Graham Cochrane (00:03.766)
Most people think you get rich first and then working less is the reward. But what if that's completely backward? In 2009, I was broke. I was on food stamps. And as a brand new dad with no job, just starting a business out of my spare bedroom. And I had a mentor tell me to do something that sounded completely insane. He told me to stop working one day a week.
Indefinitely. Not after I made it, not once business was steady, right now while I had nothing. I thought he was crazy, but I trusted him and I did it anyway. And it became the single decision that changed everything about how my business grew from there. By the end of this, you're gonna have a simple way to start working less.
Now by the end of this episode Now by the end of this episode you'll have a
Graham Cochrane (01:10.466)
Now by the end of this episode, I'm gonna give you a simple way to work less starting this week and why that might be the smartest business move you ever made.
Graham Cochrane (01:42.819)
I want you to lean into today's episode because this is the distinction that so many people get wrong. They mistakenly think that rest is a reward, free time is a reward, a relaxed schedule and calendar is a reward that comes later, one day, once I've made it.
And whatever that looks like for you in your brain, if you were to stop and ask yourself, well, what does that mean once I've made it? It's probably a certain amount of money you're making every month or a year. It's probably a certain level of impact or growth in your business. It might be a specific goal you have in mind once I accomplish this. I know guys who won't take time off until they sell their company. We're talking years, decades even.
To have a multi-seven figure exit, multi-eight figure exit, some nine-figure exit, meaning they won't slow down, take time off until they've crushed it and grinded and hustled and built this thing and sold it to private equity or someone else and cashed in $100 million, $10 million, $5 million, even a million dollars. And that, my friend, is completely backwards.
There's a couple of problems with that. One is, what if you don't make it till then? What if you die? What if the business fails? What if you put in all this work and you never reach that goal? Then what are you gonna do? Keep working until you do in another way, in another business, in another endeavor, in another industry. And it becomes this one day I'll rest kind of thing. So you never get the rest. But here's the real problem. That's not even the real problem. The real problem is.
You've got it backwards. Rest and time off isn't the reward for your success or wealth or hard work. It is the strategy. It is the way to be successful and to get rich and to have more impact. And so if you even want the $10 million exit, $100 million exit, or a million dollars a year cash flow, you must learn to work less now because that ironically is the mechanism by which you will get rich.
Graham Cochrane (04:01.42)
And it sounds crazy, but I'm living proof that it works. So when I started my business, again, I get this question a lot. I wrote a book that I get made fun of by certain people called The Effortless Business. And they go, Effortless Business, BS. I literally had a good friend of mine who's a brilliant entrepreneur say, What's the new book? I said, It's called The Effortless Business. He said, BS. It's like it's like offensive to him. It's offensive to a lot of people, or it sounds
Clickbaity. I don't know what it sounds like to some people, but I get made fun of. the effortless business must be nice. It must be nice. I get it. Once you've made millions of dollars, then you can have this really chill, effortless business. And I just wish people would listen to anything I have to say. I opened the book explaining this because I don't think people understand. I have always, always had an effortless business.
It has become even more effortless, but it's always been effortless. The most I've ever worked in my business is 32 hours a week. That's four days a week, a full eight hour days. And there is a reason behind that. I didn't come up with this. I am very fortunate that I had a mentor say something very challenging to me when I was starting my business in the middle of a financial crisis when the world was melting down, and I was a new husband and a new father and a new homeowner, and I
A new resident of Tampa, I'd moved a thousand miles away from home, and we had nothing because I'd lost two jobs and we had burned through our savings and we were on government assistance on the SNAP program, food stamps. And I felt it was the time to start a business. And so I figured, well, I'm gonna have to lock myself in my spare bedroom because I didn't intend to use that bedroom as an office, but you know, life happens.
And I'm gonna lock the door and I'm gonna put my head down, I'm gonna grind it out and work as much as I possibly can. And I was overwhelmed and I was stressed and I felt clueless. I felt like I had no resources, no help. I didn't know a single entrepreneur, and I didn't have a mentor that was an entrepreneur, but I had a past college professor, Dr. Bill Evans, and he was a guy who was successful in life, successful in marriage.
