The Death Of The 40 Hour Workweek (How Successful People Work Less)
By Dan Koe
Summary
## Key takeaways - **40-Hour Workweek as Mathematical Scam**: In the past 5 years, more and more people have realized that the 40-hour work week is a scam, with most work doable in 30 minutes during remote setups, involving meetings about meetings, emails about emails, and constant exhaustion from not owning your work. [00:00], [00:19] - **Successful People Work 3-4 Hours Daily**: Charles Darwin wrote 19 books and created the theory of evolution working only 3 to 4 hours a day, while successful people mentally plot and execute ideas with speed, achieving more in less time effortlessly. [00:54], [01:06] - **Industrial Revolution's Alienating Legacy**: The industrial revolution turned society into employees with rigid 9-to-5 schedules, breaking complex work into repetitive tasks that stripped the soul from labor, leading to alienation from product, process, and potential as per Marx's theory. [03:38], [06:11] - **AI Enables Return to Self-Directed Work**: With AI handling repetitive assembly-line tasks, technology allows a return to natural self-employment like farmers and artisans, where 80% of early American free workers were self-employed, now possible again with internet access. [03:21], [07:13] - **Transform Life in 365 Hours**: You can drastically change your life in 365 hours by dedicating one hour daily to a high-leverage task like building a product or audience, iterating until results emerge, as humans function like lions sprinting and resting, not grazing all day. [19:14], [21:58] - **Prioritize People and Product**: Focus on two priorities: building an audience via social media to attract a tribe independent of employers, and creating a product people pay for to control your income, as more time worked doesn't equal more results in the digital world. [26:46], [27:04]
Topics Covered
- Why is the 40-hour work week a mathematical scam?
- How did industrial revolution birth employee alienation?
- Why do generalists outperform specialists in AI era?
- How does AI enable return to artisan self-employment?
- Can one hour daily quit the 40-hour work week?
Full Transcript
In the past 5 years, more and more people have realized that the 40-hour work week is a scam. If you remember when everyone was locked inside doing remote work, most people realized their work could be done in 30 minutes.
But this isn't a metaphorical scam.
I'm not just saying this to say it.
It's an actual mathematical scam. And I'll prove it.
meetings about meetings, emails about emails, always being on the verge of replacement, never having ownership over the work you're doing, putting on a mask as soon as you step into the office.
It's exhausting to not be yourself every single day for 40 years.
Paying tens of thousands of dollars for an education that doesn't guarantee the ability to repay that debt.
Sitting around doing meaningless work, feeling as if you are wasting a third of your day.
That drains you, making it difficult to want to do anything in the second third, which makes you want to stay up late to get the most out of your day, which ruins the last third.
Charles Darwin wrote 19 books and created the theory of evolution, working 3 to four hours a day. Meanwhile, you're trying to look busy for 8 hours because that's what real work looks like to your boss and parents.
Now, a pattern I've noticed in successful people that didn't sacrifice their life for success is that they physically worked very little.
Yet, people see them as hard workers.
Mentally, they were always thinking, plotting, and scheming. They worked in their mind.
And once they were clear on their idea, they executed with speed that others couldn't compete with.
The new status symbol in my eyes is to achieve more in less time while making it seem effortless.
People shouldn't believe you when you tell them that you only work three to four hours a day and you don't have the desire to tell them because you're completely confident that you're doing great work. And the thing is in today's world, you have the technology and access to knowledge to do this.
You've simply been trained to think that you need a clear plan from someone else.
In this video, I want to show you why short work days will take you much further in life than opting for the mechanical work others made you believe was necessary for success.
Then, I'll give you the three steps you can take to finally quit the 40-hour work week for good.
There is something special about working on a project of your own. I wouldn't say exactly that you're happier.
A better word would be excited or engaged.
You're happy when things are going well, but often they aren't. So, why do it at all?
Because to the kind of people who like working this way, nothing else feels as right.
You feel as if you're an animal in its natural habitat doing what you were meant to do. Not always happy maybe, but awake and alive. That is a beautiful quote from Paul Graham.
