Aldous Huxley once wrote about the Law of Reversed Effort:
“The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed.
Proficiency and the results of proficiency come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, or combining relaxation with activity, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent unknown quantity may take hold.”
If you’ve ever worked twelve hours straight and still felt behind, you’ve met the 80/20 rule for small business owners the hard way.
We live in a culture that worships effort. Every business podcast, every LinkedIn pep talk, every highlight reel tells you the same story: heroes never quit. It’s meant to be inspirational, and don’t get us wrong, to a point it is. But it also comes at a cost.
And sure…drive matters. It is what can make or break you. There is no question that there will be many times when pushing the limits is what you have to do to succeed. But drive can build you or break you, and there is nothing noble about martyring yourself for your work. Not even when it is your own business.
You’re not in a zero-sum game with your business
We get it. You believe the more you give, the more it’ll give back. That if you keep saying yes, if you just push harder, the universe will reward your devotion.
It won’t.
You can’t force every part of business to move faster just because you’re willing to burn hotter. We’ve tried.
And when it backfired (spectacularly, more than once) we learned a few things worth sharing.
From one workaholic to another: Don’t just aim to find balance. That’s far too polite for what’s needed here. Use your passion and drive to go 180 degrees in the opposite direction. If the 80/20 principle says that roughly 80% of effects come from 20% of causes, then all of those extra hours you’re putting in have some explaining to do.
Get ruthless.
Identify the 80% of work that’s draining you dry, and remove it. Don’t just walk away from it entirely of course, but step away from being the one responsible for it. Some of it you’ll delegate. Some of it you’ll systemise.
And some of it? You’ll just stop. Completely.
Start here
- Delegate and optimise the stuff that doesn’t take your personal expertise to do, your hourly rate is worth more than the admin tasks! Every time you cling to something anyone could do, you rob yourself of time to do what only you can do.
- Optimise your offerings. Chances are, 20% of your products or services account for 80% of your income. Focus there. Retire the ones that drain you or distract you, even if they’re “fine.”
- Optimise your own time. Not all hours of the day are created equally. You already know when your brain actually works, so do your most important work then.
- Figure out how much of it you can automate. Yes, it takes effort to set up. But once it’s running, the time you get back will shock you. You can’t scale chaos, but you can automate sanity.
- Say NO to the tasks (and even clients) that aren’t going to serve your business goals best. Not every client fits your goals. Not every task deserves to live. Once you take a step back you might just find it wasn’t that important anyway.
It takes some practice for sure. You’ll still feel the twitch to check, to fix, to “just do it myself.” But we both know you have the drive to go the distance. Don’t make us start singing you that song from Hercules…we can’t afford the copywrite lawsuit.
