The 80-Hour Myth (Why Hard Work Is Ruining Your Life)

Ever since I could remember, I didn't want to work my life away. And I was pretty observant as a child, and I saw that these anti-roll role models were all around me. I didn't want to wake up at 4:00 a.

m. , drive to work at 5:00 a. m.

, grind away, and get home at 7:00 p. m. because I was trying to support a family, working double shifts, just to be met by a spouse ready to argue or tell me how I could be doing more around the house.

And I'll let you fill in the details there because that's obviously some pentup stuff from the negative aspects of my childhood. While that's not all there was, there was many, many, many positives. But that's why I refused to go that route.

In my teenage years, I was always obsessing over what I could do that would make me the most money with the least amount of work. In college, I was going to class and working part-time. I would spend 2 to three hours a day building side projects and learning via Udemy courses or YouTube.

And when I had my first full-time job, I learned during my one-hour commute with audiobooks, podcasts, or YouTube and procrastinate my work task for an hour or two to build my side businesses at the time. Now, what I'm trying to say is this. I didn't have 12 to 16 hours a day to grind on my side business to make it work.

I had 1 to four hours if I didn't lie to myself about how I could prioritize my time. Now, this is one topic that really pisses me off. Otherwise, I'm pretty stoic.

Like I don't feels weird to say that I get pissed off by this, but I I I read a comment a few days ago from someone on X and it was along the lines of, "Oh, that's easy for you to say. " You're in that position. Beginners don't have that luxury.

Beginners need to grind. But then you go on to read books like 4,000 weeks or rest by Alex Sujang Kim Pong or you actually listen to what Alex Hormosi is saying in some of his videos. Or you read someone like David Shapiro who said that it's a hard grind but it was never really difficult for him and he didn't really work that much or that long.

So on one end you have the hustle bros like work 16 hours a day or you're worth nothing and then you have the other crowd which is like hey you don't have to do that if you know what you're doing. And so I have a better route to show you throughout this video. But here's why I get unnecessarily upset just about this discussion in general.

Because young people have been conditioned to see grinding mindlessly as a status symbol disguised as an effective strategy for achieving success. To me, grinding is not wisdom or a strategy. It's a lack thereof.

I didn't have 16 hours a day when I had a full-time job. I had one to four hours, and I use that to my advantage. And when I started working on my own thing full-time, I worked about the same amount.

People think, "Oh, once I go full-time, I'll just be able to grind out 12 to 16 hours a day. " Your habits now are probably going to be your habits later. You just don't know how to use your time wisely enough to get the results you want.

And I want to make it very clear here that most people think, "Oh, that's impossible. " And they can't muster up the courage to say what they actually want to say, which is, "I don't know how to do that. " And personally now, I've written two books and I've created over 10 products and I'm working on a software startup now.

I'm arguably a very busy guy. But I'm pretty confident in the fact that most people are either wasting their time or just don't know what they don't know. If you are grinding 12 plus hours a day, especially as a beginner, I can guarantee that there is a way to get more results while working less than 4 hours.

In fact, I would argue that if you are working more than four hours, you are at least working on a few wrong things and there is some improvement that can be made. If you don't think that you can improve the kind of work that you do, so you can work less, then you're blind and delusional. It's as simple as that.

You're not perfect. So, you can drop things that don't work that you may be attached to. You can speed up busy work with AI.

And if you haven't started learning how to use AI, then yeah, you're probably going to work longer hours than most people will. And I actually created a free miniourse on this. The only caveat is that I teach my software, Cortex, in it, but you can transfer over everything that you learn to whatever AI app you want to use, but I called it how I systemize my life with AI.

You can find the link in the description to that. I go over how to create a tribe of mentors so you can enhance your thinking by talking to the people that you aspire to be like. I help you create a focus coach that helps you get into flow when you sit down to do work.

And I went over more practical business-like things like how to script YouTube videos or newsletters or how to write social posts that don't feel templated. So go check that out if you'd like. But aside from busy work, you can focus on your strengths and levers.

But you probably just don't want to realize that because you won't fit in with this world that glorifies busyness. The mind is a tricky thing. And if you understand the importance of leisure and leverage, and that could be a catchy book title that goes along with my new book, Purpose and Profit, but if you understand that, your productivity, mind, and lifestyle will transform.