The thing that most people don't understand is that the modern 8-hour workday and 5-hour work week did not exist until the 20th century.
Prior to that, and after we were hunter gatherers, work was mostly dominated by self-employment.
It was mostly farmers and artisans.
The work was self-directed. And that's the key point for this section of this video.
Their labor was not assigned by a boss.
They chose what to produce.
Chose what to produce. They set their own schedules and bore the full responsibility of the outcomes.
And this embodies the Jeffersonian ideal of what an independent individual was.
It was someone who directed their own labor.
The 40-hour work week is all we know today.
But in my opinion, technology is soon going to allow us to return to what is most natural. That is to what is engaging, exciting, and meaningful if the individual decides to pursue that path because they've always been able to.
It just hasn't been the default path.
The industrial revolution moved millions of people into factories and large organizations which had work that resembled assembly lines. And so if AI and technology are actually creating the assembly lines for all types of work, then what do we do? What do we do if most of our work is repetitive, mundane assembly line style work? And yes, that applies to working at a computer too.
What this did is it turned society into a society of employees. And this is what led to the birth of the 9to-5 workday.
And this was characterized by rigid schedules controlled by factory bells and clocks.
Complex artisan level work was broken into simple repetitive tasks that stripped the soul from the work.
Workers only performed one small step in production.
They were kept dumb to the entire process so they couldn't replicate it on their own. This is why generalists always beat specialists.
And we'll talk about this in the next video.
But a specialist, they focus on the skill.
They identify with the skill.
They attach to it. So when that skill is threatened or is going to be replaced, they are threatened and they are going to be replaced. A generalist on the other hand, it isn't about just learning everything, becoming a jack of all trades.
It's specializing in one mission, one vision for the future and learning every single skill that is necessary to achieve that. And if the skills necessary to achieve that are automated or go out of style, then you pivot, you adapt, you adopt the technology so that you can still reach your mission or vision. Now, on to more characteristics.
Workers owned neither the tools nor the products.
Workers sold their time rather than the products.
This is wage labor.
And managers monitored the workers constantly.
Now, this may help you understand why I am so adamant on viewing the 9to-5 as a stepping stone.
Right? You watch any of my videos, you see the title and it's like, "Oh, you're going to be replaced.
Oh, start the business." Now, I'm not against a 9 to5. I worked one myself.
You probably are going to have to work one at once in your life. But if it stops there, then you're going to encounter the psychological problems that we're going to discuss.
But that's just it. A 9to-5 is a quest in your story line.
One quest, not the entire story line.
They can be useful to allow you to survive. And you need to survive.
You need to make money.
Nothing wrong with that. But if you simply observe society, when is the last time you've done that?
When is the last time you have gone about your day and you've just observed how other people act and look and kind of you can assume how they feel?
You can see that they've had their creative spark ripped from them.
Industrial work led to the peak of meaningless work which is best characterized by Marx's theory of alienation.
Workers were alienated from the product, the process, their potential and collaborators.
Work was repetitive and mind-numbing.
Effective workers still worked the same amount and were paid the same amount.
work was about mere survival, not fulfillment.
If you've looked at Maslo's hierarchy of needs, right?
It goes from self-actualization needs to self-trcendence or it goes from survival needs to fulfillment needs. And this may be an expansion on the actual Maslo's hierarchy.
But when technology solves our basic needs, what do we do?
Many people think that we'll just lose purpose because we're not able to work anymore.
But now we get to choose where we derive our purpose from.
And many people are not equipped in their mind to do this because they are so used to just being this robot. In the early American economy, around 80% of free workers were self-employed.
But today only about 10% are self-employed.
With AI, social media, and an internet filled with people and knowledge, I do not see why artisan level work cannot be what more people shift into, especially with all the talk about jobs being replaced.
Now, of course, this will require a critical shift.
Self-directed work requires that people manage their own schedules and methods.
It is skill inensive and specific, meaning you will need multiple years of public practice and apprenticeship.
And today apprenticeship comes in the form of courses or YouTube.
