If you're trying to Be Your Own Boss, Hard Work can only get you so far. You need to be Lazy, eventually.

You say you want to be your own boss, but are too lazy to do all the entrepreneurial work to start your own business.

Well, here’s a little secret for ya...


 Laziness is, contrary to popular belief, an important attribute to have for success.

I mean think about it, it isn’t exactly the hardworking coal miners who are the top one percent. No, it’s people telling other people what to do. I mean c’mon, Steve Jobs didn’t invent the iPhone.

Laziness is not only important to success, but perhaps even necessary once you reach a certain level of height in your success.

I mean look, hard work can only get you so far.


You could be the hardest working person in the whole world, dedicating every single waking hour to getting work done, not wasting a second. Ultimate focus.

But your business isn’t ever going to grow beyond what you yourself are capable of, if you rely solely on hard work alone.

Not only are you likely to hit burn out if you relentlessly work hours upon hours, day in and day out, but even if let’s say you enjoy it. Let’s say you get a “kick” from working hard. It pumps you up. You feel energized by getting a task done and it inspires you to quickly move on to the next one. You may even call yourself a “work-a-holic” (there's a cure for that)






(I imagine most of my audience here do not identify as such, but stick with me it’s just a thought experiment and you may want to share with any skeptics and it’ll help drive the point home that hard work is over valued. )

So even if you are somehow bizarrely wired to find hard work not only anything less than suffering but actually...enjoyable, you still, *still* will be stuck at a certain point. You’ll be trapped.


If you want to grow, there comes a point where you have to delegate.

You have to be a bit lazy and guess what? Get other people to do the work for you.

You can’t do it all yourself. Well I mean you can, but it will be far less effective than being at least somewhat lazy and saying “okay, I’m not going to do this, but I can get [insert person’s name here] to do it for me”

If you ever want to expand your business beyond you own abilities, knowledge, time, and even own work ethic, if you ever want to make it BIG, you have to embrace your laziness. There’s a limited amount of resources each person has

Now, like I said, that’s assuming you want to work hard, luckily for you, as a lazy person, it’ll be a lot easier to delegate the workload to others and lay on back, when you reach that point. 

The downside is….you have to reach that point.

You can’t be reckless lazy. You have to be smart and lazy.

Doing NO work at all with ZERO cost and ZERO effort and making a living is impossible. There’s always something that must be invested, whether it’s your time or your money.

The goal with laziness though is to minimize effort and maximize results, it’s the ability to invest very little and yield BIG results, not necessarily produce something out of nothing.

I never have and never will promise those things. Anyone that does is a scammer. 





Look, straight up, there’s no such thing as getting paid to do “nothing”. You  do have to do *some* work to get the ball rolling, (even if it's as simple as plugging your phone in and downloading an app) but once it’s rolling down the cliff, gravity does all the work for you. You can sit on back and let it go.

Laziness is about taking the easy way out, not necessarily taking out completely.

You have to do “Just Enough” to get by, “Just enough”  to set the business on the right path before you lay on back and go smooths sailing. The best way to do this is to create a vision.  Create a vision that is simple, yet effective. It should be something people can relate to and give them a sense of purpose “for the greater good.” 

Religion does this and people have literally sacrificed their lives to show their commitment to their faith, the “vision” created by a church. That’s a bit extreme, but just goes to show the power in creating a vision and what people are willing to do for you. Having a strong vision can help inspire loyalty from others.

Plus, it’s really easy to do. You just use your imagination. You don’t need to do any research or pull up any facts or figures. You create a fantasy. It’s fiction.

Granted, it shouldn’t be a complete fairytale and should have some realm of truth to it. It should have  a bit of verisimilitude, believably. Just tap into a deep hope or desire. 

But look, I wouldn't worry too much about being over fairytalish. if people can believe they will enter the gates of paradise if they follow the rules of the big sky daddy, I’m pretty sure the criteria of what constitutes a “fantasy” are frankly quite loose.

People will believe nearly anything as long as it gives them a sense of PURPOSE.





Provide a strong sense purpose for others and you’ll never have to work a single day in your life

 I hope you choose to create a positive vision, a positive purpose, and set a productive path to obtain that vision. 