Graham Cochrane (06:24.728)
He had a a peace about him. Like he was calm. He was never like ruffled. He was never stressed. And he had wisdom. And so I just was like, who can I talk to that's a little further ahead in life than me, who has wisdom, who has peace, who has the qualities that I want. He wasn't even an entrepreneur. He was a college professor, but he had figured something out and he was the only guy I knew to talk to. So I called him up, said, Bill.
Know what to do. I'm starting this business. I don't know anything about business. And I'm stressed and I'm tired. And so, you know, I'm working as best I can Monday through Friday, trying to keep regular work hours. We're at the same time, we're planning this church. And if you don't know what church planning is, it's starting a business basically, it's starting a nonprofit, but you don't get paid. I've never gotten paid for any work I've done in ministry. And I've I've put in 20-hour weeks in that church for years.
didn't get paid a dime. We did it because we believed in the mission. All of us just put in our time because we cared about it. And I was doing that on the weekends. Like I I was leading the band. So what that meant was Saturdays, I would get up in the morning, I would drive over to the storage unit, meet up with the rest of the bandmates. We would load out all the band equipment and the instruments and the sound system from the storage unit, drive over to the rehearsal space, set up a whole sound system and the whole band, and then run our sets, work on songs, write songs.
tear it all down, take it back to the the storage unit. and I would be home by one or two o'clock in the afternoon on Saturdays. That was every Saturday. And then Sundays was church. And it was set up, tear down church on the college campus of University of South Florida. And so we would go to the storage unit in the morning, get all the stuff, take it to the conference center where we had a room that we were reserved. And then we'd set it all up there, do church, tear it all down, take it back. We would get home two or three o'clock in the afternoon on Sunday if we were lucky.
And so those are my weekends. So they weren't very restful. I was functionally a volunteer on Saturdays and Sundays, and I was working for free for myself Monday through Fridays. I said, Bill, I'm tired and unsuccessful. And this is like a month or two into my business. He said, Graham, I've got good news, bad news. The bad news is you're not taking a Sabbath. And that's why you're you're stressed out. A Sabbath, if you're not a a Christian or a Jew, you don't read the Bible,
Graham Cochrane (08:50.196)
It it is a practice of taking one day off a week from work. And it's the way God designed things. If you look in the creation story in the book of Genesis, he worked for six days and he rested on the seventh day, not because he was tired, because he's God. He's not tired. He's infinitely powerful, but because he was setting a pattern for us as his creation. Six days you shall work, one day you shall rest. It's one of the Ten Commandments to keep the Sabbath and honor it.
And so it's one of the things that God really, really cares about, that we do not work seven days a week. This is why Chick-fil-A takes Sundays off and closes Sundays, right? This is why historically in the United States, there were no businesses open on Saturdays and Sundays because the Jews celebrate the Sabbath Friday night, you know, Friday sundown to Saturday sundown. So Saturday was their day off. That was the traditional Shabbat, the Sabbath. And then Christians started to celebrate
The Sabbath on Sunday, because that was the day, the Lord's Day, they called it the day Jesus rose from the dead. And so to honor the Jews and the Christians, because our nation was started by Judeo-Christians, Saturdays and Sundays, everything was closed forever. Until people were like, hey, we can make more money if we open up on Saturdays and Sundays, and people stopped really caring about spiritual practices for a long time. And long story short, you know, the weekends are no longer weekends for a lot of people. And I understand that. So
He was saying, bro, you got you don't have a Sabbath. That's why you're struggling. It's you're you're breaking the design, right? God's design. And when you go against God's design, things don't work very well. There's a reason why he designed things the way they work. It's it's better to flow with God's design than against it. He said, But I got good news for you. You can take your Sabbath day on Friday and you start taking Fridays off. If you can't take Saturday and you can't take Sunday, you gotta take Fridays off. I said, Bill.
I appreciate that and I understand what you're saying, but you gotta understand, I can't make any money in five days a week. How is it gonna help me to drop down to four? I'm struggling to make even $500 a month working five days a week. How is going to four days gonna help me? He said, You need to trust me. And even though I thought it was a crazy statement, because I trusted the person, the man.
