Overachieving with Lazy Entrepreneurship

In twelve easy steps

In my experience of building businesses, success has been down to doing the right work rather than doing a lot of work. I have a tendency (which I’m sure many share) of feeling like I always need to be doing things. It’s important that I resist this urge - this is where tapping into my inner lazy entrepreneur comes in handy.

The lazy entrepreneur doesn’t want to work that much, is quickly bored by busywork and is never going to suffer from burn out. Why is this desirable, contrary the common mantra of putting in 110%?

Actually there’s only three steps

Firstly, you need time and space to think beyond the immediate tasks in front of you. As an entrepreneur you are not laying bricks. Vision and imagination are a crucial part of your work and this isn’t the kind of work that purely down to the number of hours you put in, or how much you struggle.

Similarly you need space for happenstance and opportunity to do its work. This could be thinking or reading time, attending conferences; I like cliche of the “CEO on the golf course”. Make sure you’re spending some of your working day on something relaxing/fun, and especially something which has large potential upside.

Get someone else to do it

Secondly, the lazy entrepreneur would much rather have someone (or something) else do the work. A large part of growing a successful business is delegation and automation.

Even if you're a tiny or solo operation, you’ll potentially benefit from hiring outside help. A few hours of repetitive tasks can be cheaply outsourced, and it’s often smarter to hire and expert than go down the rabbit hole and do-it-yourself . Ultimately scaling up a business is largely about recruiting and leading the right team.

Automation is vital - in a basic sense, software startups/SaaS businesses are automation of some manual process(es). But equally a 21st century bricks-and-mortar business that doesn’t replace some of its repetitive tasks risks losing the edge to competitors.

Work leads to linear, lazy leads to exponential

Finally it’s a huge opportunity cost running after a mediocre idea when a good or great idea is just about to come along. By being a little lazy, you’ll struggle to succeed with a mediocre opportunity, only the really good ones will work. Once you’ve founded a few businesses you’ll see this in effect - one/some of them “just work” and grow much faster than the rest.

A mediocre idea will have linear returns, and a great idea exponential returns on the same effort - consider how that compounds over time.

A word on burnout

I’ve met many entrepreneurs who fill their day with carefully measured doses of caffeine, matcha or modafinil; minutely partitioned work calendars; body, diet and sleep hacks. This is all fine to some extent, as long as you have a healthy balance. If you don’t have that, you risk pushing things too far and burning out.

I’m speaking from experience here - I used to do it all, work hard, play hard, experiment with my exercise diet and sleep - and eventually I made myself chronically ill. It me took years to fully recover.

So in part I wrote this today because I know many of my fellow entrepreneurs are, like me boundless workaholics with a heavy bias towards activity. Tap into your inner lazy entrepreneur, it’ll help keep you from overwork, steer you towards a better outcome and save you from burning out.

Coming up next: crib notes from a decade of running remote teams; business lessons from options trading; channeling your inner business baboon…