EARN TWICE AS MUCH IN HALF THE TIME

If you’re still bragging about working 60 hours a week, you’re doing it wrong. If you’re complaining about not enough work and asking which AMCs you should sign up for, you’re doing it wrong…and if you hate it when some stupid podcaster tells you you’re doing it wrong so you shut down and stop listening, you’re doing it wrong.

What if I told you that you could make more money, in less time, with better clients, and actually enjoy your life in the process? What if I changed the word ‘could’ to ‘should’, as in, you should be making more money in less time, with better clients, and enjoying life in the process? 

Today, we’re dismantling the ‘grind and complain culture’ that’s keeping most appraisers broke, burned out, and bitter, and replacing it with a proven blueprint for a 4-hour workday that doesn’t just sound sexy, it actually works. I know because I’m living it. 

I’ll show you how to eliminate the noise, automate the busywork, and focus only on what moves the needle, so you can build a business that funds your freedom, instead of one that owns your life. Let’s get into it.

Most of you listening have heard of Tim Ferris, and most of you have heard of his book, the 4-Hour Work Week. If you haven’t yet heard of it, I highly recommend picking up the updated version if, for no other reason than to start rewiring your brain around working less and making more. 

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that you can just work 4 hours per week and everything will just fall into place. I think even Tim Ferris has said that he didn’t really mean for the title to be taken so literally, but the book makes the very solid point that there are usually much better ways of doing things, and that there are much better ways of making a living than trading the best years of your life for a few dollars. 

At least, that’s what I took away from reading it when it first came out. I had already started some form of my own online business selling martial arts video courses, so this was nothing new to me, but it definitely reinforced the idea that there is nothing wrong or shameful with working less and making more. 

So many people grow up with a subconscious tape playing in their mind that hard work will lead to an easy life, or that, to make a good income, you’ve got to put in your time and work hard. These messages are hammered into us from our earliest years and they end up shaping the way we think and feel about work in general and our income specifically. 

This dangerous messaging is a subtle form of the scarcity mindset. There is nothing wrong with having a strong work ethic and not being afraid of working vigorously. It’s when we tie the word ‘hard’ to work. From our earliest years onward we are developing our understanding of the various definitions of the word ‘hard’ as it relates to work. And, since your income typically comes from what you do for work, those two concepts get intimately linked and you’re screwed for the rest of your working days. 

If you were ever told that nothing worthwhile is easy, or that you’ve got to work harder than everyone else to get ahead in life, you were being brainwashed. Not that the person who told you those things had anything other than the best of intentions for you, they just didn’t know any better. 

After all, what kind of parents would we be if we told our children to find shortcuts in their work? The messaging comes from a place of love and an understanding that the world is an unforgiving place where laziness is not rewarded. The message that you have to work hard is meant to steel you for what’s ahead, which isn’t going to be easy. 

But, there is a difference between easy and hard. If you had learned as a child that something might not be easy, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be hard, that subtle difference in messaging may have changed your whole trajectory. It can be a valuable pursuit to chase after things that aren’t easy because there are fewer people doing that. 

However, if you have an internal belief that something must be hard to be valuable, you will subconsciously make things more difficult than they often need to be. I see this all the time in coaching people. They don’t even know they’re doing it, but they’re deliberately making things more difficult than they need to be and it's usually because they have a belief system that simply accepts that, if something is hard, they must be on the right track. 

I am here to tell you all that, especially when it comes to your work, your income, and your life; the goal should always be to make as much as humanly possible in the least amount of time, with the least amount of hassle, and with people you enjoy doing it with. 

A man who digs a ditch by hand is no more noble than the one who digs it using an excavator. The world responds to results, not the labor that gets the results. The market pays you for the impact, not the effort it takes you to create the impact. 

If we take the ditch digger analogy into the realm of economics, the man who digs the ditch by hand is not only constrained by the number of hours in the day, he’s also constrained by the amount of energy, strength, and will power he has, not to mention how dense the earth is under his shovel. 

The man who uses the excavator is only constrained by the number of hours in the day and, thus, how many ditches he can dig in the same number of hours. Which one do you think makes more money? Which one has more of himself left at the end of the day? Which one would you rather be? 

The man who digs the ditch by hand is working hard, yet paying the greatest price, getting paid the least, shortening his own life, receiving the fewest benefits, and yet, per the adage that hard work is rewarded, by all rights he should be a billionaire. 

Sorry, friends, it’s time to ditch the industrial age programming. There was a time and a specific place where that mentality worked and it was the factory floor. You’re not on a factory floor and your work does not need to be ‘hard’ to be valuable. 