It's crazy, right? You think of Marcus Aurelius or the emperors of the past or uh the very smart people of the past, the rulers.
They each had their own personal teachers, right? They had the smartest people that were mentoring them.
And now you have access to multitudes of the smartest people on the internet just giving out their knowledge both for free and paid. You have no reason to not achieve the life you want to live.
Self-directed work emphasizes craftsmanship and the work moves at a leisurely pace.
There is time for rest and thinking.
Now, as an aside, something you may find interesting, you may not, but I talk about a lot of this, right?
I feel like I understand the psychology of employment and entrepreneurship.
And then the question there is not that anyone has asked but sometimes I ask this about other companies is like well okay if you know this how is your company structured right because I'm building a software Eden the next version of cortex rolling out soon to cortex users only public launch next year but this is kind of the challenge that I'm dealing with is I want to implement and maintain this level of artisan level work I want my team to each have the traits of an entrepreneur I want them to be able to direct their own work inside of a company and have a shared vision for the future, right?
You can do this independently, obviously.
Go watch my one person business videos. But what if you want to work with a team?
What if you want to build a company? How is that organization structured?
This is kind of maybe something I'll dive into in the future once I actually practice it enough myself.
I think that would be a very valuable video is like how are companies going to transition from this employment wage labor to this more tribe of entrepreneurs working toward a shared vision.
Those who come to me and say you know I work 15 hours a day. I say I'm not interested.
I am interested in the quality of working hours not the quantity.
The brain of the human being.
Do you think that during the first 5 hours of the day you are the same as you are in the last 5 hours? No way.
You're tired. And if you're tired, you stop listening and the decisions you make are risky.
That's another beautiful quote from Brunello Cusinelli. And it leads perfectly into this section.
AI solves utility so humans can transcend to meaning.
We hate long lines at the DMV.
We hate when a server gets our order wrong.
We hate meetings that could have been a five bullet point email.
AI and automation solve necessary work that humans hate.
On the other hand, we crave the potential for failure. We love the final batter in the ninth inning.
We travel across the world for a five-star dining experience.
We cry at a wedding as the bride and groom read handwritten vows.
Machines are for speed, repetition, and necessity.
Humans are for story, novelty, myth, and meaning.
Most people identify with the traits of a machine, the schooling, the job, the mundane tasks.
And that's exactly why general fulfillment is abysmal.
So what can you do about it? First, you must understand that great work is not bound to time.
Great work is not bound to time.
Think about that. That is the biggest mindset shift.
That is completely obvious, right?
You think about it, it's like, oh yeah, no crap, Dan.
Then why do you have no leverage?
Why is your work bound to time?
If that is so obvious to you, if it's so obvious to you, then I believe it should be of value.
And if you are not living in accordance with that value, then you're sleepwalking.
You're living in accordance with someone else's values that were assigned to you. Great work is the combination of a useful idea, the right amount of skill, and the ability to inspire others to care about the end product.
So that leads to a few key points.
You do not need to work 16 hours a day to have a great idea.
In fact, your brain will not allow novel ideas to emerge when you are in the narrow-minded productive state.
It's ironic, but constant work destroys how impactful your work can be. Your level of skill determines the level of ideas you can have.
If you do not acquire a unique and overlapping skill stack, you are limited to ideas that have already been exhausted.
You must create a vision and trek through the unknown. If you want to achieve any form of uniqueness, most people fall into two camps.
One, they work a job that disconnects them from how the product is sold and thus generates revenue.
So, they do not understand that process. And two, they cannot possibly see how selling can be a mutually beneficial act. So they virtue signal themselves to death because they want to focus on their art. So if you understand these points, you understand that a single person can work 2 to four hours a day and get substantially more results than anyone who works 8 plus hours a day. So take Charles Darwin like I mentioned in the intro. Yes, the guy who created the theory of evolution, the thing that we still talk about today.
He's a legend. He wrote upwards of 19 books in his lifetime. 19 books.
Very few people do that. That's a crazy body of work.