Graham Cochrane (11:12.374)
I did what he said. Fun fact, by the way, every time I've had a mentor and I've done what he or she has told me to do, I have won. Do not ask for mentorship. Do not hire a coach. Do not pay for a program. Do not sit down for coffee with a mentor. Get his or her advice and feedback and not do what they say. You are not smarter than them. And this isn't about intelligence. This is about you needing advice at about a certain area of your life.
You respecting a mentor, he or she has done the thing you want to do. They give you advice. If you disregard it and don't run their play, you are arrogant and foolish and your life is going to miss out. So make sure you do what your mentors say. There's a reason why they're telling you what to do. You don't have to become exactly like your mentor. You could never become exactly like him or her. You are your own unique person, but your mentors have advice for a reason. So I have become successful in life largely because when I find a mentor.
And I hire that person or I spend time with that person. I do what they say. Okay, rant over. So I did. I started to take Fridays off, and it became something that my family called family fun Fridays. Shea and I would take our little baby daughter, Chloe, at the time, we'd go do something together as a family. And then when Vera came along, we did something the four of us. We'd go to the zoo, we'd go to the beach, we'd just go to the neighborhood pool. We would just go run some errands, but we'd just that something fun together. We were broke, so we didn't have a whole lot of money. We'd go to Barnes Noble.
share one dessert from the cafe in Barnes and Noble bookstores and read books on the shelf and then put them back on the shelf because we didn't have enough money to buy the books. So that's what we did for fun. And I still love doing that. Although I buy books now. I have way too many books, but you can't have too many books. But I started taking Fridays off. Everything changed. Everything changed about my business. Not only did everything change, not only did I go from making $10,000 in my first year
Making $65,000 in my second year to $120,000 in my third, to $250,000 in my fourth, to $500,000 in my fifth.
Graham Cochrane (13:19.522)
But I got obsessed with this idea of working less and making more. That every January I would ask myself this question: how could I work less this year? And not only make the same amount of money I made last year, but make more? And let me explain three reasons why this works. Number one.
Graham Cochrane (13:43.339)
If you don't understand what I'm about to teach you, life is going to be way too hard for you. But if you start to understand this one law I'm going to teach you, your life will get easier and more successful. It is simple, but nobody takes advantage of it. There is something called Parkinson's Law. You can look it up. It's a thing. And Parkinson's law states that work expands to fill the amount of time you've allotted for its completion.
I will say it again. Parkinson's law states that work expands to fill the allotted time you've given for that task's completion. Work expands. Work always expands. What does that mean? That means if you were in college or high school and your professor gave you seven days to write a paper, it would take you seven days to write that paper. Because you would think about it, hem and haw about it, you would ideate, you would.
Wait to the last minute, whatever it was, you'd eventually get it done in seven days. But if that professor, same professor, gave you only 24 hours notice to get that same paper turned in, it would magically take you 24 hours. Same output, same result, way less time. And I would argue your 24-hour paper would be better than your seven-day paper. Well, that doesn't make sense, Graham. Actually, it makes way more sense than you think.
Because when you have an incredibly short deadline, you must focus. And when you focus, you end up doing the things that really matter. When you give yourself a lot of time to do something, you're opening the door for a lot of distraction. This is why my friend Dr. Benjamin Hardy, who's a brilliant author and psychologist and entrepreneur, in his really, really, really good book, The Science of Scaling.
And I interviewed him on this show. You can look at that episode. He talks about why you need not only incredibly large goals, 10X goals, but you need incredibly impossibly short deadlines to achieve those goals. Because if you gave yourself 10 years to 10X your business, it allows a million different possibilities or paths to achieve that. And they're all distractions. But if you give yourself three years to 10x your business, there's probably only one or two paths that are going to get you there.
Graham Cochrane (16:08.106)
That focus shows you the better path. The better path. So five days of availability to run your business, Monday through Friday. If you're like most people, I'm going to work Monday through Friday. Five days of availability doesn't mean five days of necessary work. It just means you're working for five days, but it doesn't mean it's all necessary work. Does this make sense? Removing a day is another way of saying the same thing. Removing a day. Let's say I you take me up on this and you say, I'm going stop working on Fridays.
