First, let me be clear: I am not here to tell you that you do not need to work to succeed. For more than 20 years I worked on average between 16 and 20 hours a day, and the people who promise to succeed without working are generally at best ignoramuses and at worst crooks…
Long before a presidential candidate used the phrase “work more to earn more” in his election platform, it had been my credo for a very long time, ever since I launched my first company in 1999:
– If I was not succeeding, it was because I was not working enough.
– If others were not succeeding, it was because they were not working enough.
– The people who took holidays were all losers.
– The people who did not work on the weekend were losers too…
I come from a working-class family: my father was a pastry worker and my mother a hypermarket checkout operator. In that position, the only way to earn more is indeed to work a few hours more every month. I do not know whether that is what instilled that belief in me, but I believed it absolutely, even as an entrepreneur, for a very long time.
Yet it takes only a few minutes of thought to see that this logic does not stand up on a larger scale. If the highest earners were the people who worked the most, it is a safe bet that Chinese factory workers or Korean taxi drivers would take the prize for high incomes… And plainly, that is not the case.
While work is necessary to succeed, the amount is not necessarily what really makes the difference. In fact, it very rarely is. Understanding that (and putting it into practice) took me nearly 20 years.
My financial life has gone through many ups and downs. I have been » poor » and I lived in the Caribbean (but happy) with the woman who would become my wife, in a » hut » measuring 13 m², with two breeze blocks and a plank serving as both desk and kitchen table. I have been » rich » and I blew 1000 euros every evening out on the town without worrying about the next day. I have been middle class, and so on, moving between those situations as time passed and opportunities arose.
And one thing is certain, looking both at my past and at today: the times when I earned the most were never those when I worked the most, but those when I chose my battles and when I worked *better*.
I will not give you a complete how-to guide in this post: it would not fit here, would be indigestible and would need breaking down much more carefully. But I will give you a few simple examples so that you do not make the same mistake I did.
– Checking your emails 80 to 100 times a day is pointless. So is answering them within a minute. You think you look more responsive, but to your prospect you mostly look desperate. I went from that average to once or twice a day, and you know what? The world did not collapse, the clients did not leave, and I reclaimed valuable time that can be put to much better use.
– I learned to say no: it is sometimes hard, especially at first, to decide to turn down a client or end a contract. Yet you must learn to do this very quickly, or you will end up with an anxiety-inducing project that makes your life miserable and eats up time you could better spend finding other prospects, for example.
– Knowing how to take a break: I found myself faced with a seemingly very complex technical problem that I spent two weeks working on, only to finally take three hours to play a video game, or go and play the piano, and solve the problem in 10 minutes right afterward… Once again: working more is not always the right solution, but it took me a (very) long time to fully take that on board.
– Stop being a perfectionist: when you bill a service at 150 euros / month, you must not deliver 2000 euros / month worth of work to prove you are the best. A mistake I made for a very long time. A product or service needs a price that matches it. If this product/service does not suit your client, then you change it, and the rate with it, of course…
– Learning that a negotiation in business must not become a compromise: in a negotiation each party gains something; in a compromise, each one gives something up… : I will probably write more about this too.
There are dozens, even hundreds, of examples like these. Soon I will explain how I organised myself to work better. You then need to adapt that to your own wants and needs, but to give you an idea, my hourly rate went from 150 euros to 400 euros during business hours (HO, 09:00–18:00), from 200 euros to 600 euros outside business hours (HNO), and to 800 euros for weekends / public holidays + HNO, and in spite of that I have to turn down work every week, because it remains more profitable to set up systems that work for you. Another subject I will come back to.
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Christophe Casalegno
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