Did he work 16 hours a day? No.
After a short walk and breakfast, he began a 90-minute session of deep study.
After an hour break, he would return to his study around noon. And at that point, he would remark, "I've done a good day's work." That's 3 hours of work.
After that he replied to letters for 1.5 to three hours and now this is kind of work right but it's uh not deep intensive focused creative work it's more like maintenance work it's collaborative work and you could say that it isn't necessary for the actual creative work that he produced but I think he may say different right because communicating with people that helps create new ideas that helps refine ideas so on and so forth but after that he took time to rest and read.
Then he played games with his family, read more, and listened to music. Now, when I came across Darwin's daily routine, I realized that there were many overlaps with my own. They're both composed of intensive work intervals, systematic correspondence, so responding to others, regular breaks, and social interaction, rest, leisure, etc. I go on a walk first thing in the morning, then I knock out my deep creative, prioritized work for the first 1.5 to 2 hours, which usually involves writing and idea generation and research.
So learning and writing.
Then I go on another walk and by then I've kind of completed the needlemoving task for the day. I've done a good day's work.
And if I do that, even when on vacation every single day, I feel clear.
I feel good. Then I go to the gym.
Then I respond to messages from business partners and the team and just other people.
Sometimes I'll take a nap.
Then I'll read. Then I'll spend time with friends and family and go do stuff.
Now this sounds like a simple routine, but the reasoning behind it is actually very potent.
In the morning, entropy is constrained.
There are minimal distractions when the world is just waking up.
So, I place my most important tasks.
Then, since I'm always focused on a project, a book, product, newsletter, etc. And projects are magnets for novel ideas, I go on a walk and have my notes ready to jot down what comes to mind.
Now, I always talk about going on walks to have good ideas and all of the other benefits that come along with walking.
But a practice for you if you struggle to come up with ideas. First, you need a project that you're working on.
Second, as soon as you can when you go on the walk, whether you're listening to a YouTube video or an audiobook or you're reading something on your phone, doesn't matter what it is, try to jot down an idea early.
Try to force an idea out.
It's like clearing the faucet so water can flow.
Once you have one idea down, the rest of that walk, you'll have much more ideas.
Now, the gym marks the end of my intensive task. It's like a hard break throughout my day and I do not work on those later in the day because I know the quality of that work will suffer.
If I have an idea, I write it down and refer to it in the morning.
Now that people are up and communicating, entropy is slowly released and this is when I begin checking messages to reply to.
It's a different style of work that probably shouldn't be done in the morning if you care about the quality of your creative work. Now, by simply adhering to this routine, I would say for the past five years or so, I feel like I've done quite a bit in my life at the age of 29. I've written two books so far and have many more outlined that I need to get to. I've written a little under 200 newsletters, I think, and it's very similar with YouTube videos.
I've written thousands of posts across socials.
I've created like 10 products or services in my lifetime.
I'm working on two software or I'm working on one software company and a focus supplement company right now. Actually, on that note, go look at my highlight on Instagram.
I wasn't going to start posting about this, but if you want to see what the focus supplement is all about, it's actually really cool.
I'm going to be posting all of the science and the hype and the teasing on my story.
So, if you're interested in the brain and neurotransmitters and how certain supplements interact with that, follow me there. And the thing here is that I really just focus on people and product.
What I mean by people is attracting people to my work, right?
As mentioned, that's a quality of great work is being able to get people to care about what you do. Otherwise, you become a starving artist. You can sit and do your deep work and writing all day, but if you can't get that in front of other people who care, or if you can't persuade people to care about your work, then you're not going to make any form of an income from your work. I try to create products that would help my past self and put effort into their quality.
Then I write content to attract people who may benefit from those. If I were to build the product for one hour per day and write content for 1 hour per day, that's more than enough work considering the fact that products can be sold while I sleep and one piece of content can reach millions.
More time worked does not equal more results in today's world.
There is a point of diminishing returns and outsourcing too much of those two levers may hurt you. What I mean by that is that I can I've tried I can just never outsource content because that's where my unique edge lies.
