The 4 Hour Workday (How Creatives Work Less & Earn More)

A Normal Workday

00:00People don't believe me when I tell them I work less than 4 hours a day, especially at this point in my life where I'm working about 1 to 2 hours a day. And now I want to make it very clear here that like, nothing is permanent, right? Just the principle of impermanence, where even the people that work 12 to 14 hours a day don't always work 12 to 14 hours a day every single day, 365 for the rest of their life.

00:23It varies. And so I'm setting the scene here where I don't work less than 4 hours every single day. Sometimes it's four, sometimes it's six, sometimes it's eight, sometimes it's ten, sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less, sometimes it's one, sometimes it's zero.

00:35Okay, so setting the scene there. But the point here is the majority of my time, I would say 90% of my days when I am not focused on a project or have procrastinated to the point of having to work 10 hours a day. I work 1 to 2 hours a day right now, and for 90% of my days I work less than 4 hours a day.

00:54There's a lot of meaning behind this. If you are new to this whole four hour workday thing that I promote, go and watch the video, the four hour workday that will give you so much more context when you come into this video. So how do I work only 4 hours a day?

01:08First is that I've always focused on eliminating the things that I don't like in my life. I didn't like client work or hosting podcasts when I took those things on because it was the smart thing to do at that point in my business right now, this is assuming that you are a creative entrepreneur, a creator, a freelancer, an agency owner, or a one person business, or just have a small team because client work and getting on calls all the time and hosting podcasts and having that in my day, that added 2 to 3 hours of work to my day every single day.

01:39And I just notice the futility in them very quick. They didn't make sense to do when I knew that I could just I could create something different, provide the same exact amount of value and make more money because it didn't demand that much time for me.

01:52And as the same thing with like getting locked into a religious paradigm or a nutrition paradigm like the Carnivore diet, the same thing happens for getting locked in a business paradigm, like freelancing and client working, thinking that you can't pivot and change what you do on a daily basis simply because that's what you're supposed to do.

02:09That's what you were taught, and you didn't seek to question or actually create a new way of business for yourself. Nobody knows what they're doing. People are just giving away methods here and there so that you can try them, adopt them, see if they work for you.

02:22But at the end of the day, the fulfillment comes from building your own way of doing it by creating a lifestyle that is of your own design, by actually being creative. And that is the problem that we're going to dive into about how hustle culture and working 12 to 14 hours a day and being in that consistent state of stress, stress being the antagonist to open mindedness.

02:43So when you're closed minded the entire time and you don't have the ability to even zoom out and have any form of creativity, then how are you going to change your work so that you can work less and make more? So the second thing is that I've always focused on the highest leverage activities possible.

02:59So freelance and consulting and agency work, that's a great starting point. For most beginners, it has to be done in many cases. Not all. It's a good way to start making money first. You can, of course put that off, build an audience and then fuel products or services over time and kind of delay when you actually start making money.

03:16But at the end of the day, you need a product that is able to sell and maintain itself while you sleep. If you actually want to be able to do this without hiring an immense amount of employees, which I don't want to do, the time to money ratio has to decrease as you grow or get better at business.

03:33And so I realized very quickly that client work, manual outreach, all this stuff was just taking up so much time and I was so closed off to the thought of being a creator or building a personal brand or actually building leverage along the way, not just shooting blanks of thousands upon thousands of cold emails and having no leverage or readership built to show for it.

03:55And so I realized that writing is the foundation of all of that. Writing goes into my tweets. Those get repurposed to every single platform Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, whatever newsletter gets repurposed into YouTube videos. And so all of this is just based around writing.

04:09So I know that with the momentum that I've built, I can write for 1 to 2 hours every single morning just on my content, which is traffic generation to fuel the products that sell when I sleep. That's literally all I have to do. And if I want to push further by, say, writing a book and distributing that or building a software like I am, then that's going to add a bit more time to the amount of time that I spend working.

04:32But it's still manageable because I'm still focusing on the levers and not letting all of these unnecessary time suckers take my time and attention. And so this is where most people fail, right? As they take courses which are extremely valuable because schools don't teach them.

04:47And knowledge not found in schools equals money not found in employment. So people take courses or they read online internet content and they completely miss what the actual lever moving tasks are, even though they are made very clear, people go through the course and then just forget all of it and try to go about what they were going to do anyways by not listening to anything in the course.

05:06They use that as motivation to act and then they wonder why they're not getting results. People will come to me and they'll say, Dan, I'm not getting results on this anymore. And then I ask, Okay, what are you doing every single day at any given moment of your day, like that first morning?