See if you don’t create your own vision, someone else will create a vision for you and you will be working to serve the purposes of their vision, not your own. Your purpose will be determined by someone else. You will not be in control of your own destiny.

And you will have to actually work hard. Ugh.

Take the lazy path instead and create your own vision, rather than working tirelessly for someone else’s.

Once you have a vision, you can use it as a backbone behind every decision you make and every task you assign. You don’t just dictate orders, but you let a person know how it fits into the bigger picture of said vision.

The easiest way to run a business is to think big picture (vision) and not get bogged down with the finer details. That’s why you hire experts for that sort of thing.

You don’t really work as a business owner, or very well shouldn’t You instead distribute the workload to whoever its most well suited for the specific job (or specific task).





It’s like building an RPG party, like okay the Cleric is gonna be the healer, the Warrior will be the tank, and the Rogue the DPS. You basically utilize each person’s strengths and weaknesses to fill in a role that compliments his/her strengths and offsets or eliminates his/her weaknesses.

You’re not headed into battle yourself. You’re just strategically choosing who will.

Trust is an important factor in business management (or really any sort of leadership role for that matter). It’s less about making demands for your employees and more about trusting that it will get done.



 Lay on back and relax, dude. They got this. It’s why you hired them in the first place..

 No one likes being micro managed, and micro managing is just extra work *for you* as the business owner anyway. This is why finding the right people, people you can trust to get things done, is one of the most important steps in starting a business.


A lazy entrepreneur always continues  to grow his/her business because s/he’s looking for ways to “get someone or something else to do it”. S/he is focused on producing the best results possible and finds the best people for the job (that s/he trusts).  as well as the best technology to make the jobs as easy as possible. 

S/he is NOT focused on getting all the work down by him/herself. That’s just a waste of time and not worth all the effort. You can be lazy and successful or hardworking and a failure.

The more you can streamline your business with the right people and/or the right technology, the faster it will grow. It’s not a matter of hard work at all. It’s a matter of streamlining and making it easy.






A lazy entrepreneur/business owner has one job and one job only and it’s to ask:

How can I take this to the next level?

S/he then makes decisions in delegating tasks as seen fit to level up, keeping in mind the overall vision along the way.

 A hard working entrepreneur, on the other hand  is constantly trying to keep themselves busy with more work.


Look, there’s a difference between being a business owner and creating your own job.

 You ideally want to own a business that generates profits for you, not replace a 9 to 5 job with another 9 to 5 job that you just so happen  sign both the front and back of your pay check.

If you’re going to be your own boss, don’t be the boss you hate that makes you work endless hours. Be the boss you love who let’s you work as much (or as little) as you want.


Do you own the business or does the business own you? Who’s in control?

The procrastin8r is always of control of every aspect of his/her life and that’s what you should aim for.

Decide how much an hour of your time is worth. What is it $50 an hour? $100? Whatever that number is, keep in mind that whenever you work on something for your business, you are basically paying an employee (you)  that amount to complete the task.


Put bluntly:

Would you pay a person $100/hr to scrub toilets?

No? Then don’t do it yourself.

Would you pay someone $100/hr to answer phones or check e-mail?

Again, probably not. So outsource it to someone else.

You get the gist. Remember, your time is as valuable as you make it. As a procrastin8r, time is your most important asset.




Eliminate work for yourself that isn’t directly expanding your business or inspiring your vision to your employees.

Delegate work . Let them see the bigger picture. That's it.

In the beginning, you’ll have to do a bit of work on your own, but that’s simply because it is necessary for the business’ expansion.

You’ll get there eventually and be able to let others do the work for you. It’s a matter of getting the ball rolling and there’s no reason to push it all the way down the hill yourself.

Gravity is one hell of a force.

And so is laziness.


Take it easy, 

N8


P.S.

Speaking of being your own boss, we're gonna have Sam Priestley, the Lazy Entrepreneur himself

come in for a conversation on the ProcrastiN8r Podcast about starting your own business, the lazy way, during our next interview (as of writing), in episode 60.

Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss it!