Now, I'm not here to convince you that working 4 hours a day is the only way of doing things. It's one way of doing things and you don't go one way for the entirety of your life. Productivity comes in seasons.

In one season you may work four hours. In another you may work 16. Sometimes it's 6 hours, 2 hours, 8 hours, 10 hours, zero hours.

You can you don't have to work one day or any other number because input versus output often aren't a linear correlation. Sometimes I work 12 to 16 hours a day, but the thing is I don't have to force myself to work that long consistently. So, my purpose with this video is to prove that a sustained 16- hour grind set won't get you as far as you think it will.

Consistent 12 to 16 hour work days is not a personality trait. It is a sign of major dysfunction and a general neglect for how your mind is wired. All I ask is that you finish this video before forming a hard set opinion because even that is a system that will break down when you need it most like your notion productivity system that you forgot about because systems don't last forever.

So, let's talk about the 80our myth. Why we're so addicted to being busy. The creator's paradox.

Creativity is the result of not trying to be creative. Humans are mimedic creatures. We imitate in order to survive and avoid being cast out of our family or our productivity obsessed culture.

Our mind takes the shape of that which allows us to fit in. So, the problem starts with the fact that everyone glorifies the visible extreme. There's something we find inspiring about the young startup Phenom who built a $1 million business in three weeks just from grinding.

It feels relatable. Anyone can do that, right? It makes sense that the longer and harder I work because that's what I've been told to do my entire life, the more likely I am to get what I want, right?

It's just all about working hard, right? Wrong. You and I both know that there is a deeper formula at play.

We both know that a highlight reel on social media spurred by unconscious competence is not reality. We both know that you can spend 10,000 hours writing 10 books just for them to never see more than 50 readers. And that pisses some people off because someone who understands how to distribute a subpar book can sell millions of copies and run laps around you because they focused on what gets results.

Most people are missing the context. They're missing the invisible extreme that actually led to the success of most creatives, visionaries, and strategists. Take Charles Darwin.

You know, the guy who wrote 19 books in his lifetime, discovered the theory of evolution, and changed the world as we know it while working four to five hours a day, followed by lots of long walks, reading, and other leisure that fueled his mind with the ideas that allowed him to accomplish such grand tasks. The difference between you and him is that this was his life's work. It didn't matter how long it took for you.

It's do or die. You either succeed in 6 months or you quit and accept your fate forever, which is laughable and backward. And that constant state of stress and survival definitely isn't helping your cause.

So, when we actually take a look at one, the lifestyles of successful people, and two, how your brain is wired psychologically based on psychological facts, we shine a light on a few things. First is that most of the creatives we admire had very similar routines. They had intense focused work blocks followed by relentless rest that involved a complete disconnection from work.

So you can take David Oglevie who's a legendary advertiser who believed in doing intensive research where he absorbed as much information as possible and then he stopped. He took a break. He understood that once he did that his subconscious would do the work for him.

Your mind is this problem-solving machine and when you leave it alone with information to munch on, it does work for you. So here's a quote from him. Big ideas come from the unconscious.

This is true in art, in science, and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well-informed or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information.

Then unhook your rational thought process. The long walks and the reading and the research and the leisure time of the greats, the people that we look up to is what activates the default mode network or DMN in your brain. That is, when you stop focusing on work, your subconscious continues to do the work for you.

There's studies that show that when you aren't working on something, your brain is just as active than when you were working on that thing. A lot of the time, your brain, when you aren't working, works harder than you. And it does it in a more creative and effective way.

And once it has an idea to present to you, it pops it into your conscious mind. See, shower thoughts that bring novelty and innovation to your work. So, here's a quote from the book rest.

Other scientists have found that the complexity of the DMN shapes our capacity for self-awareness, memory, ability to imagine the future, empathy, and moral judgment. The better developed your DMN, other scientists have found, the better able you are to construct models of other people's minds. In other words, the most effective and result generating work you do is when you don't work at all.

This is an extremely hard pill to swallow for those whose identity is so attached to the grind that their mind will spit out a reaction to that statement before it even has time to think. If that's you, you should go on a walk because that's the exact ineffective thinking that is taking you nowhere. When you are deeply focused on a string of tasks, your mind is narrowed in on that like a quest in the video game.