Stop tying the number of hours you work to how valuable you believe yourself to be. That’s the first step in your psychological recovery. The second step is to stop tying your income to the number of hours you work. Your value is not in how hard you work. 

If you want to become obsessed with a number related to your hours worked, become obsessed with your dollars per hour. Once you truly understand dollars per hour, you’ll start to understand that everything you thought you knew about making money and building a life is backwards.  

The only people impressed that you make $40 per hour are people who make less than you and probably work harder than you. The only people impressed that you earn $100 per hour are those earning $50 and working harder. The only people impressed that you earn $200 per hour…and on it goes. 

The goal should always be to get that number up continuously, as in, it never ends. There are 3 primary ways to increase your dollars per hour: 

1. Choose work that pays you more in the same amount of time that the lower dollar work pays. Short answer: raise your fees. 
2. Find ways to do more of that work in less time. Leverage software, assistants, and efficiencies to do more in less time. 
3. Create something of value that pays you while you sleep. 

That’s it.  

Raise your fees, get more efficient, and get paid while you sleep. Of course, you can do all three of those things to increase your dollars per hour, but the point is that I am challenging you to have a mindset shift from ‘if I just work a little harder, I’ll make more money’, to, ‘It’s ok to earn more than I believe I can in the least amount of time possible, with the least amount of hassle, struggle, and suffering, and I can do it with people I enjoy working with!’

Friends, this first step in the 4-hour workday blueprint is to first realize that you get paid for results, not effort. You get paid more for impact and transformation than you do your labor. Create more impact, get paid more. 

Stop making your value about how hard you work. Maximize your impact and the results you get while minimizing the effort it takes to get those results. 

To be clear, I’m not saying that some things in life aren’t difficult. I’ve done martial arts for 45 years. I lived in a Zen temple. I’ve traveled the world getting my ass kicked and doing difficult things. I understand deeply the value of doing things that are difficult.  

I’m simply saying that your income does not need to be based on how hard you work. If you believe you have to work hard to be rewarded, you will go out of your way to make everything hard, which inevitably leads to working more hours than necessary to accomplish what you’re trying to accomplish. 

The thinking behind a 4-hour very productive workday is all about scaling your results instead of trying to scale your time. When the only way you’ve ever thought is like a technician, the only things you tend to think about as it relates to your work is how you can get better, do more appraisals, and make more money. 

Nothing wrong with that way of thinking, except that you eventually hit the ceiling on all of those things. The law of diminishing returns eventually kicks in because there is a point past which you’re no longer really getting better, you can’t increase your personal output any further, and you’re capped at how much you can earn with the number of hours you have in your day. 

To go beyond all of those things, you need leverage. Leverage comes from levers, which is a tool that can move exponentially more than the size and weight of the lever.   

The most powerful form of leverage begins with your recognition and understanding that you might just have an addiction to struggle. 

An addiction to struggle shows up for a lot of people because of how they were raised and the messaging they saw and heard when they were young. 

There’s a belief that ‘hard work makes the man’, or the one that’s become a meme in the past few years that ‘hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times’. While not necessarily wrong as it relates to one’s character, it doesn’t necessarily apply to one's work and income.  

When you have an unconscious addiction to struggle, you’ll unconsciously seek it out because struggle validates your sense of self worth. Something has to be difficult for you to feel good about it. 

Bring that mentality to work and not only will nothing ever be good enough, nobody will ever do things as good as you (which means you’re stuck doing everything) and everyone around you looks lazy. 

Look around you and examine your business. Whenever things have gotten good or come a little too easily, in what ways did you sabotage and over-complicate things? If you started adding new tech, over-complicating systems, adding bodies unnecessarily, and increasing your workload, you likely have a hidden addiction to struggle and making things harder than necessary. 

As many people and businesses as I have examined and coached over the years, one of the things that I know for certain is that most of you have, on your best days, about 3-4 good, productive hours of work and income related activity. Nevertheless, almost every one of them complained about not having enough hours in the day. 

Friends, rarely, if ever, is your biggest issue that you just don't have enough hours in the day. If I told you today that, not only can you earn as much you do now in half the time and with half the effort, but that it's an order, within 63 days you’d figure out how to do it. 

The problem is not that you don’t have enough hours in the day, it's that you use those hours for things you shouldn’t be doing as the CEO of your company, and it doesn’t matter to me if you’re a one person business or not, the rule still applies. 

You’re addicted to hard work and to struggle and it's limiting your income at the expense of your time and mental health. Stop working so hard and take a few cues from the so-called ‘lazy’ ones. Unless you’re in the gym trying to lose weight and gain some muscle, hard work and struggle needs to be banished from your thinking. 