05:19BLOCK When you're actually working on building your business, what are the exact steps that you were taking? And then they either list out one thing or they aren't able to list out anything tangible that they're actually doing to grow. They're procrastinating for 3 hours while working on things that don't fucking matter for the other eight.

05:37So the third thing is that people still don't realize the compounding nature of readership, growth, business online and offline requires people and a product or traffic and an offer, and people come from ads or geographic location like having a physical small business manual outreach like cold calls or cold emails, or creating content to grow a readership in the new digital society or creator economy.

06:02So most businesses are still locked in the old paradigm that they have to just consistently focus on getting customers every single day. They neglect or completely glance over the thought and power of social media as a necessary part of life and as the foundation of modern business.

06:17Every business has to be and will be demanded to be on social media. So I wrote this tweet. This is my creator philosophy. Go large and broad so you can talk about whatever you want. Your newsletter products and services create beginner to advanced niche sub audiences.

06:31A map that guides people through the hierarchy of needs. As you self-actualize, I've always been a fan of growing as large as I can on top of funnel socials like Twitter and whatever, and then other things because everyone's like niche down niche, don't be super specific so you can sell a product or service.

06:47It's like your newsletter products and services and lead magnets that all lead into each other. Are your niche audiences that you are building Your top of funnel should be broad and large so that you can actually be you, which is the most profitable niche.

07:02And so my point is this if a brand with 50,000 followers can make $50,000 a month, yes, this is the low end. If you know what you're doing, I can make that much with 1/10 of the effort. If I have 500,000 followers. Now, imagine if I have 2 million, which I do, I can make that much in an hour, a week.

07:20In other words, I can make ten times the amount as other people because of the focus that I've invested over the years. And I don't care to work longer for the sake of playing the status game that every single other entrepreneur is playing of.

07:31Oh, who can work longer hours? Oh, hustle, grind this. Oh, I work so long, I deserve more than you. Me writing one tweet is the same as a beginner writing 10,000 simply because I've iterated so many times and have had. I understand what a high performing idea is.

07:48I have so much more knowledge and expect science that goes into one tweet versus a beginner who has to build that up. So here's a tweet from Taj Dosa. I highly recommend following him on Twitter. I know an entrepreneur who works 14 hours a day and is stuck living in the basement.

08:03I know an entrepreneur who works 5 hours a day and has built and sold three companies for $100 million plus each. The value isn't in how many hours you work, but where you focus your attention, awareness and consciousness. That last part is so, so, so crucial.

08:19And another caveat that has to be made here is that you have to understand that most people. Right, the people that like challenge me working 4 hours a day are usually the kids who don't know what they're doing or are just getting started and or have been brainwashed by this business ideology that come in.

08:35And since they have so much time on their hands, they think they have to fill it with work when they don't realize that most people that are actually going to see some success are going to be forced to focus on the levers in the high value activities.

08:46It's going to be people at the 9 to 5 job that have the pressure to get out because they hate that situation and they're going to have to dedicate one hour, one hour, that's it every single morning to actually making the business work. And they're going to make it work faster than the little kid who is working 14 hour days, simply because they just procrastinate the entire time and think they're making progress when they're not.

09:07And so what's that? If 9 to 5 people can build a side income with one hour a day and scale that up as they build leverage, as they build an audience, because that compounds what is so crazy about working one hour a day, There's nothing crazy about it.

09:22It's crazy to work longer than that. Most people aren't increasing their skill level. They are increasing the amount of time that they spend at their current skill level for absolutely no reason. And so shameless plug. I share all of this in my Digital Economics Masterclass for Product izing yourself or turning yourself into the business.

09:40There is the four hour workday philosophy and there's the levers that you have to focus on because people just don't understand what to do. And no, you don't need to buy a course. That's not what I'm getting at here. I'm just saying if you want all of the systems that I use and the things that are valuable enough to put into a course which I talk about here and there, of course.

09:56But if you want to invest in some form of education, that is 1/40, the cost of a college degree, that can make you ten times more.

Why 4 Hours?

10:04Go ahead and check it out. So now why do I only work 4 hours a day? Because there's a glaring problem with the over workers 14 hour a day. Lifestyle over work is the antagonist of holistic development, and holism is the catalyst to exponential growth towards self-transcendence.

10:19People wonder why I work 3 to 4 hours a day on average, and I wonder why they don't if they value self-actualization and actually making it to the next level of their life. For me to illustrate this, think of a talent tree or skill tree in a video game.

10:33So here's a graphic where you have mind, body, spirit in business and you have levels going up the left side. And now you have to understand that it's not just linear development across all of these domains of life. They're interconnected. It's a web of problems that are dependent on each other to be solved.