You will not and cannot see outside of the task. You can't see outside of the game. You may have some strategy to work with or other things, but that's usually created outside of when you go to play the game.

Before you actually go into the game, you have this strategy or tool or trick or hack that you want to try to see if you can get better results. But while you're actually in the game itself and deep in a task, you're not thinking about those things. So to summarize this section, most great ideas come from well-informed self-reflection.

Now, we need to talk about my favorite aspect of this whole work thing and working less thing is just the power of procrastination because it's not laziness, it's how you're wired. So, a quote from Nibal to kick things off. You don't, you and I are not like cows.

We're not meant to graze all day, right? We're meant to hunt like lions. We're closer to carnivores in our omnivorous development than we are to herbivores.

As an intellectual athlete, you want to function like an athlete, which means you train hard, then you sprint, then you rest, then you reassess. You get your feedback loop, then you train some more, then you sprint again, then you rest, then you reassess. This idea that you're going to have linear output just by cranking every day at the same amount of time.

Same that's that's machines. You know, machines should be working 9 to5. Humans are not meant work 9 to are not meant to work 9 to5.

Most people have underlying fears and desires that tie them to the grind. They romanticize the long and hard route. They have underlying trauma that makes them want to prove themselves to people who won't or don't care in the first place.

They were raised in a frugal family and delay their success because deep down they're afraid to make money. So they work longer hours to act like they're doing something. And last, they think they don't deserve leverage yet.

So they do everything themselves or try to do everything at once. And the reality is it's no longer acceptable to say you found and exploited a shortcut. It feels like you're falling behind when you stop working so much and are met with boredom.

But to the ancient Greeks, who we consistently reference as pillars of wisdom, leisure was the pinnacle of civilized life. Work was necessary but secondary to leisure. And I've recently rediscovered this myself.

As a fancy pants startup founder, I've felt like I've had to work all day just to keep up with the AI race that's going on right now until I realize that there's no keeping up with it. Right? For me specifically in this situation, if I'm working so hard to keep up with something, that usually means I'm following someone else's lead.

It doesn't mean that I've had this outsized idea or idea in general that's going to set us apart from everyone else and allow us to move in that direction while everyone else is heading in a different direction. And if I'm so narrowed in and stuck in on that race, I'm never going to have that idea that's out here. I'm never going to have the idea that allows me to work less and get more results than everyone else.

So, two months after doing this, after just working super hard and feeling like I needed to pump out more content, pump out more this, pump out everything, just work all day, my writing began to suffer. That my writing is like how that's my compass whether or not I know I'm in a good state of mind or a bad state of mind or if I'm having good days or I'm having bad days, if I'm having good ideas or bad ideas. And it felt like I just couldn't think clearly anymore.

I'd go and look back at my old writing and I just think like how how in the world did I write that? Not because my writing was like amazing or so good. Some people like it.

I I don't like my old writing. I cringe at my old writing. I like my current writing when I write stuff.

But I asked myself, how in the world did I write that? Because right now in my current state of feeling overworked, there's no way that I could have come up with those ideas. Like it it's not even fathomable to me.

And I would also think back to my long walks where my brain would just light up with all these different connections and opportunities and and ways of looking at the world. Like things made sense to me in my life. Like I I felt so clear and focused and like I had a grasp on the mission I was working towards.

And I I just really missed that. So I wanted to go back. And during that time, it's like something was putting a a limiter on my pattern recognition system.

Like I just couldn't make connections between things. and the dopamine that comes along from that like you just don't feel like life is the same. So what I did is I started intentionally taking more rest throughout the day.

I had to physically like stop myself from trying to work more and I had to let go of the thoughts of if I'm not working so hard then other people are going to pass me by because one that's just irrational and it's not going to happen. But I can't see that it's irrational unless I let go. Let my mind go to a new level.

View it from a different perspective and then be okay with that so I can focus on rest. And boom, what do you know? I start reading more books.

I start listening to more podcasts. I start filling my boredom with things that will give me inspiration. And then with that inspiration and novel information, my brain can make connections and start sparking all of these different ideas.

And I start to feel clear again. And I mean, even you guys notice it, right? I can also tell by the YouTube comments when I'm not taking my time for rest to have those creative ideas because my my videos just become these repetitive cookie cutter boringness.