I cannot outsource creative direction of the product.
There are very specific things that you will learn that you cannot outsource.
So we've discussed all that.
Let's talk about how to actually quit the 40-hour work week for good.
You live in the most permissionless time in history.
You futureproof yourself when you just do things without permission.
You pursue something you deeply care about.
Learn new skills.
build the project, package it up, try to sell it, and attract a tight-knit tribe of people who share your energy. You don't future proof yourself by sticking with a skill set that was an asset then, but is a liability now.
A liability that allows someone else to determine your value, cap your income, and control your attention for most of your day.
You can learn any skill faster than anyone in the past.
You can find the knowledge you need to do almost anything. You can do more as one person with less time, work, and money than an entire business could in the past. You don't need a degree.
You don't need a certification.
You need to be able to get results.
This is called permissionless leverage.
And it blows my mind that people still opt for the conventional path.
They'll go through four years of university, stack up miles of debt, and lock themselves into one area of study, not because they have the experience to make that choice, but because it promises to give them a stable income, rather than experimenting with their own path, error correcting for one to two years, and cultivating a mindset and skill set that allows them to earn as much as they want.
But now, now the power lies in the individual.
Now, future success boils down to skill, agency, critical thinking, and a healthy relationship with fear, failure, and embarrassment.
And if you believe otherwise, listen to that last sentence again because a lack of belief in yourself signals that you have none of the above.
But that can change with point number one, which is that you can drastically change your life in 365 hours.
Now, I've used this quote in like the last three out of the five videos, but that's because it's a great quote.
It's from Naval Ravakant. 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 gonna 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.
>> Person A can work 12 hours a day and make $50,000 a year. Person B can work one hour a day and make 5 million a year.
The difference is skill, leverage, and understanding, not how hard, long, or organized you work. People are doing this right now, meaning it's possible.
And you complaining about how unfair it is doesn't change that fact.
The belief that has taken me the furthest in life is understanding that results are replicable.
Anything that someone else can achieve, I can achieve.
And maybe not with the same sequence of steps, but there is a sequence of steps that I can discover through iteration.
Now, to sound a bit arrogant for a bit, I've made the most money in my life working 2 to four hours a day because I was quick to realize what my high lever tasks were.
I quite literally just ignored everything else.
And I noticed that if I tried to force myself to work more or longer on those tasks, the quality of the work just suffered and I didn't get as much results. And so I felt bad for not working very much. But I got more results.
So why wouldn't I do it?
And that's when I kind of had to just become okay with it. And then I realized that most people are just convinced that if they work if they aren't working eight hours a day, then they're useless.
And the other thing here, the most important thing is that when I first started, I didn't have two to four hours a day, right?
If you're working a job or you're a busy person, you're you're looking at these entrepreneurs online and it's like, oh, you have to work and grind 12 hours a day. It's like, dude, I I I know that I'm probably wasting some of my time throughout the day, but I don't have that time. So, I didn't have 2 to four hours, which is nothing, right?
I had one I had one hour that I could scrape together in the morning or the afternoon.
and how you spend that hour is just incredibly crucial.
Another thing on the topic of entrepreneurs is that the entrepreneurs that work 12 hours a day, they want to.
Those who don't don't and you just don't hear from them because they prefer a quiet life.
So, you need to start with one hour and you can drastically change your life with 365 hours. You need to dedicate one hour of work on the single task that will generate some form of result.
If you don't get the result, you need to iterate because it's not the action that doesn't get results. It's that you aren't good enough at the action to get results.
If you can't quit your job with 1 hour a day on weekdays and maybe four to 8 hours of work on weekends, it is best to believe that you are doing something wrong and you must improve through learning and experimentation.
Now, for beginners, this wasn't even possible 20 years ago. So, I understand why most people don't believe it.
Cultural beliefs are dominated by the oldest generations and those are the base operating system installed into the mind of the masses as they are born because when you're born it's like you just bought a new supercomput and you have the operating system but you haven't installed any apps or software or anything on the hard drive.