10:49So in order to get to, let's say, level four of business, then you're going to have to get to level four plus of mind, body or spirit, or if you want to reach true self-actualization. And the spiritual people that think business is an unnecessary way to reach that point are going to fail.

11:07Right. And they're not going to realize it because they're neglecting the development of a huge domain of their life, which is financial development and the development of their life's work, which is the vessel for creation creation. Your divine gift and business is the vessel for contributing to humanity, which is something greater than you that is bridged by spirit.

11:28It is fulfillment. And so the whole there's like common advice to focus on one thing and it's good advice, but that it completely ignores the fact that in order to focus on one thing, you have to focus on the things, the multitude of things that allow you to focus on that one thing, like if you can't start a business yet because you don't have the time or you don't have the money or you don't have whatever, then what is the problem standing in the way that you have to bring your focus on so you can bring your focus back to that main thing that you want.

The Psychology (And Futility) Of 9-5 Jobs

11:56So now that we have that base, we need to talk about the psychology and futility of 9 to 5 jobs. So let's open this can of worms by making a hard distinction between work and rest. We will classify work as productivity mode and rest as creativity mode.

12:11So here's another graphic that I've created before on the Focus Matrix. So there are four corners of focus that you can be kind of tapped into at any given time. These are states of mind, These aren't permanent. They all kind of mix into each other.

12:25But you can kind of get the point of what I'm saying here where there's unconscious narrow focus, there's unconscious open focus, there's conscious neuro focus, and there's conscious open focus. And so with productivity mode, this is a state of narrow, focused attention.

12:39You are fixated on solving a problem that a specific task presents, and it's almost always accompanied by a specific pressure or stress to perform right like that. I feel like this is human nature and more people need to accept it, that we move better when we have pressure and that procrastination is kind of a good thing.

12:55But mindful procrastination where you shouldn't really care about your work until it's coming closer to the actual time, where then you're consciously and narrowly focused on the task at hand and you knock it out in a ten times better fashion than if you were to spread that work out.

13:10At least that's how it's always work for me and the people that I've talked to. And so another thing is that you like this state isn't necessarily bad, right? Being stressed and all this stuff isn't bad. It's a mode of being and you have to contrast the two.

13:22You have to balance out the creativity and productivity. So in psychology, the productivity mode is best illustrated by the task positive network in the brain that is active during attention demanding task and includes our conscious attention toward the external environment.

13:36So creativity mode is an open focus state of attention. You do not fixate on a stress related task, but you can still be focused on a task or a goal, but you're not really actively paying attention to it. You're not thinking about work. And so you can note this phenomenon when you are like at the gym or in the shower or going on a hike or going on a walk or any other form of rest.

13:57I'm not talking about sitting around drinking wine and shoveling ice cream down your throat. I'm talking about actual rest, not laziness. So in psychology, this state is best illustrated by the default mode network that activates when we shift from outward to inward focused cognition.

14:13And a beautiful thing here is that the default mode network. So when you are not working, your brain is more active. Do you know what that means? That means that you are going to solve more problems, have more ideas, have more insights to actually channel into your work when you take more rest.

14:30So the problem is that over workers don't realize that habits are not only what you do, but who you are. So a state of mind like productivity mode can be conditioned into your mind. You can be brainwashed into working 14 hours a day and you can live in that narrow state of stress in a way and for too long to the point where it starts to wreak havoc on your health, which is going to even further decrease the effects or impact of your business.

14:56And that's just the thing, is that you don't care why, Because you don't know. You don't realize it because it's a slow drag into this lower state of being that you just see as normal because the change isn't immediate and your current level of awareness or consciousness doesn't allow you to grasp at the higher rung of the ladder because it's clouded by fog.

15:16Your life is so mechanical and known that it never crosses your mind that there is an unknown that can benefit you. You're identity feels threatened at the thought that you could be making more progress by working 3 to 4 hours a day and you're afraid of the unknown lifestyle that you could be thrown into.

15:31Right? You're it's natural for you to be working 12 to 14 hours right now. And if you were to just drastically shift to 3 to 4 hours a day, you would hate it. And I don't blame you. That's just human nature. That's how all change is in your life.

15:45So in this case, the ego constricts its grips on your way of living and you keep doing what you have always been doing. So I'm not saying that productivity mode is bad. It's actually one of the most enjoyable states you can be in, right? The flow state.

15:58But of course flow state also transfers into open state of focus, like being in nature, having some form of challenge, etc., etc.. But it's so enjoyable because it's so secure, certain and focused, so that negative thoughts don't replicate in your mind.