There's nothing new or novel about them. Not that everything has to be new or novel and I need to stay away from that trap as well. Some things are worth repeating, but you can just tell when the video quality sucks.

So, the solution to all of this is to work like a lion, not a cow. So someone who works like a cow and grazes the fields puts in consistent long hours every day. They have steady and predictable output.

They're trading time for money in a linear fashion. They're showing up regularly regardless of energy and this often leads to burnout and diminishing returns. And the second way of working is like a lion and we share a similar psychological wiring as them because we are hunters.

And this is at least when it comes to work. Our brain craves the novelty and dopamine that comes along with discovering resources like ideas that aid in our survival. So ideas are our new berries.

When our ancestors would be going around and they are hunting, they see berries or something that would be useful for them in the future like hunting animals so they can eat later. That shoots dopamine into their brain. That's the good excitement.

That's what they remember. And so ideas for knowledge workers is the same as hunting for food in the past psychologically. So those who work like a lion work in intense bursts of focused high energy work.

They have long periods of rest and recovery between hunts. They work according to energy and creativity cycles. They prioritize impact over number of hours logged and they aim for leverage where results aren't tied to time.

A lion by today's perception is a massive procrastinator. And people discourage that. They make you feel guilty for taking your time.

They tell you that you lack discipline and you should take things more seriously. If you're bad at texting people back or if you put off your work or your homework like when you were in school, it's not a character flaw. It's how many people are wired.

And if that sounds like you, what you need to understand is that intensity is better than duration. Rest is the most productive form of work and results matter more than hours. But there are a few moving pieces here.

First is leveraging your unique strengths that give you an asymmetric advantage. Second is choosing to pursue work that allows you to put lifestyle first. That way you can work according to your energy cycles and make a conscious choice as to what you should be working on.

Some creatives work late into the night while others preferred the morning. Now if someone tells you what to work on, you can't really change that and your first priority must be to leave that work. So now we understand how to work in a sense kind of but we need to round everything out.

We need to understand how to work less, earn more and enjoy life. So if you want to work like a lion, you need clarity. And I want to coin something here that we'll call co razor.

If you need to force yourself to work, you're working on the wrong thing. But if you have absolute clarity on the idea, project, or strategy that will take you one step closer to your vision, you don't need discipline. you can't help but work.

You tap into the flow state and get it done quickly with extremely high quality. This is how most of my best and most notable projects are completed. So, if you can learn how to lean into this flow of work where you rest until it's time to work because you can't help but work on that thing, that's the best way to work.

I personally take my leisure often to the point of feeling like I should be working until the project deadline approaches and I have sufficient clarity on how to get it done. Then it's the only thing that's on my mind. My focus narrows and distractions become zero.

And once the project is done, I return to a maintenance mode where I do the minimal amount of work required to sustain some form of progress. Knowing that if I were to try to force more from experience, I would be disappointed with the results. Now, in order to work less, a few conditions need to be met.

First is you must define and abide by your ideal lifestyle. Second is your unique strengths must align with a leverage-based game. And third, you need the awareness of tools and technology at your disposal to do more in less time as one person.

So with that, let's begin. First, your ideal lifestyle determines focus. The best way to create your ideal life is to live it right now, but on a smaller scale.

If you want to be a writer and you aren't already writing, you will never become one. But if you start writing now, even if you only have 30 minutes, you can slowly titrate up the amount of time you spend writing. But if you aren't writing or designing, creating, coding, etc.

, you aren't engaged in the process of error correction, you aren't encountering the real world feedback that allows you to get better. And until you actually start, whether it be now or when you think you're more knowledgeable, you are delaying how soon you will be good enough to do that thing full-time. To work less, every single decision you make must be filtered through your ideal lifestyle.

And this image of your ideal lifestyle is not some static target. It's an evolving work of art. I can't tell you what it is because it's up to your own self-reflection of the past experiences you don't want to live again and a gradual trial and error toward the future experiences you think you want until they become past experience that you can see with clear eyes.

For now, one of the most useful things you can do is set anti- goals. In other words, what are you not willing to sacrifice in order to achieve success? Are you willing to sacrifice your health?

No. then 16- hour work days are automatically ruled out. What about time with your significant other or your intellectual development or your social life?

I feel like most people write these things off or say that you can only have a few of them or that you can't have it all. And that's just a lack of skill. It's a lack of strategy.

