I remember the moment that I turned in my keys to my office at my 9 to 5. It was the very last day that I ever had to walk into a 9 to 5, and I was so excited to have this freedom and this life that I'd been dreaming of and working pretty damn hard for fa long time. It wasn't until months later that I realized that I actually traded in my 9 to 5 for a 24/7. And somewhere along the way, I actually thought that that was a good thing, but I realized it wasn't. And I'm here to talk to you today all about how to build a business that lights you up without hustling 24/7. Here's the thing. What I wanted in the future, the vision I had for the future, what I wanted, I was working so hard for, and I wanted it so badly that I was sacrificing my life in the present. And I realized that that wasn't necessary.

I thought it was just kind of part of the gig of being an entrepreneur, but hustle isn't actually required. In fact, now I believe and recommend that you do it without hustling. Now I say that, and I still believe you have to work for your dreams. It requires action. You have to do something. You can't just wish and wait and hope, but I also believe that hustle simply isn't required. I want to dive in and talk about what I mean by this word hustle. Now you've heard it a lot, but you may have heard it as this badge of honor.

And I really want to dive into the real meaning of hustle and why I am so adamantly against it now. So as a verb, the definition of hustle straight from, by the way, googling the definition of hustle, is to force to move hurriedly or unceremoniously into a specified direction, or to obtain something by forceful action or persuasion? The keyword in both of those is force. And what I know from my own journey and from my clients is that when you force something, when you put pressure on yourself to get a result, you end up overwhelmed, no longer enjoying the work that you do. You ultimately fear taking a break because you're connecting working to the result, and you feel like you have to work to get the result. And that means if you stop working, if you take a break, what's gonna happen to your business? It also leads to working in your business, not on your business, and there's a big difference there. But, ultimately, I can summarize that all by saying it leads to burnout. When you're forcing a result, it leads to burnout. Now as a noun, hustle means busy movement and activity or a fraud or swindle.

Let's talk about the busy definition first. I'm really curious. When did hustle become this badge of honor? I don't know about you, but I often hear people say things like, hey. How are you? And then they respond with busy. Oh, that's good. Busy is good. Right? No. It's not.

Not unless it's good busy. There are different kinds of busy. Hustle isn't the good busy. Busy isn't good if it's not busy doing the things that light you up, busy doing what you love. And for you, that might include a good portion of work. I'm not here to tell you there's a magic number of hours that you should or shouldn't work in your business. It's all about working how much you want to work in your business. It's about only working when you want to work.

It's about not working because you feel like you have to work, again, going back to that force. Right? So let me ask you this. Do all busy entrepreneurs achieve their goals? Does everyone who works hard actually live a life that lights them up? Does everyone who works hard actually achieve success? I hope that you're with me here, and a resounding no is the answer. Being busy and working hard is not my definition of success, and, in fact, it's not necessary for success. There's a difference in putting in the work and taking action and forcing yourself to work nonstop. And so while that last definition of hustle being a fraud or a swindle may seem like it really doesn't apply at all here, what I actually want to put out there for you to consider is that that's the most accurate definition because hustling and thinking that hustling leads to your success couldn't be more deceiving. When you're hustling, you're forcing that result. You're busy feeling like you have to do more in order to achieve your results, and that the secret is doing more and working harder.

You're actually stilling joy now. You're sacrificing the life that you want to live now for the idea of what's to come in the future. I believe, and more than that, I know that it's possible to build a business that lights you up while living a life that lights you up. You get to have both. You don't have to wait. Your business should support the life that you love. So how becomes the question. Right? Is this really possible? And if so, how? Okay.

I've got 3 steps here, but I want to mention my mini course, so hustle not required. I dive even deeper into this topic in that course. So if you think This is an area that you need to work on. Be sure to check out that resource. The link will be in the show notes for you. Now today, I wanna give you some steps to get you started with letting go of the hustlepreneur life. So first, You have to know what is getting you results and then cut the rest. There's a saying in the marketing world that originated, I believe, from David Ogilvy, and he talked about how 50% of your advertising is working.

You just don't know which half. And the funny thing is that's so freaking true for so many people, but it doesn't have to be anymore. Things have developed so much since he first made that statement because now we can make data driven decisions, and we can actually see what is working and what's not working and even forecast the results and the ROI. So first things first, you have to know what's working. It also comes down to the Pareto principle, which is So freaking true. Have you ever heard of this? It's about 20% of what you do actually getting you 80% of your results. Imagine if you knew what that 20% was. Imagine if you only had to focus on that, and you could cut out anything that wasn't leading to results wasn't as ROI generating for you? What would that free you up to do? If you only had to work 20% of the current time that you're working and still keep 80% of your results? How could that change your life? And, I mean, of course, you don't have to cut all the way back to 20%.

But if you did, just imagine, if you even just cut it in half and you worked half the amount of time that you're working now and got greater results because you're focusing on only the things that deliver results. That's one way to make this possible. It's not about how often you work, how many hours you work. It's about doing the right things when you are working. Number 2, you have to create efficiencies for any repetitive tasks, any and all repetitive tasks You need either systems for or automation for. This means not rethinking a process Every time you have to do something, you're trying to remember the steps, but having them written down, knowing exactly how you're gonna handle things, like client situations or prospective client conversations, how are you gonna respond to certain questions that you get? You can have canned responses so that you don't have to recreate the will every single time that situation occurs in your business. Or, of course, with automation, there are so many things you'd be really surprised, so many things that you can do that will save you time by completely automating something. It could be huge automations, like building a sales funnel to automate the sales coming into your business, or it could be really microtasks that just take time, and there's no reason you have to do them.

Things like every time I create a project in Asana, I have an automation set up to automatically create a project folder by the same name in my Google Drive account. Such a simple thing, yet it's one less step to do, and it saves time. And there are so many other things. Those are just some examples. Number 3, build a team and delegate. Imagine if you had even a few more hours each week, whether you choose to reinvest that into your business, into those revenue generating activities, or whether you choose to use that time to take a break and live your life and do what you enjoy, imagine what that would be like. You can do that immediately as soon as you get someone onboarded and up to speed on some of the roles in your business. And oftentimes, there's a major objection here where people are like, oh, but I don't have the budget for that.

And I want to challenge that right now because you absolutely can begin to outsource at any level. There are options to outsource, whether internationally or online or even hiring a team member, and you'd be surprised how affordable it can be and how profitable it can be. Every team member that you hire should make you money. There are keys to making the right hiring decisions, But building a team and starting to outsource the things that drain you, that burn you out, that take time away, that are just the mundane, boring tasks, the things that anyone could do, you've gotta get those off of your plate to allow room for creativity and vision and strategy for you to work on your business and not in your business, for you to enjoy your life. You can actually create more success while doing less in your business? It's possible. Do you believe it?