Removing a day doesn't cut out a day of output.
This is the big distinction. Is you're not removing a day of output. You're not saying no to productivity. You're not saying yes to less out output. No, no, no, no. You're removing a day of waste. You're removing a day of waste. And most people have no idea how much time they're wasting in their week. So what Parkinson's law does, and it's not a thing that you do, it's just a reality that you are living and you just aren't aware of that reality.
If you say, well, Graham, it takes me seven days to f to run my business. That's because you've allowed it to take seven days. If you just decided, I'm not going to do it in seven days, I'm going to do it in six, it will work because it's a decision. Your work will only expand to whatever time you allow it to complete. The reason you have seven days worth of work is because you allow yourself to have seven days worth of work. Like lean in for a second. There's infinite work to be done.
Like, when do you think you're ever going to be air quotes done? Like, this is why this idea of checking off to-do lists is so silly. The to-do list is never done. Until you die, there's always more you could be doing. There's more I could be doing unless you protest to the contrary and say, nope, I'm only going to work Monday through Thursday, no Fridays. Until you decide to do that.
Graham Cochrane (18:12.524)
You're owned, my friend. You are owned by work that is naturally expanding. Parkinson's law is working against you. The moment you say, No, I'm taking Fridays off, Parkinson's Law is working for you.
Okay, here's how this works. Parkinson's law is a reality, but another reality, another law or principle that helps you then do something about Parkinson's law is Pareto's principle, or the Pareto distribution, or the 80-20 rule, which states that 80% of your results are coming from 20% of your efforts. Another way to look at it is that 80% of your efforts.
Are only contributing to 20% of your results. It's lopsided, meaning you don't have five full days of good work in you. Excuse me, Pareto's principle would say that you have one day of good work in you. If you work Monday through Friday, 20% of that week is one day. Let's say it's Monday. The work you do on Monday generates 80% of your results. The rest of the stuff you do on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday is generating at best 20% of your results.
So the point is, not all of your tasks are created equal. And yet we treat them as equal. I got these 50 tasks, I gotta get them all in this week. That's a really barbaric and elementary level way of looking at your tasks, assuming they're all equal, but they're not. There's certain tasks that you do in your business that actually drive revenue. There's certain tasks that you do in your business that actually create clients. There's certain tasks that you do in your business that actually move the needle to reach your income goals.
The rest is just nice to have, maybe need to have, but it doesn't move the business forward. Maybe it's like supporting a client or a customer, or maybe it's some administrative task like getting your accounting done or your bookkeeping done, but it doesn't grow the business. Most of what you're doing in the week is noise. It's not signal. Posting to Instagram, posting to TikTok, getting to inbox zero, tweaking the buttons on your website.
Graham Cochrane (20:25.026)
Hemming and hawing over the exact thumbnail design. Although you could argue the thumbnail is the most important thing, but only 20% of your thumbnail decisions lead to 80% of the results of your thumbnail on YouTube. Do you see what I'm saying? Like there is a reality in which you fill your week with tasks, but they're not all equal. There's only 20% of what you're doing that really matters. Your job is to figure out what those 20% are and then eliminate, automate.
Or delegate the remaining and in that order. So one activity you could do today is to write down every single task you do in your business every day, every week, and every month. Because some tasks are monthly, some tasks are weekly, some tasks are daily. And then circle the tasks that require your face, your voice, or your specific skill set. Those tell you that these are the ones that only I can do. But those aren't even all your 20%. Of those circled,
The tasks that only you can do, which of those lead to direct directly lead to revenue, directly lead to business, directly lead to client creation? That's your 20%. Everything else you need to look at through the lens of can this be eliminated? Like if I just stop doing this altogether, does my business crumble? Right? Like I don't have people posting to TikTok for me because posting to TikTok doesn't grow my business. I don't have people creating
Reels for me all the time because creating reels doesn't grow my business. I don't have people responding to every YouTube comment for me because responding to every YouTube comment doesn't grow my business. There's things that I just eliminated. Okay? And then there are things that I can't eliminate, but I don't need to hire a person to do. I I can automate. There's AI, there's tools, there's all kinds of things you can do. Can we get a tool to automate this? Because it's gonna be cheaper, faster, more efficient. And then everything else that's left that
is absolutely essential to the business, but not essential that I do it, then I delegate and hire someone else to do it.
