#212 - Why You Shouldn't Be A Slave to a 40 Hour Work Week

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How to Make Money with What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. It talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's Podcast Network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**Shaan Patel** (1:02)
And a lion is the exact opposite. A lion sits, rests, it watches, it observes, it waits for an opportunity.
Then when an opportunity comes, like the gazelles running across the field, the lion looks up, sprints after the gazelle.

**Sam Parr** (1:29)
Okay, we're here. All right. Let me tell you something. All right. You ready?

**Shaan Patel** (1:34)
Yeah.

**Sam Parr** (1:35)
I saw a great tweet that got me thinking a lot. And I've been reading a lot on this topic. So it's very good coincidence. So it's this guy named Dan Vasallo. He said, I'm convinced that working 40 hours a week, 50 weeks per year for 30 to 40 straight years is against our nature. Yet, the most skilled, educated and highly paid people I know tend to be unable to consider any other path that doesn't involve enduring this artificial lifestyle. Do you, Shaan, agree or disagree?
Well, actually, let me phrase it differently.
Do you think that 40 hours, 50 hours a week for 50 years is outlandish? Where do you fall on that?

**Shaan Patel** (2:17)
I totally agree with this. I think that the workweek concept is suboptimal, somewhere between bogus and suboptimal. All right. So why do I think that?
So first, there's this assumption that we have linear output, that you come in eight hours a day, all eight hours are going to be roughly equal. Nobody says this, but it's just implied in the way that we work.
You're expected to sort of be there for these hours. And then on top of that, there's like, well, cool, then Monday through Friday should be the same. And then you're working 50 weeks out of the year, they should all be roughly equal. We know anybody who does non-factory work, non-industrial work, if you're working with your brain, you're doing knowledge work, that workweek doesn't make any sense. And I think you kind of like nerd out about the history of things, the history of the workweek, the history of the industrial revolution and shit like that.
And it seems to me, and maybe I could be wrong here, but it seems to me like this idea of the way we work, where you go to a central place, and then you work eight hour shifts, and you do that five days out of the week, and then you do that 50 weeks out of the year, and you do that for 30 years out of your career, that is like the industrial age. And it makes sense if you're actually working in a factory, because you can sort of pick pack, you know, you can sort of like do all these like, these physical tasks with a certain set of output, and it can be measured and like just the more hours you're there, the more output you're going to get. Whereas if you're a programmer, or you're a designer, or you're a, you know, a product person or you're a marketer, you might have one hour where you just get this burst of creativity of insight. And that hour was like the whole day's work, and it might take you a whole day to get to that point. But that hour was like the most valuable bit. So I think that the way people work today is we still work the schedule of a factory, but we don't work in factories anymore for the most part. So yeah, I totally disagree with I totally agree with the tweet, which disagrees with the workweek.