There is almost always an easier way to accomplish what you want to accomplish and to do it in less time. Your job as CEO is to find the easy way and exploit it for the benefit of your company, team members, and clients. You working harder does nothing for your clients or your bank account. Remember, the market pays you for results, not how hard you work. 

Hard work is a season, not a long-term strategy. Yes, it's ok to put in lots of extra effort at the beginning of something or to power through challenges, but those of you using hard work and struggle as your success strategy, I hate to burst your bubble, but it will never beat the person using leverage. 

You may be able to run faster than me, but you’ll never be able to run faster than I can pedal on my bike. You may be able to bike faster than me, but you’ll never be able to bike faster than my car can drive. You may be able to drive faster than me, but you’ll never be able to drive faster than an airplane can carry me. 

That, my friends, is leverage. Instead of patting yourself on the back for working lots of hours and spilling all of your life energy on the pavement for a few dollars, start asking yourself what it is you’re trying to accomplish and then ask what is the quickest and simplest way to achieve that thing. 

If you’re addicted to working lots of hours and doing lots of things like Elon Musk, fine, do lots of things, start a bunch of companies, and become a billionaire doing it. Just understand that there is a marked difference between somebody who starts and owns several multi-billion dollar companies and schedules his whole day in regimented 15 minute time blocks because his time is in such high demand, and somebody who spends half their day driving in a car to take pictures and measure houses. 

Sorry if that offends you, there simply is no comparison between a CEO of 6 big companies working 18 hour days and what you do. The comparison is not meant to shame you for not being a billionaire, it's to highlight the point that it's not about how hard you work or how many hours you work, it's what you create in that time and how much impact and influence you can have in those hours. 

Which brings us to one of the most important comparisons in this 4-hour workday conversation: effort vs impact. if you take nothing away from this episode but this point, it's that you get paid for your impact (results), not your effort. We know this is true by the simple fact that two appraisers can be working on the same $400 appraisal report, except that one appraiser takes 4 hours to complete it and one takes 10 hours. 

Same assignment, same fee, different effort. Not saying that one of those appraisals is better than the other, by the way, just emphasizing the fact that we are always paid for the impact and the result, not for how hard you work creating the result. 

If that is a universal truth, why not try to find the ideal marriage between effort and impact? Your value is not in how hard you work or how difficult your life is. The goal should always be trying to figure out how to multiply your impact while simultaneously minimizing or eliminating unnecessary effort. 

Again, if you were ordered or had no choice but to work only four hours per day, yet make the same amount of money or more, what would you eliminate, what would you delegate, what would you automate, and how would you utilize or spend the remaining hours of the day? That is the question to be asking every morning before you lumber into your spare bedroom office and start mindlessly plinking away on the keyboard simply because you’ve either got a busy appraisal queue, or because you don't have anything better to do that day. 

I’ll finish this episode with one of the teachings from a framework I created for my coaching members called the BOSSMAP framework. Each letter of the framework is a command for building a killer business, but more importantly a killer life. 

The ‘B’ stands for ‘Build the Machine’, which is a command to build systems and processes, along with people development, instead of getting stuck in the technician spiral. 

The ‘O’ stands for ‘Own the Vision’, which is a command to first have a vision, one that goes beyond just waking up and working, and then addressing what kind of culture to build to have the greatest impact and results in the least amount of time with the least amount of hassle. 

The first ‘S’ stands for ‘Scale with Simplicity’, which is a command to keep things simple instead of killing the dream with complexity. 

The next ‘S’ in BOSSMAP stands for ‘Strategic Scheduling’, which is the one I want to focus on as we wrap up this episode. If you’re interested in what the whole BOSSMAP framework entails and how it helped me and a bunch of others build some fairly successful businesses, I talk about it much deeper over at the appraiser increase academy, which you can try absolutely free at www.CoachBlaine.com/freemonth. 

The second ‘S’ in the BOSSMAP framework is for strategic scheduling which is a command to ruthlessly focus on how you allocate your most precious resource: time. "Strategic Scheduling" recognizes that your calendar is the ultimate reflection of your priorities and the most powerful leverage point for transforming your role as the CEO of your appraisal business. 

Having coached lots of business owners over the decades, I can say with certainty that most of you operate with reactive calendars, which is to say that most of your days are spent reacting to whatever is the most urgent and whatever is in your queue for appraisal inspections.  

