A kind of panic sets in once you’ve leveled-up your earning power.
Your first taste of it comes in your teenage years when you’re working at McDonald’s or the ice cream shop. You start in the kitchen flipping burgers or at the cash register. Then a couple weeks or months in you get promoted to assistant shift manager. The nametag or tie changes color.
And suddenly you’re doing less work, but you feel more stressed.
You were good at serving customers quickly, and you took pride in it. Now, you’re asking Lilly to keep the cups stocked up.
The store manager is over there chatting up a customer, and the guy who owns the store shows up only twice a month. Just to collect the money.
You soon realize the people earning the most are usually doing the least.
If you’re like 95% of us, your brain has a hard time processing this.
To you, this arrangement kind of sucks.
But you have no time to dwell on this. Not while Lilly’s over there dropping stuff and giving people attitude.
You eventually adjust to the reality of work there, until you quit and go off to college.
Thing is, the work vs. reward paradox will creep up at your next jobs, smacking you in the face until you fully internalize it.
Those who stay at the bottom of society work like cows, while those who attain money and power work like lions.
Cows spend their whole day working, chewing grass at a slow, constant pace, just to get enough nutrients to survive. They can’t take hours or days off. Or they die of hunger.
But a lion spends 95% of his time lazing around basking in the sun. Napping too. Saving his energy for the other 5% of the time where he needs to sprint full force to get a kill or to fight a rival.
That one kill that took him an hour to scout and 3 minutes to chase will feed the lion for four days.
But it was intense, risky, and exhausting.
The cow chews thousands of times in a day, but no single chew is dangerous or very rewarding.
This is the price of success. Can you convince yourself that to rise above you have to embrace the work style of a lion?
A lion is choosing to lean into the power of leverage. High risk, but high reward.
In society, the people at the top don’t have to spend their entire day working, but they have to be alert at all times to the couple minutes out of their day that can make an actual difference. An executive might be in their office all day doing mostly stuff that looks unproductive, but when it’s time for that important call, he’s armed and ready. He’s rested, relaxed, and poised. He’s a lion ready to chase the zebra into a corner.
Powerful people understand that certain activities give them leverage. And they dedicate most of their time to protecting and honing this leverage, so that they can perform at the key moments that truly matter.
We’ve all heard Abraham Lincoln’s quote: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening my axe.”
A sharp axe is what gives him leverage.
But using his bare hands he could work all day and the tree wouldn’t move an inch.
As I mentioned in my book, the way to get money and power in the world is to build for yourself a lever. A lever is something that can move a heavier object than itself with less effort. A lever can take the form of a skill that you have, or a powerful connection, or an asset, or money that you can deploy.
If you have a job, your lever can be a skill, like being a good manager, public speaker or a great salesman. Or it could be a technical skill, like if you’re a genius architect. At that point you’re not physically building the factory. You’re just designing the plan and the cheaper labor is laying the bricks.
The public speaker or the salesman or the architect are spending most of their day thinking. Or learning or saving their energy for the moments that really matter. These short moments can make or break their entire day. They might not be doing much actual work, but they feel stress. The stress of a compressed spring, ready to push at any time.
The entrepreneur or executive understands that making the right impression at the pitch meeting can be the difference between landing the million dollar account or having to lay off five employees.
Can you put up with this stress? The stress of responsibility. The stress of lounging around most of the day so you can run like hell for two minutes.
Not many are ready to pay this price. Which is why not many climb up the pyramid that is society.
A successful life does not feel like a marathon. A successful life is a series of sprints.
In between the sprints you have to be ok with the boring moments when your mind and body are re-charging. It’s gonna feel like nothing’s moving, but inside nature is doing the work it has to do. The most important of all work.
As Charles Burdett wrote: “Don’t force yourself to be highly productive 100% of the time. Save your energy for the high-calorie brain activity for when you truly need it.”
This happens in creative work too. There’s a comic strip where a son asks his journalist dad, “Why are you staring out the window? You should be typing.” The Dad answers, “Typists type. Writers stare out windows.”
My favorite writers work like lions.
Aaron Sorkin, the brilliant movie writer says that his writing process involves months of thinking and napping in his office before he even writes one word of the screenplay. Then most of the writing actually takes place in a mad dash at 2AM when inspiration strikes. He’ll write ten pages within two hours. Then it’s back to thinking and napping for days or weeks.
He wrote classics like A Few Good Men and The Social Network, so who am I to argue with his process?
Look, I understand that starting out we all have to do menial busywork. It’s called paying dues. But what I hope to impress upon you is that you should be on the lookout for Lion-style work, leaving behind the work that a cow would do. Do it for free if you have to. Just get good at it. When others shy away from responsibility, you should be raising your hand.
Take on the crafty work, and let go of the crappy work.
Once you start moving up, it’ll feel weird. The money grows, along with the stress, but the actual work becomes less and less. That’s a sign you’re on the right track.
There’s a nerdy essay on the internet that I love, it’s called The Gervais Principle. It’s named after Ricky Gervais, the creator of The Office, one of the best shows of all time, of course, duh??!
The essay uses The Office to talk about company politics and how people move up. He argues that it’s easier for someone from the bottom to move up to the executive level than it is for someone from middle management to do it. This is because those who get promoted to middle management moved up due to hard work. But it’s not hard work that gets you to the executive level. He says you have to be slick and a schemer to become an executive, and that quality is found more in the lower levels where many are desperate enough to take risks.
Basically, at the lower level you’ll either do just enough work to not get fired and stay there forever. Or you’ll maneuver around in a slick way which makes you shoot up to executive level quickly.
I don’t agree that you have to be a schemer to get to the top, I think you just have to be comfortable making the risky decisions that most people are too scared to make. In other words, you are ok giving up cow work to take on the work of a lion.
And lions don’t just hunt anything, they find the right prey too. A successful lion will focus on hunting antelope, not field mice. As Sahil Bloom wrote: Stop wasting your time and energy on small decisions with small rewards. Your energy is limited, use it to hunt the antelope.
If you’ve reached the fork on the road then you have a decision to make: keep going down this path where you work all day just to stay above water, or give up most of that work to take on work that will change your life. The work that most are scared to do. The work of a sprinter, not a marathoner.