Thread by @matt_gray_

How I work 4 hours a day (and make $730,000 per month):

If you thought of someone making $9M a year, how long would you guess they were working?

Most would guess 12-14 hours a day.

I am doing the complete opposite.

I’m on track to make $9M a year and only work 4 hours a day on my businesses.

But it wasn’t always like this.

I once believed in the mantra of hustling 24/7.

When I was 22, I ran a coding boot camp in Canada where I was working 15-hour days.

I was running myself into the ground…

I had thought I had it figured out as an entrepreneur.

But I had got it all wrong.

I was the embodiment of 'no days off'.

No control. No freedom.

Fast forward to today, I:

• Work 4 hours a day
• Am in the best shape of my life
• Have total control over my time
• Travel the world 6 months out of the year

I created the life of my dreams. How?

I realized it all came down to the 5 Pillars of Leverage.

Working smarter beats working harder. Every. Single. Time.

It’s not about working 14 hours a day on soul-sucking work and sacrificing your well-being.

It’s about doing the highest leverage activities only you can do.

When you focus on those pillars, you take a step towards freedom.

For me, true freedom is defined by controlling the 4 Ws in life:

• What you work on
• Who you work with
• Where you work
• Whenever you want

Success as a founder isn’t about the money.

It’s about your autonomy. It’s about building your own Automated Empire.

But to control the Ws in life, you first need to figure out one thing:

Find Your Ikigai

Ikigai is the Japanese concept of your 'reason for being'. Find yours by asking yourself:

• What do I love?
• What am I good at?
• What can I be paid for?
• What does the world need?

My Ikigai?

• Leveraging systems
• Selling online education
• Helping founders automate
• Solving founder overwhelm

I found my reason for being, and it transformed my life. Once you have found yours, it’s time to focus on:

The 5 Pillars of Leverage

• Deep Work
• Build Your Founder Flywheel
• Automate, Eliminate, Delegate
• Hire a Chief of Staff
• Apply the 80/20 System to Everything

Let’s break it down:

Deep Work

Cal Newport's 'Deep Work' revolutionized my productivity.

Deep work is your time to work in your zone of genius - completely undistracted.

1 hour of deep work is better than 8 hours of shallow work.

Block out your time as soon as you wake up and remove all possible distractions:

• No phone
• No notifications
• playlist

I wake up at 6am and dive into 4 hours of writing, systems building, and automation.

It’s my time to tap into my zone of genius. Brain.fm

Build your Founder Flywheel

“Small hinges swing big doors” - W. Clement Stone

Founders want every action to multiply the last.

We want there to be compounding effects on everything that we do.

Enter the flywheel.

There are 3 laws to a flywheel, according to my good friend and founder of ConvertKit, Nathan Barry:

• Activities flow from one to the next
• Each cycle gets easier
• Each cycle produces more

The Founder Flywheel is a self-propelling system I invented to 10x the results of my efforts and rapidly grow my brands.

It’s how I grew an audience of 16M+ fans.

This attention then drove Founder OS from $0 to $280K/month in the last 12 months.

How do you build your own?

Start by building an audience around your authentic personal brand.

As this grows, word spreads, which kicks into a referral flood - an endless flow of customers.

The more they hear your story, the more they want to be a part of it.

Turn your audience into advocates.

Automate, Eliminate, Delegate

Inspired by Tim Ferriss, I made it my mantra.

Never automate what can be eliminated. Never delegate what can be automated.

This system saved me 30+ hours a week.

I calculated my hourly rate: $5K/hr.

Anything below that, I delegated or automated. Now I focus purely on high-level strategy while my team handles the rest.

The ROI of auditing your time is level-raising.

Some tools I use for my Automated Empire:

• Loom for SOPs
• Kajabi for websites
• ConvertKit for newsletters
• Hypefury to schedule content
• Seamless to connect with fellow founders

Eliminate what’s unnecessary, automate what you can, and delegate the rest.

Hire a Chief of Staff

The highest leverage hire a founder can make.

A Chief of Staff manages my calendar, communications, and more so I can create.

They became my right hand, handling the daily so I could focus on the visionary.

We align in a 15-minute daily standup, and they are given 100% access to my schedule.

An expertly trained Chief of Staff runs my business as my second brain.

A game-changer for operational bandwidth.

Apply the 80/20 System to Everything

“The most important thing is to keep the important thing the important thing” - Albert Einstein

The Pareto Principle has become my decision filter.

20% of my efforts produce 80% of my results - I relentlessly double down on that 20%.

I solely focus on the needle-moving strategies.

I determine which systems, tools, clients, and tasks I need to focus on.

Leveraging your time to focus on the 20% drives unfairly outsized returns.

In the end, it's not just about the hours you put in.

It's the impact of each hour.

I reshaped my life around effectiveness, not busyness.

And you can, too.

Now, I choose when to work and how to live.

I've built a life where work serves me, not the other way around.

Take these lessons, mold them to fit your world, and watch as the impossible becomes your new normal.

Let's not just chase dreams; let's live them, 4 hours at a time.

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