So your parents and your culture and what dominates the culture is going to be what occupies that's the software that's going to be installed in your head whether you like it or not. So by the time you turn 20, it has to become an ultimate priority of yours to undo that and redo it. And the important thing here is that some studies show that the adult mind crystallizes by the age of 25.
So, if you don't adopt personal development work, not the self-improvement that you see on YouTube nowadays, but real personal development work as a part of your life, then it's going to be so much more difficult to change when you're over the age of 25.
So, the boomers right now control the majority of the global belief system by conditioning their children, teaching in schools, preaching in churches, and governing in politics. It's not until they pass on that a major cultural shift will happen.
And that's when work times will decrease across the board because we'll be out of the industrial work mindset.
It's no longer going to be a status symbol to work 40 to 100 hours a week.
That's going to be the mark of stupidity.
Now, personally, I was kind of a rebel as a teenager.
I'm very grateful for my programming, so you could say.
But here's what I did, if it helps.
I started freelancing to control how long I worked. I realized I still didn't control my time because client work sucks.
I saw the opportunity of social media to build an audience of people.
I acted like a one-person media company and started writing then diversified to video. I built products with no marginal cost of replication like ebooks, courses, planners, templates, systems, and now software and a supplement.
So, people ask how I earned a few million a year working an average of 2 to four hours a day.
And I personally don't think it's too hard to understand.
Over five years, I've grown to a few million followers across social media.
To continue growing, I write posts and newsletters for an hour or two in the morning. I spend about an hour a week turning that content into a YouTube video as I teach into our writer.
And if you understand business, you understand you need people and a product.
Social media is where people come from in today's digital world because that's where the attention is right now.
In the past, it was mostly in the newspaper, on the radio, and on TV.
Everyone's telling you to start a personal brand because it's the popular thing to do, but it's also the true thing to do. I'll go out on a limb and actually say that as an absolute take.
Why?
Because the attention is there and it's permissionless.
You can start you can build digital assets without investing any money.
Like I I guess media is how you get in front of other people without manually doing it. So, if you don't want to manually try and scale to some like a million bucks, that's not going to happen without the internet.
At least maybe it will, but why would you even subject yourself to that if you think that you're somehow avoiding competition by doing that? You're not. And I mean, you can I guess create a product and then go market it on the radio or other things of that nature. And again, like it just doesn't make sense.
So, yes, social media is kind of a requirement in today's world.
And if you actually think it through, you understand that there is no saturation.
If you understand how the algorithms work and how human attention works and how many posts that people scroll by on a daily basis, there is more than enough to go around.
And I would go as far to say that there isn't even the supply to reach the demand of attention.
Every single scroll past a piece of content that you don't care about or you don't like is kind of a missed opportunity.
I'm not saying that we should just fill your feed with everything that you find important, right?
You still need to be able to discover stuff, but the fact still lies in that.
So, if it takes me a few hours of writing to continue growing my audience, and I have products that require close to zero work on my end to fulfill, then yeah, that's all the work I have to do for the day. If I can convert a small percentage of 10 to 20 million impressions I get each month on a $150 product, I'll let you do the math there.
And if you don't know what product to build, we're going to talk about that.
So point number two is do not lose focus on these two priorities.
Those two priorities are one people building an audience of or building a tribe of people to remove your dependency from your employer, government and any other centralized entity that controls most aspects of your life and two product.
Building a product so people can give you money in exchange for something that benefits their lives.
This is the only way to take control of your income and stop relying on anyone else to make you money.
And I find it quite funny how beginners always ask like, "Oh, how do I make money?
" And when they're given the only answer that will actually make them money, they ignore it and go after the faster methods of making money that are reserved for people with money like investing crypto startups real estate, and the rest. You make money by starting a business. You make money by distributing a product with a price tag on it so people can pay you for it.
To think that you don't have to build a product is idiotic, especially in the context of this video. If you don't build the product, you work for someone else who did. Plain and simple.
In other words, you are still bound to 40 plus hours a week on products that were assigned to you. I know some of you will only understand this if I'm harsh.