Graham Cochrane (22:31.522)
Does this make sense? Parkinson's law and the 80-20 rule paired together will change your life. So that's the reality in which you can start taking Fridays off. In fact, you must, because the moment you do, something magical happens. Here's reason number two: you become refueled for the other four days. So if the reason number one is Parkinson's law, you're wasting time. The moment you take Fridays off, you immediately eliminate
A good chunk of your waste, you become more efficient, more effective. And just by virtue of doing the exercise I just gave you, you now know what actually drives your business. And so you can double down on that. You can double click on that and do more of that. That's what will grow your business. The reason why taking Fridays off was so good for my business, reason number one is I realized a lot of what I was doing isn't necessary. Cause I was able to still do the things that grew my business in four days, which made me realize I don't think I even need four days. This is why I only work five hours a week.
Because I have I'm I'm maniacal, but I've figured out, I only need a good five hours of my time in the office any given week to generate multiple millions of dollars a year. So why would I do more than that when I could just be spending time playing Nintendo Switch with my daughter or going to the beach or taking my wife on a vacation or just reading a good book by the pool? Like why? Right? So
Taking Fridays off isn't the reward, it is a mechanism to eliminating your waste and getting efficient. Number two, it refuels you for the other four days.
Graham Cochrane (24:10.39)
Rich Litfin says space is where miracles happen.
King David, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wrote in Psalm 46, 10, be still and know, right? And the word there to be still is the word rafa, which means to relax or lie down on a sofa, or literally it's translated in the book of Exodus as be lazy. Like chill the bleep out, and then the knowing Yada will come. If you want to know what to do next in your business, you need to relax. You need to take.
Break. Working harder does not scale your business. That is a very false American Western thought process, and it's toxic and it just isn't very smart. It doesn't work. Taking regular breaks away from your workplace, away from your typical environment, go to the park, go to a hotel lobby, go on a walk, take your spouse out to dinner, just do something different.
You get refueled. You get the rest you need so that you're sharp, yes. But I believe innovation, creativity, ideas, solutions to your problems that didn't seem apparent manifest when you relax. Psalm 46, 10. Relax and the knowing comes. Be still. Lie down, be lazy, lay down on the sofa is literally what the Hebrew word says. Loosen, be loose, right? Just
just limp. You just fall down limp is the imagery there of Rafa. Relax and the knowing, the knowledge comes. And I've shared this imagery before, but Ruth Ruth Haley Barton wrote this beautiful book, Invitation to Silence and Solitude. And in it she uses this imagery of the jar of river water. Our lives are like a jar of river water, and we're all shooking up because we're running like a mile a minute. It's all cloudy. There's there's sediment in there, right? Swirling around.
Graham Cochrane (26:10.71)
If you set the jar down and just let it be still, eventually the sediment falls to the bottom and the water becomes clear. If you want clarity of what to do next in your business to not just make more money, but multiply, like have a 30-fold increase in your business and insane impact, you need to sit still one day a week and rest.
Watch the clarity come. Clarity doesn't come from doing a lot. It comes from rest. Letting your mind rest. So refueling and resting on your Friday or your day off, whether it's just running the errands, getting the car washed, getting out of your environment, it it's not a 2009-only experiment that I was running back when this was happening to me. This is my reality today. I don't work on Fridays. Fridays are my date day.
With Shay, where we go take a walk, we go to the gym, we go get a lunch, we run errands, we go back to Target, we return stuff, but we're hanging out, paling around, not in the office, not thinking about work. I also don't work on Saturdays or Sundays. In the summer, I'm not even working on Mondays or Tuesdays. And I like it so much I might not even go into the office at all on Mondays and Tuesdays anymore. Just consolidate everything down into a Wednesday or Thursday. this is my reality. It's not my reward, it's how I started and how I've continued.
