You don’t need to work hard, you need to think hard

Throwing more hours at your problem doesn’t necessarily solve it.

Doing so might even make things worse, since you’ll be so exhausted by the process.

But that’s capitalism for you. Our society has decided that the busier we are, the better we must be doing. Success is simply a matter of working longer hours.

Protestant work ethic reminds us that there ain’t nothing that getting up earlier and staying at the office late can’t accomplish. Forty hours a week is merely the minimum, so get cracking.

I remember one year in my late twenties, my publishing business really started to struggle. The economy was in a recession, the industry was seeing major changes, book sales were declining rapidly, and requests for speaking engagements were barely trickling in.

And what was my solution? Just wake up an hour earlier.

That’s right, starting work five in the morning was for rookies, so let’s roll it back to four. Surely this will solve all of my business problems.

To my dismay, taking those additional sixty minutes each morning did not significantly boost my creative output or increase the company revenue. The only material changes that happened were sleeping less, feeling tired during the day and having chest pains from a higher anxiety level.

Meanwhile, in my delusional, workaholic, capitalistic mindset was, this is the sole path to growth.

It has to work. Need to make more money? Just wake up earlier, slacker. Early bird gets the worm. Sleeping is for the dead.

But in my experience, doubling down on labor didn’t alleviate my pain, it only amplified it. After two months of waking up at four instead of five, there weren’t new bags of money in my bank, only new bags of stress under my eyes.

Have you found the same in your own life? Did you ever notice a direct relationship between the number of hours you worked and the amount of happiness and wealth you created?

If you are like me, the answer is a resounding no.

In which case, maybe you don’t need to work hard, you need to think hard. That’s the advice somebody should have given me. Work fewer hours during your day, but compress greater value into those hours by being more intentional, strategic and sophisticated with how you use your brain beforehand.

For example, instead of arriving at the office two hours before the rest of your team to catch up on pointless email, use that time to walk your dog in the park and commune with nature. Or do some journaling, meditation and yoga. Whatever.

Just let a little rhythmic, repetitive movement clear your mind, stabilize your emotions and increase the production and release of endorphins to pump the well of creativity. By the time you show up at your desk at a perfectly reasonable start time, you won’t need to take forty minutes to settle in.

You won’t need to wait until that third cup of coffee starts working its magic to be productive and useful. Because you will have already transformed yourself into an open container into which the world can place good ideas. Creating value will happen naturally.

I’ve been practicing some variation of that very routine for many years now, and it’s almost embarrassing how quickly I complete all my tasks on a given day.

In fact, working hard isn’t in my vocabulary anymore, because thinking hard does most of my heavy lifting. Forty hours a week is a joke. It’s a quaint relic from a bygone era of inefficient industrialists who did not understand how the construct of time works.

Listen, capitalism is still a wonderful thing and I’m grateful to be part of that system.

But throwing hours at our problems doesn’t necessarily solve them.

Sometimes it only makes us more tired.

Does working harder earn you bags of money, or bags under your eyes?