 98 hours in a week.
How many of those are you actually working? And importantly, how many of the hours you ‘act like you are working’ are you actually truly working on proper, productive tasks?
I will bet it is less than 50.
If you can actually do this, you can change your life.
It’s your move. Right now. Tick tock! What are you going to do about it?
Reference:
[1] https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/39/3/687/2454041