16:11And most hardworking entrepreneurs would scoff at the fact that they are the exact same as a 9 to 5 worker. But they are. And the best way to explain this is with the Skill Challenge match, which I learn from my high tech set me high. So you can see here there's a challenge level going up the left skill level across the bottom.

16:30There's anxiety and boredom on either side of the flow channel. And when your skill level matches the challenge level of any given situation, that is when you are in flow. But what people don't realize is that this has to continue evolving.

16:44Eventually a challenge becomes normal to you so that it's easy and then you get bored with it. Or if you aim too high and your skill doesn't match, then you get anxious. And so these things have to continue evolving and both working 12 to 14 hours a day as an entrepreneur or working the same mechanical 9 to 5 job every single day.

17:01It prevents your personal evolution and it is dangerous for your psyche. There is no higher ladder rung. You may be making more progress in business and taking in the money, but what about the things that actually matter in life that that money contributes to?

17:16And if you have a reaction to that of like, oh, the like money doesn't matter. I'm not saying that money doesn't matter. I'm saying that it matters a lot. I'm saying there are other things in your life that actually need cultivation and appreciation and attention.

17:30And so I talk about that phenomenon in the video. The life is a video game, but challenge narrows the mind on a problem that is standing in the way of a goal, which is the driver of evolution. We all feel the pull towards something greater than ourselves, right?

17:44And then as we are pulled towards that and our desire to reach that higher state of existence happens, we meet problems that must be solved. And if we are ignoring problems, aside from just the money problems, because we're working 12 to 14 hours a day, then we're not going to able to reach that point.

18:02We're not going to fulfill our purpose of being on this earth. And so, as I said, all of this has to evolve the challenges you take on in life have to evolve. Your skill has to continue increasing to match stagnation equals death. And in order to reach new levels of challenge, to focus your attention, you must never stop learning to stack new skills and perspectives, increase the complexity of your character to be able to even perceive the challenge, solve deeper problems in your life so you don't get trapped in the superficial.

18:28This is my gripe with most 9 to 5. They inevitably come with a cap on both your income and your development. I see 9 to 5 jobs as a stepping stone. They breed complacency and are dangerous for your psyche challenges. What makes life fun and interesting?

18:41If you halt your personal evolution by never pursuing something more, you lose purpose and fulfillment. Now, of course, most people have their own goals and people can achieve a sustained level of happiness at a 9 to 5 job. But I'm not speaking to those people, right?

18:56I'm supposed to be a creator. I'm supposed to be myself. I'm supposed to get across my beliefs. I'm supposed to have some form of a niche audience. You're supposed to disagree with me on some things. And this may be one of them. But again, I'm not speaking to those people.

19:08I'm speaking to you or else you wouldn't be watching this. You wouldn't even be curious about this. You wouldn't have that desire for more.

Creativity & Leverage

19:15If the work doesn't require creativity delegated, automate it or leave it. That's a classic quote from naval creativity is the balance to productivity, because a constant need to be productive leads to a constant state of stress. And stress just closes your mind, often clouds your actual critical, critical thinking skills and leads to you living an overly superficial life and this impacts every other area of your life, like your relationship with your friends and loved ones.

19:41Your ability to recover from health related activities, your mental capacity and development which dictates your future level of true wealth. Four hour workdays, singular focus and meaningful work is becoming the norm on small pockets of the Internet, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

19:55Ancient Romans and Greeks Steve Jobs, Charles Darwin, and an ever growing list of visionaries, Strategists and innovators attribute their success to surprisingly low work times, accompanied by an abundance of restful activities like long walks.

20:08When we see someone with a respectable body of creative work, we assume that they just work long hours and that they obsess into the night over the details of their next piece. And they may. But obsessing and thinking and contemplating, that's not work.

20:21That's rest. That's the default mode network going off and you having inward focused cognition to actually bring better, more impactful ideas to your focused output. And so when we look at reality, we see the opposite, like Charles Darwin arriving at his study at 8:00 after his morning walk in breakfast, he would work for an hour and a half, take a break to read the mail and write letters, then return to more serious work where he conducted his experiments by noon, Darwin would stop his workday and head out on a long walk.

20:48After reading and answering a few more letters, he would take a nap, take another walk, and return to his study for another work block. 3 to 5 hours of focused work paired with active rest seems to be the sweet spot for most impactful creatives.

21:01And so if they can change culture and business and society at large, why can't corporate workaholics do the same? They can't. It's impossible. And so if you're wondering how to do this or how to do focus work, I've talked about this before in both the four hour workday video and it's called like How to Change Your Life in six Months.