It's a lack of actually putting in effort into other areas of your life because you don't want to do that. And many people will see this as limiting because in order to maintain their health, they can't be staring at a screen for 16 hours a day. It's pretty obvious.

But in reality, this is incredibly freeing. This is your unique advantage because creativity thrives within constraints. With the constraint of not sacrificing your health, you are required to one, choose a career or business model that favors that, and two, say no to more commitments, freeing up more focus, and three, prioritize quality over quantity of work.

When you can't extend your working hours indefinitely, you're forced to make the most of the time you do have, leading to more focused and often better results. So, that's point number one is just that ideal lifestyle determines focus. Point number two is permissionless leverage.

Because we've missed one crucial piece of the puzzle so far, and that's the difference between mechanical work and creative work. Mechanical work can be done for 16 hours a day with relative ease because it doesn't demand that much mental energy. But that's not where leverage comes from.

And you are still neglecting the rest of your life. So if you're still arguing with me in your head that you can work all day and get a lot of high-quality work done, it is probably mechanical work. And you are probably still better off working less so you don't procrastinate all the other work you should have done in other areas of your life for 40 years.

Now, none of this is to say that working a lot is bad, but it is the lowest form of leverage out of the three. The first is labor leverage which is increasing your time spent on tasks or outsourcing work to others. The cons of this are management overhead and complexity in general and just you don't have that much time.

The second is capital leverage. So your money works for you through investments and the cons to this are that it requires existing wealth or something worth investing in. And the third is permissionless leverage.

And this is the most powerful form of modern leverage with the cons being that most people look like they're doing the same thing. What I mean by that is like everyone's a coach now. Everyone's a creator now.

Everyone's a teacher now. But what people don't understand about the creator economy is that your specific interests and your stories are what make you unique in that thing. And now all of these forms of leverage have their pros, but we live in the most permissionless time in history.

You can just do things. Now permissionless leverage comes in the form of code, media, books, podcasts, tweets, newsletters, courses, etc. These have zero marginal cost of replication.

In other words, build once and sell as many times as you'd like. Once a piece of software, content, or digital asset is created, you can distribute additional copies at virtually zero cost. One digital product can serve 1 million users.

Now, why is this important? Because never has there been a time where so much power lies in the hands of the individual. One person or a small team can reach global scale without gatekeepers thanks to the internet.

Digital products don't require permission to build or distribute. And last is that they often have exponential rather than linear returns on investment of time. Now, this is where people get confused.

One, they think they have to again grind out content to build any form of an audience. But if you think critically, you know, that's not true. You know that with quality and consistent output, you have more of a chance at being spread to more people who love your work.

I personally wrote three tweets a day over the course of two years with the occasional thread and I grew to like a 100,000 followers just by doing that. Well, there's other things there of course like the networking and other things, but writing the content just three tweets a day that doesn't require anything close to a grind and neither do the other strategies for growth. You're you're telling me that I I can go on walks and listen to books and fill my mind and make sense of ideas in my own way according to my own experiences and I can go live life experiences to add uniqueness to myself and my work because I'm the niche.

And then I can distribute that for people to like and follow so that they can look into my other work that I offer my products or services. And you're telling me that in order to grow I need to make friends and meet people and talk to cool people that I can't find in my local location. like you're telling me that I can just live a good and healthy life and build a business doing so.

So, I spent maybe 5 to 10 hours a week. Like on the side of my freelance work, like that was the easiest thing ever. It didn't even take away a lot of the time from my freelance work.

The freelance work was difficult because I only had so much time to take on so many clients. So, building an audience doing that was the next logical step. And now it's evolved into this, which is completely different from what I was doing in the freelance world.

And now with this, a digital product takes some time in the past. It's like, yeah, I would spend 2 to three days just going hard, working all day, getting those things done, and busting it all out. But that's because all of the work was premeditated beforehand.

I had already generated the ideas for all of that in my leisure time. So, when I sat down to work, I could bust it out easily. All of my work was already done for me.

I just had to take the time to flesh it out and do it together. Now, this doesn't have to take a lot of time anymore because you have AI. If you go to the Cortex YouTube channel, I made a video on how to create your first $10,000 digital product with AI.

