Why working harder is a poor mindset

One reason for this might be that many of the people our culture perceives as “successful” preach the gospel of working long hours.

As Quartz writes, “…the patron saint of work boasts, Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, declared that ‘nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.’ Musk said in November that he worked 120-hour weeks, and on Twitter claimed that 80 to 100 hours per week is necessary to change the world.”

And in an article for “Entrepreneur,” Rajiv Talreja writes, “If your aim in life is to sip on a nice cocktail as you sit on a beach chair, listening to the sound of the waves hitting the shore—then entrepreneurship is not your game. If you want to build a business, then be prepared to work longer and harder than anyone else around you. Entrepreneurship is a physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausting process. If you want free time, take a vacation. Build a business only if you are willing to immerse yourself in your company and ready to work 80 hours a week.”

If you searched right now, you could find thousands upon thousands of articles talking about how working long hours is what it takes to make it big. With such role models in front of us as a culture, it’s no wonder we value long hours and late nights as a mark of perceived success.

But the reality is that as successful as these role models are or might be, they still have a poor mindset. Why do I say this? Because they still equate success to hours worked, not to the amount of work you can squeeze out of your hours.

Maximizing your hours is working smarter, not harder

The mindset of the Rich is not how many hours a week do I need to work to be rich, but instead how much can I get out of my hours so I can do more with less time in order to be rich. Your true worth comes from being able to invest your time in those that you love and passions that you care about. You can’t do that when you work 80 hours a week. Your true worth comes from working less—that is the sign of a smart business owner..So, take some of your down time to reflect on how you find your worth. Is it from working too much? Or is it from finding ways to make your assets work for you? I hope it’s the latter. If not, perhaps fear is holding you back.

Try this exercise from Tim Ferriss: Fear Setting. 

What I encourage people to do is for whatever decision you're considering, starting a business, quitting your job, ending your relationship, whatever, or starting a relationship, is to just take a piece of paper, break it down into three columns. The first column is all of the things that could go wrong. All of your fears, write them down, get specific. The second column is the things you could do to minimize the likelihood of each of those happening. And in the third column is how you could get back to where you are now if those things happened. And when people go through that exercise, usually they realize that their fears are either completely an illusion or they're really not that bad at all and probably transient or reversible.

By facing your fears head on about how much you think you need work, what it means to you, and the motivations behind it, you can then build the foundation to work smarter, not harder.