21:17My Deep work routine. Both are good videos, but now we need to talk about the new currency. Like why is creativity so important? Creativity and leverage are obviously very important here.

The New Currency

21:26But why? Because first, how do you make money? First you need attention, and second, you need a product or service to direct that attention. And third, you need to understand the process of guiding attention throughout that journey from your brand to your newsletter, to your lead magnet to your product, to other social media platforms inside of a long form, let's say YouTube video.

21:43How are you going to hold attention? It all comes from ideas. And so if you aren't creative and you don't have ideas, then everything about your brand suffers and you are going to automatically go and learn direct response marketing. So you have all of these framework frameworks and templates for manipulating people's attention and holding it with something that isn't by your own design.

22:05It's not creative. It doesn't help further the understanding in the niche that you were trying to advance understanding in it becomes so shallow, so fast. I've been in that position and so my funnel is simple. I write a big idea centric newsletter every week.

22:20I write three punchy and memorable tweets. Every day I repurpose them to all platforms. My new my newsletter is my YouTube script. I teach you how I write my newsletters in my course to our writer, which is very like idea generation centric and talks about productivity and creativity mode.

22:35In a more practical fashion. You must capture, hold and nurture their attention with ideas. Ideas are the new currency. Modern success is mental warfare, creativity, rest, and short work hours are the catalyst. This is something that I realized late in my journey is that if you don't prioritize depth, you won't be remembered.

22:54Because think about it. I was on a podcast with Matt Gray. Not sure when that's going to be released, but maybe you can find it after this video is that I made the realization that my tweets maybe hold 5 seconds worth of attention, right? And so if I write tweets over time, that's just a bunch of like scattered attention.

23:10It's not held for a long amount of time. But then when I read a book, like when I see an idea on Twitter, after holding that 5 seconds of attention, I see the tweet and then I automatically read relate it to a book that I've already read. And I attribute that idea to that author, right?

23:24If I read anything about spirituality, it goes straight to Eckhart Totally, because I read the book and I invested six, seven, 8 hours of my attention into that book, right? Power in this modern world is determined by how much attention you hold over time.

23:39And frankly, the short form tweets, reels, shorts, tiktoks, etc. that's not going to do it. That's not going to build your authority. That's not going to make you memorable. And frankly, that's not going to make you meaningful money. It's going to make you superficial, shallow, short term money.

23:53And so this is why I'm so big on longform newsletter, YouTube podcast, book writing, and fueling that with the top of funnel socials that are easier to grow on by writing short form content. And the other thing is that like, yeah, it's a difficult game.

24:07It's going to be fucking difficult. Well, boo who write the newsletter is going to take a long time to write and actually get good at the YouTube videos are going to take even longer. It's because you have to increase your skill to match the challenge of actually being an impactful creator.

24:20If this is your life's work, which it is going to be for, I believe, 80% of the population over the coming 50 years, then what else is there to do? Spend your time on it.

The Fill-Empty-Use Framework For A Holistic Lifestyle

24:30So let's end this off on a practical note by going over what we previously gone over, but I call it my fill empty use framework. Fill your brain in the afternoons with books, learning and socialization, empty your brain before bed with journaling, planning and meditation.

24:44Use your brain in the morning with creation, output and focus. That is the overly simplistic tweet that I had at some point and it went viral, so I started creating more lifestyle and productivity content. But let's break it down a bit more in the afternoons.

24:59Fill your mind through curiosity pursuit to collect kernels of truth, to integrate into your worldview, skill acquisition to increase your value in the marketplace. That continues to change. If you stop learning, you die intellectual conversation so you don't get trapped in a narrow perspective.

25:15You need to test your ideas with an open mind, avoid debate and argument, all of which can be used as the fuel for your creative work in the evenings. Empty your mind through self-reflection to know mistakes, lessons and directions that you would have missed otherwise.

25:29Reality mapping or documenting what you learn for the day and how it connects to other ideas so you can create something of value, spiritual connection so you don't get trapped in doing mode. Embrace being to balance out stress in the morning.

25:42Use your mind through focus. Work to channel your discoveries and practice your craft priority projects to have direction for your work. This is the only way to produce something that you can pass off to other people and get paid for doing so.

25:54And birth of intensity. So you feel a sense of accomplishment. First thing in the morning you can be at ease during your rest knowing that you knocked out what needs to be done. Ending it here, like subscribe courses in the description. Other free guides like a planner seven days to genius idea Challenge and other things.

26:11Just check out the description and yeah, enjoy the rest of your day.