And it's not having AI do it for you. It's guiding you through with your own ideas, how to flesh it out in the form of a digital product and having it do a lot of the busy work for you. And if you aren't able to build a product or a service in two to three days just in one sprint, you can just space it out one to two hours a day for a month.

That's the same amount of time. And it once you build it, it can scale infinitely. And so far we have traffic for a business which is social media.

We have a product. Now the next thing you need is like a landing page. So you need to learn copyrightiting.

You need to learn a no code no code tool to host your product. But even AI helps with that. Again take my miniourse that I let out for free.

The link is in the description so you understand what I mean here. Now, personally for my work, I could have stayed as one person for as long as I wanted to and I could have focused on content on like two to three platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter because that's just written content and I like writing. I could have a newsletter.

I could have a product. That wouldn't take me anything more than two hours a day, maybe four hours here and there, but that's not how I'm wired, right? I want the cycles to continue.

I want the intensity to continue. I like the 16- hour workdays. I don't like doing them for the entirety of my life.

it doesn't make any sense. So that's why I started Cortex. That's why I build new products.

Like it just comes naturally. Now, the last thing with permissionless leverage is that this path isn't reserved for anyone. Any interest or skill of yours can be turned into a digital product or content that others with similar interests or skills resonate with.

So if you want to work less, this is one of the best beginner routes to take to build that initial leverage. What a lot of people get mistaken on here is like, oh well, everyone's going to become a creator. That's not really how it works.

A lot of the big YouTubers and creators in general, they build the leverage, then they have the cash flow, then they go onto something else, and they don't even have to be a big creator to do that. They use it as a launchpad, a permissionless launchpad into what they want to do. So, no, not everyone's going to do it or get into it or stay that thing.

Everyone can start that way. Learn the skills. This is a permissionless way to learn skills as well.

Like you're telling me that you can get on social media, start a digital product business and learn every single skill that it takes to make a business profitable. You can make your own profitable. Then you can go and work for someone else.

You can start an e-commerce business. You can build a software startup like I am. You can become an author.

You can start a book. You can do anything after you just get started and have the other forms of leverage to put into play. So we have ideal lifestyle determines focus and we have permissionless leverage on our quest to working less, earning more.

The third thing is just understanding what AI is. So I want to give a new perspective on AI because the more I use AI, the more I realize that I'm not outsourcing my thinking to it. I'm enhancing my thinking with it.

When I try to have AI perform a task in a more accurate way than yelling at it to write me an entire book in one sentence prompt, I'm exposed to clear and intelligent thinking. I am reading more. I am understanding more.

I am revealing my own blind spots more because much of my instructions aren't clear the first time around. when I write a newsletter or I create these YouTube videos or I read a book, I often go to AI to help me learn that thing. So, for this video, I'll ask for clarification and examples on the concept of permissionless leverage, which I already had a solid grasp on, but I just needed to connect the dots a bit further out to weave it into the story I was trying to create with this video.

AI to me is like reading a book that's tailored to you in real time. AI is closing the gap between learning and doing. Since AI can accomplish tasks according to your instructions, like writing landing page copywriting or creating a viral marketing plan, you are both completing the task and learning how to better complete it the next time.

Imagine the future of digital products, which we're kind of sort of working on. It's a it's an endgame for a cortex in a sense where imagine you share a workspace and it has all of your knowledge in it, all the things that you wanted to put into there and then it has your custom prompts and AI workflows inside of there. So, not only can people learn what's in your mind, but they can do things with it.

I can technically create a clone of myself with the knowledge base and the AI workflows for how I create these YouTube videos. I could give you my system for creating a YouTube video or whatever or writing a book or being focused or whatever it is in that form. And no digital products do this yet.

The digital product world is so static right now. It's just a course. You learn passively.

You don't actually do the thing. But now you can actually do the thing thanks to AI. A prompt that you refine and reuse is a reflection of your understanding of the task.

It is an externalized clone of a creative process that no longer needs to sit in your head or in a static SOP document. So, here's personally how I like to use AI right now is one. I choose a task to complete like making a better YouTube introduction.

I find a YouTube video, PDF, or reference text and have AI break it down into actionable steps. So, what I did here actually is I looked up how to create a killer YouTube intro. I found a YouTube video by April Lyn Alter.