Because it's in these moments where I'm going for a walk, or I'm just at the gym, or I'm in the car line picking up my kid from school, or I I'm just doing something different, and ideas come. Ideas for frameworks, ideas for clients, ideas for content, ideas for my next book, ideas for cool events I could put together, solutions to problems, a name I should I should reach out to. Hey, I was thinking about you. Is there a reason we should talk? Getting connected to somebody. This is a superpower.
The space is where miracles happen. And the stillness, the relaxing, the rest is where the knowledge and clarity come. Okay, does this make sense? All right. And can we just like finish this in in a a sort of history lesson? The five-day workweek, really the 40-hour work week spread over Monday through Friday, is a made-up construct. It didn't exist.
Graham Cochrane (28:36.672)
Until the late 1800s, early 1900s, when the US government and the Ford Motor Company kind of pioneered this concept. And the reality was back then it was actually a reduction of what a typical work week was where people were overworked in factories. And so they were trying to have some, you know, legislation and some business practices around the idea of, hey, let's protect our employees so they're only working Monday through Friday. And so I think there was a lot of good that was trying to be done there.
Let's not overwork them. But the point is, it was arbitrary from like 130 years ago. 40 hours, Monday through Friday. And yet, we're still doing the same thing. We're still doing the same thing today. People who were working nine to five Monday through Friday quit their jobs, they start a business. And what do they do? They operate in that same Monday through Friday, nine to five mold. Only now they
They actually try to work harder and longer because A, they really love their work and they believe in it, which is what a concept, right? You actually will work harder on something you believe in. But B, there's a lot of nerves there because they're not making any money yet. So they just default to what they know, which is the harder you work, the more successful you will become. But that's not what they know, that's what they've been told. And it's a lie. Hard work doesn't lead to success. Smart work leads to success. Rest and smart work lead to success. So there's this historical mold that was never
The right mold. It was just a mold that we all have been fit into and no one's decided to break out of it. Except for me, maybe Tim Ferris, who pioneered a lot of this with his seminal work, The Four Hour Work Week. Such a great read. But it never made sense to me to work 40 hours just because. That's that if you truly are resisting the previous generations and resisting the way things are, and you're going to break the norms and be an entrepreneur, why are you so non-resistant? Why are you so like?
acclimated to this century old mold of a 40 hour work week, five day work week. Like, that doesn't show me that you're really raging against the machine, right? That just shows me that you're compliant to like, well, that's what everyone else has always done. But why why don't you question that? You question everything else about your generation or the way things were or the business model or your job, but you don't question 40 hour work week. Isn't that funny? It's just so ingrained in our head. So question it. It was made up by a bunch of people.
Graham Cochrane (30:59.626)
It's pointless. We know at best from God's design that six days of working was the most any person should work. You should never work more than six. So I'm begging you to at least take one day off. Because at least you're going back to the way God designed you. But I'm telling you, if you're in business, you don't need to work more than four. So whatever you're working right now, if you're working on a Friday, take Fridays off. Take Fridays off.
Again, Parkinson's law, work is just expanding to whatever you're giving it. So give it less and the work will fill that magically. Two, the 80-20 rule, the Pareto distribution, take a look at all your tasks and realize where you're wasting. Realize that not all your tasks are created equal. There's only a small amount that actually are moving the needle. That gives you the confidence to stop coming to the office five days a week because you know I'm still doing the thing that really matters. I don't worry about doing all this other stuff because I know the things that move the needle.
Creating this show every single week, coaching my clients that paid me a lot of money for results and running my my challenge. Those are the those are the the things that I do that print money. Okay? So you gotta figure out what yours are. Now, if you're hanging with me all the way to this, we're gonna wrap this up. If you're hanging with me and you're like, this makes sense.
Your next step is to just stop taking Fridays off immediately. Until further notice, you no longer come to the office on Fridays. That is not a reward for doing all this work. That is the catalyst to start doing all this work. And you'll see your business grow and your stress level drop. And if you're like, Graham, I'm too afraid to do that. I understand. Let me give you a few variations if that doesn't feel like your cup of tea.