You’re responding to the constant barrage of emails, calls (if you’re actually getting any of those), and requests to squander your time and treasure with fee and turn time bids, without considering whether any of those activities actually advance your most important goals. Strategic scheduling represents a fundamental shift from reactive to proactive time management so that you can get to the point where almost every hour of your day is spent doing something that advances and increases your wealth, your equity in the business, your dollars per hour, and your quality of life. 

The core insight of strategic scheduling is that not all hours are created equal. I’ve done a couple podcasts on the topic of $10,000 hours and how they work. If you don't know what your $500, $1000, $5000, and $10,000 hour activities look and feel like, you’re likely to default back to the $50 per hour activities like working only on appraisals. 

Don’t get me wrong, if you run an appraisal business, yes, you have to work on appraisal reports at some point. The problem, however, is that, while you’re working on appraisals, you can’t do anything else to advance your company. You can’t do sales, you can’t meet with new potential clients, you can’t give a talk or teach a class, you can’t do anything that we might consider to be a $10,000 hour. 

Yes, there is a time during the day that the appraisal need to be worked on. However, what are you doing with all of the other hours of the day? Likely nothing of value because you’ve been led to believe that the most valuable part of your day is when you’re working on an appraisal. 

I am challenging that assumption because the reality is that working on appraisals is NOT the most valuable part of every day. It might be the most valuable activity of some of your days, but there are definitely more valuable uses of some of the hours of your days that could exponentially exceed whatever your dollars per hour are when you’re working on an appraisal. 

There are certain activities, what we could call "$10,000/hour activities", that create exponentially more value for your business than routine operational tasks. These high-leverage activities typically include vision development, strategic partnerships, talent acquisition, capital strategy, content creation, and brand authority building. 

One piece of good content put out into the world can create tens of thousands of dollars worth of future business. I know this to be true because it's been true for me for 20+ years now. If that’s true, then we can compare an hour spent working on a $400 appraisal and what that hour is worth versus an hour spent creating some valuable brand building content. If I can spend an hour to create a piece of content, heck, if I have to spend 3 hours creating a piece of content, but that content brings in $10,000 worth of business over the next year, those 3 hours were worth $3,333 per hour. 

I challenge you to show me an appraisal assignment you’ve worked on that netted you $3,333 per hour.  

The point is to simply highlight the fact that all hours are not created equal and far too many of you get sucked into the abyss of grinding away on appraisal reports all day every day thinking you’re killing it, only to look back and realize everything around you has changed and you’ve been left behind. Not only have you not built a scalable and salable business, you haven’t built any additional streams of income to protect you from market and industry changes. 

Friends, if you only had four hours per day to work and create more income than you’re producing right now, what kinds of activities would you work on? Although I am not telling you to only work four hours per day right now, I am challenging you to look at how you spend most of the hours during your day and see if you can't reallocate some of those hours to some $10,000 per hour activities. 

Build the system, own the vision, scale the most valuable parts of your business with simple systems and process, and take control or your calendar like your life depends on it because it does. You must strategically schedule in the time to work on activities and plans that likely won't pay you today, but will pay you exponentially more in the future. 

If your calendar is filled every day with tasks, you’re working too hard on things that likely don’t matter in the long run. If your calendar is filled every day with appraisal orders, congrats! You can call yourself a successful appraiser this week or month. But I will challenge you to begin redefining what it means to be a business owner. 

While being busy completing appraisals was a worthy goal at the beginning when you were starting out, if you’re still busy plugging away at appraisal orders 10 or 20 years later, and you’re doing so all day long, you’re simply doing it wrong. 

The goal of almost everything we do in life should be related in some way to progress. If you start lifting weights today and you can only bench press 20 pounds, the goal should be to lift 30 pounds at some point in the future. If we check in five years later and you’re still bench pressing 20 pounds, you’re doing it wrong. 

If you’ve been doing something for 10, 15, 20 years or more and you’re still doing it fundamentally the same way and in the same amount of time, you’re simply working on the wrong things. Sorry friends, be offended and mad all you like, it's simply a universal truth and a veiled form of laziness. 

My challenge to every single one of you today is to look at your calendar, look at your daily schedule, look at how you spend your time, and then force yourself to finish everything you have on your schedule today, but in one less hour than you had planned. Then do it again tomorrow. The following week you shave off two hours of your day to accomplish the same amount of stuff. 

Keep living and working like this until you wake up to the fact that you actually can accomplish way more in considerably less time than you ever thought you could. From there, the real challenge begins: start using the time you’ve freed up to create something new, something valuable, something that solves a problem for somebody, something that people will pay for, and something that might just pay you while you sleep.