Her content is great. Go watch it. But then I took the video, popped it into Cortex, asked it to break down how do I create an effective YouTube intro and then from there I turn that into a meta prompt I can reuse over and over again and then I refine the prompt as I use it.

So if you go to Cortex and then you go to chat and then you go to write incredible AI prompts and then you tell it what you want to create and you include the details then it will create this prompt that you can reuse and refine over and over again and it's super powerful to do it that way. So I don't want to be the next guy who's just telling you to start learning AI. But seriously, start learning AI.

Now the fourth point here is just types of leisure because we all understand what work is. But when it comes to leisure, I often get the question, if you don't work that long, what do you do for the rest of your day? Do you just sit around?

And it's like, dude, I I feel terrible. Like I feel bad for you. You the only thing you think you can do in this life is work.

Really? So for the sake of definition, leisure is a mindset. You can write for fun, leisure, or rest.

But once it's tied to an obligatory outcome for the purpose of work, that's when it ceases to be leisure. You can go on a walk with the external goal of 3,000 steps. But that goal is often a way to free the mind from thinking about the walk.

You gain more mental energy that can be allocated to solving subconscious problems. You can read a book, but once you start analyzing and trying to get something from it, it becomes work. You can go to the gym, go on a run, do yoga, take a nap, cook, clean, socialize with friends, and your mind may oscillate between a type of work and rest.

But the purpose of rest should be a lack of focus on work. Now, the beautiful thing about this for creative work is that these types of leisure are often direct fuel for your work. Since creative work is largely dependent on the quality of ideas you have, and most of your ideas don't come while you're working, leisure is how you begin to create a life where work, rest, and play blur into one.

If long walks are considered a part of my work, which in many cases they are, then I work all day every day. Even my sleep is a direct contributor to work. Now, the final and arguably most important point that I want to make here is that a responsible life has deadlines built in.

Because we all know the power of deadlines, right? Parkinson's law, work fills to fit the allotted amount of time till completion or whatever it is. In other words, if you have a deadline and it's urgent and it's real and it's right now, you're going to get the work done.

And with this, it's common advice for successful people to tell you to work as hard as you can in your 20s to give up most of your life. But personally, I think most people misinterpret what that means. I don't think the successful people are actually saying this.

What they're trying to say is take bigger risks to bet on yourself and create your own path. And that doesn't require 16 hours of work because you can work hard on more things than your business. You have a mind, a body, and spirit that also need developing.

You have relationships that probably shouldn't go neglected because that can absolutely load rogue thoughts into your mind that dampens the quality of your work. So with that, a responsible life has deadlines built in. If you truly value your intellect, physique, connection to others and reality, and a standard of health that envelops them all, you cannot sustain 16 hours of work, it's impossible.

Those who work 16 hours day in day out expose that they do not value those things. And I would question your trust in their methods. I value my health and I understand through experience that my performance in the gym, if I go at like 4 or 5:00, it will diminish.

I work out my best like midday around 11:00 or noon. So that means that I have a deadline, a real deadline for my work since I value the gym and it's an important thing in my life. I need to get my work done before then.

So I usually do and I can do more after that. It's all dependent on how you structure your day. You don't have to only work until 11 or 12:00.

There's often times when I work later in the day. You get the point. But another thing here is that if I value my relationship with my significant other, which I do, and I understand that if I work I I've felt this before multiple times where if I work hard all day on something that stresses me out and I go and lay in bed at night and I'm just stressed out like it's not a good time for myself or for her because all I'm thinking is about all I'm thinking about is work still.

So I understand that I need a buffer time, buffer period. that I need to set another deadline during the day where if I don't stop working now then the night is ruined and if that happens over multiple years the relationship is ruined. Now this is not a downgrade but an upgrade for the quality of your work.

Why? Because deadlines narrow your mind and create a sense of urgency which act as rocket fuel for deep work. When you strive to be multi-dimensionally jacked and hold that as your standard, you will feel that sense of urgency in the morning to complete the task you can during that time with the creative fuel you acquired during your previous day's rest.

The results may not show up immediately. Of course, it takes a few weeks to adapt to that new lifestyle. But if you stick it out, I promise that your life will improve more than you could have imagined.

That's it for this video. Thank you for watching. Like, subscribe, download the free miniourse with the link in the description.

I'll see you in the next video.