← Build with Leila Hormozi
Build with Leila Hormozi
How I Work 14 Hours a Day (Without Getting Tired) | Spotify Video Exclusive
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In this video today, what I want to talk about is how I work 14 hours a day without getting tired or overdosing on caffeine. And so this subject came about because I talk about the fact that I like to work 14 hours a day. And a lot of people like to tell me that bad for my mental health. This is tiring, it's stressful, like, and here's the thing, if you only want to work eight hours a day, I am happy for you. Because a lot of people think that by me saying I like working 14 hours a day, that I'm putting down people who don't work 14 hours a day. So in another video that I had, I referenced work capacity. And a lot of people said, layla, how do you raise work capacity? Because as part of the job of being a CEO, so if you want to run a company, you typically need to be able to increase your work capacity. And a lot of people have asked me how I've done that. And there's part of it that's physical and part of it that's mental. And I think that more of it is mental. I would say 80% of it is mental and 20% of it's physical. Part of it is physical. In terms of if you want to build physical work capacity, you can't back down when your hours are stretched, what happens. A lot of times it sounds stressful, but the reality is that if you commit yourself for long enough, it becomes normal and eventually you adapt both physically and mentally. That's the first piece of it. The second piece of it is that a lot of people ask me, in order to work those hours, you must to meditate and walk and journal and use nootropics and caffeine dosing and alternating, you must have a crazy, meticulous routine to allow you to physically work those hours. And here's the thing. I don't have anything. I don't do shit. I drink one cup of coffee in the morning and that's it. And here's why is because most of the reason that you can't work 14 hours a day is because it's in here. It is not your physical being is your mentality around work. And so I want to break down for you the three beliefs that I have that serve me so that I can work 14 hours a day without feeling tired or stressed. The first belief that I have about work that allows me to work 14 hours a day is that I don't need to do this. When we were running gym launch and it got to a point, we were doing about $4.5 million a month and I felt incredibly stressed and I didn't know why I was so stressed. Like, we're making all this money, all this stuff, it's going really well. I felt so much stress in my head because of the thoughts I had about work. And the thoughts that I had were, if I don't do X, Y and Z, this will happen. I had all these what ifs that I believe relied on me. And here's the thing that I realized is I don't need to do this. One is I choose to do this. If you're starting a business, you don't need to start a business. You choose to start a business. It's a very different delineation. You could go have a job, you could go sell something on Etsy. There's so many other things you could do besides start a business. If you're going to start a business, remember, it's a choice. The side consequence of that is that oftentimes when we get into it, we have all of this pressure we put on ourselves because we're like people are relying on us. And what I've come to realize is that's a very selfish point of view. If you constantly are putting yourself in a place where you're putting so much importance on you, then you're going to feel so much pressure when you're working. It's almost debilitating. And I can tell you that because I've been there, that's what it used to be like for me. And the moment that I realized I was putting that pressure on myself and putting this elated level of self importance on myself, that's when I realized, oh my gosh, I'm creating this false reality or false narrative in my brain that's actually making work way more stressful for me. And so now my motto is, I don't need to do this and they don't need me. The second belief that I hold about work is that the goal is to be imperfect. So often what slows us down and doesn't allow us to work long hours is that we constantly monitoring ourselves as we're working to make sure that work is perfect. The thing is that if you're constantly checking for perfection, everything takes longer and you have a ton of judgment on yourself. But if the goal is to be imperfect, think about how much faster you'll move. So now every time I catch myself going slower or I keep judging myself for the fact that something isn't 110%, I just remind myself, like, girl, the goal is to be imperfect and so remove so much the mental drama that we have around work that doesn't allow us. Because if you have all that mental drama going all day, you're going to feel sluggish, you're going to feel tired, you'll feel like, I can't keep doing this all the time. But if you feel like, hey, I'm exceeding my goal, my work wasn't even just imperfect, it was like, pretty decent, because you're exceeding the expectations you've set for yourself. And if you can set expectations for yourself that you can constantly exceed, you're going to feel better and you're going to want to set higher and higher and higher. And over time, you're going to constantly be exceeding them and building confidence. The third belief that I hold about work is that work capacity is built under tension, the same way that you build muscle, which is time under tension. People talk about time under the bar, and I come from a fitness background, so I use this as an analogy. So what that means is that if you want to grow a muscle, you need to create more time under tension. And at first that muscle won't adapt, but then eventually that muscle will succumb to the work that you've put into it and it will grow. The same goes for work capacity. People often think, well, that sounds so stressful to commit to speaking and to commit to meetings and to commit to travel and all these things. Of course it's stressful if you only do it every once in a while. Think about it. If you only work out really hard once a month, then every time you do that workout, it feels terrible. But if you do that workout every day, it's just normal and it doesn't feel terrible. You actually adapt both physically and mentally. And so I believe that when I have to take on more work, I don't look at it like, oh, that's going to be horrible and terrible. I'm thinking I'm leveling up my new level of normal, and so I want a new level of normal overall. I wish that I had had these beliefs when I first started working. And what I used to think is all the stuff that everyone else says, right, and everyone else is probably not where you want to be, which is, you know, don't work so hard. Working long hours is bad for you, all these things. The reality is that the mental drama that you have around work is what's preventing you from working 14 hours a day. It's not necessarily the physical aspect of work. It's the thoughts you have about work. It's the meaning you give to working long hours. If you're able to change the beliefs that you have about work and about yourself and your output and your results, then you're able to work much longer hours. Not sucking your energy, it's actually giving you energy. And so that all being said, a lot of people have actually requested to see a screenshot of my calendar, so I'm going to share that here. So you can see, I do work long hours. I do have lots of things going on. I do have lots of things I have to switch between, and I'm okay with it. The thing is that in the beginning, switching between things, working long hours, it's hard. But guess what? I get used to it within two to three weeks. And you can, too.