There's a couple of on-ramps to working less and making more. One is just leave two hours earlier each day. So whenever you come in, if you let's say you come into your office on at nine o'clock, instead of leaving at five or six, leave at two or three. Just cut cut out early. Two hours early. Start that. Do that for seven days. Do that for a couple of weeks. See what happens. See what you have time for.
Graham Cochrane (33:18.7)
You might have time to pick up your kid from school. You might have time to go to the gym. You might have time to get a little round of pickleball in. You might have time to just go sit and read a book and be inspired.
The other is to start two hours later. There was a period of time where I started to experiment with coming in at eleven instead of nine. I'd go for long walks. I'd have a long time reading my Bible and praying. I'd have breakfast at home, take my kids to school, take care of some stuff, and I felt like I'm the frickin' man. Cause I'm not having to get into the office like everybody else is scrambling to get on the road to get. I'm not going to go until eleven. There's something powerful about saying I don't go in until eleven.
So come in two hours later. Or you can take a two hour lunch every day. Most entrepreneurs don't take a break for lunch, and if they do, they eat while they work.
If you're working full time, like five days a week or more, you have plenty of time to take a two-hour lunch. There's something very rich about taking two hours off for lunch. It's funny, it's there's a phrase that goes around that's used as a diss, like, ladies who lunch. These ladies that just take these long, two, three hour lunches, they're not really contributing to the world. And I've seen girl on girl crime, by the way, where there's female entrepreneurs that judge other female entrepreneurs that, you know, just take two hours to lunch with their friends and
To me, that just shows how little certain people know and how much judgment there is. But ladies who lunch should be a goal, not a diss. taking two hours lunches is power. It shows that you aren't a slave to your business. Your business serves you. It shows you aren't wasteful in your tasks because nobody needs to be running forty hours a week to run a mil multi million dollar business. Nobody. Nobody, nobody. The most you need is twenty. I've done the math.
Graham Cochrane (35:12.886)
My clients, this is what I'm talking Like you you you do not need more than twenty hours a week to make a million dollars a year. If you're working more than twenty hours a week and you're not hitting a million dollars a year, you're doing it wrong. It's just it's just proven, okay? And I say that to say that let's flip the narrative. Let's not judge people that take two hours for lunch. Let's become the people that take two hour lunches. See, it's the same thing. It's the same principle. You're taking advantage of Parkinson's law, you're re out you're re
realigning your life with the reality of the Pareto distribution, that not all your tasks are equal. There's only a few things that you do every week that really move the needle. And this to me is mature leadership of yourself. This to me is mature entrepreneurship. This to me is not the reward of being rich. This is the mechanism by which you will become rich if you just work around the clock and you fill every moment you have running your business. I can tell you almost
With a guarantee that you will never be successful. And it pains me to say that. But it's true. And there's a reason why I talk about this a lot, because I care about you winning. This isn't a gimmick. This is what I do, is what my clients do, what I help people do. So
Working less isn't your reward for success. It is the lever that creates it. It's not a nice to have. It is a must have to create the life you want.
Now, if you don't have my book, The Effortless Business, you should pick it up. I'll link to it below, but just go to effortlessbusiness.com. It's the only place that's available for sale. The entire premise of this book is that effort fueled businesses fade, but energy fueled businesses flourish. The way you design your work week, the way you design your business model, the way you think about business determines everything.
Graham Cochrane (37:15.308)
And once you realize that the building of an effortless business, the reality is the effortless business isn't the goal or the result of everything you do in this book. The effortless business is the tool to have the high income, low maintenance business in life. It is the tool. It is the strategy. Working less is the strategy, not the reward. And so pick up a copy of the book. It's simple.
Like you'll read it in two hours. Like it will reframe how you're thinking about work and success because most people are thinking about it wrong. And I promise you, it's not a nice to have or a when you're already successful, it can work for you. It is the way to get there. I hope this episode blessed you and encouraged you and helped you. If so, let me know in a comment on YouTube. And if you're listening on an Apple Podcast or Spotify or podcast app of your choice, message me on Instagram at the GrahamCocker and let me know that you're listening.
And what resonated with you. All right, my friend. Take Fridays off. Stop working Fridays. Watch it change your life. Watch it change your business. Report back. Can't wait to see. Have a great one.