So, stop being a [ __ ] idiot and finally realize that you need a product and people in the form of an audience to pay you for that product. Then, and only then, once you have a minimum of 20,000 to $50,000 a month, should you think about investing capital as leverage to make more money from it.
Cash flow first. Freelancing, agency work, information products, I don't care.
Everyone has their opinion about why those are the worst or the best.
Your success in any of them will be determined by your ability to block out the noise and understand that opinions do not determine value and sales volume.
I recommend what I recommend, but just start something.
You probably don't have a few hundred,000 without destroying your life with loans to get rich like the few who did in older generations.
We live in a digital world with more resources, more efficiency, and lower costs so more people can generate wealth in that space, the digital space.
Now, point number three, and I think this will be the most helpful of them all because it's what makes you money.
Point number three is to build the product you want to see in the world. So once you've started writing or producing or creating some form of content so you can at least start practicing that and actually learning because you're not going to learn a thing until you're actually doing it.
Then you can start and use an hour of your day to actually build a product or you can start building the product first.
That's actually perfectly fine because then when you start on social media you actually have intention.
You have direction.
You have topics that you can write about because the topics are just related to the product.
You're not pitching the product in every video. you're talking about a topic that the product sits in a category.
Now, you don't need experience to sell a product. A product is what helps you gain experience.
Think about that for a sec because the biggest problem is like, okay, well, what if I don't have testimonials on the product?
How is it going to sell? How do you think you gain testimonials?
You sell the product. It's always the circular reasoning that traps people.
It's like, okay, well, I can't do this unless I get this, but I have to do this in order to do that.
So, it's like just do the thing.
And no, you don't need to create exaggerated promises that turn you into an unethical scammer. Creating a digital product is no different from creating a physical product or providing a freelance service.
So, let's say you want to sell a planner. Do you need experience selling planners in order to sell a planner? No, that's impossible.
Instead, you buy a few planners and start using them to see which methods get the best results for you.
You start taking the best parts of each to create a new method for better results.
Then you test and iterate a bit on yourself until you've solved the problem in your life.
Then you manufacture, sell, and distribute to the audience you've built with content.
You get results for your customers and continue iterating on the product until it pulls in the revenue you want to. This doesn't change with a digital product.
You can sell a printable planner, a notion template for a planner, or just an ebook or course that walks people through how to use your system.
Now, since you're not going the physical route, you can launch fast and skip the costly manufacturing and distribution.
I personally recommend that everyone create a digital product to start.
You can think of it as tiered, right?
Social media is the first data point.
You start talking about topics and ideas and the ones that do the best give you an idea to turn into a digital product.
And then the digital product you can launch and see if it works.
And if it doesn't, you may have lost time, but you didn't lose any money.
And now you have more data points to iterate on.
Once the digital product does really well, turn that into a software.
Complement it with a physical product.
Now you have money to actually invest in a bigger higher risk business.
And the same goes for freelancing.
For some reason, when people start a business other than client work, right?
Selling your time, their brain freezes up and they start whining about imposttor syndrome.
So how do you make money as a freelancer?
You learn the fundamentals of a skill. You build portfolio projects to practice.
You start working for free or very cheap. You gain experience in the real world. You start charging a bit more.
You improve your skill and get better results.
And this applies to anything you build, not just freelancing.
You aren't as skilled or successful as you think you are because you haven't started selling a product.
You're afraid to sell a product because you have imposttor syndrome.
You don't realize that selling a product is how you overcome that imposttor syndrome and get results for other people.
So my advice is to build the product you want to see in the world. Solve a problem in your life and sell the solution.
Take inventory of products that have changed your life, shaped who you are, and influence your behavior.
I'm guessing these will fall in line with what you are already writing about to build an audience.
Then make those products better by creating your own system and selling it under the most unique brand you can find yourself.
Start with information products to build cash flow if you feel like it. Turn the successful information products into another business.
And that's kind of it.
So, we'll leave it there. Like, subscribe.
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All right, thank you for watching.
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