You Can Work Hard Forever or You Can Work Hard Once on the Thing That Works for You
You’re going to die. And between now and then, you have a fixed, non-negotiable, rapidly depleting amount of time to build whatever it is you’re going to build. No extensions. No bonuses. No rollover minutes.
This is not new information. You’ve heard it before. But you haven’t acted on it — because if you had, you wouldn’t still be doing everything the hard way.
You’re chopping with a dull axe. Swinging harder, sweating more, exhausting yourself with effort that feels productive because it’s painful — while the person next to you is cutting twice as deep with half the swings. Not because they’re stronger. Because they spent an hour sharpening the blade before they started.
Photo by Jason Abdilla on Unsplash
Ecclesiastes 10:10 says it plainly: “If the ax is dull and its edge unsharpened, more strength is needed, but skill will bring success.
Skill. Not more hours. Not more effort. Not grinding yourself into dust and calling it discipline. Skill — the intelligence to recognize that how you work matters more than how hard you work, and that the highest use of your finite time is not laboring — it’s building the systems that labor for you.
There are two kinds of hard work, and most people never distinguish between them.
The first is linear hard work. You trade time for output, directly, hour for hour. You do the thing, you get the result, and tomorrow you wake up and do it again. Every day resets to zero. Every result must be re-earned from scratch. This is how most people work. This is how most people live. And it’s why most people are exhausted, underpaid, and running out of time with nothing compounding behind them.
The second is leveraged hard work. You invest time once into building a system, a process, an asset, a skill set — something that continues producing results after the initial effort is complete. You work hard, but the work has a half-life that extends beyond the hours you put in. The system runs while you sleep. The asset appreciates while you’re focused elsewhere. The skill compounds into opportunities that didn’t exist before you built it.
Both require effort. Both require discipline. Both are hard. But one of them requires you to work hard in perpetuity — forever, without end, trading hours until you run out of them. The other requires you to work hard for a season — intensely, strategically, with the understanding that what you’re building now will eventually carry weight you no longer have to lift manually.
The choice between them is the most important decision you will make with your finite time. And most people never make it consciously. They default to linear because linear is obvious. Swing the axe. See the chip. Swing again. It feels like progress because it produces immediate, visible feedback. But visible feedback and meaningful progress are not the same thing.
I’ve been investing since I was 14. That was leverage. Not genius — leverage. The early deposits were small. The effort was minimal. But the decision to build a system that compounds — to put money into a mechanism that grows without requiring my daily presence — means that decades later, the earliest investments have done more work than I ever could have done manually in the same timeframe. I didn’t outwork the market. I built a system and let time do what time does when you give it something to compound.
I’ve been building content across multiple platforms. That’s leverage. A single article, written once, can generate revenue, build audience, and create opportunities for months or years after the morning I wrote it. The words don’t expire. The system doesn’t reset to zero at midnight. The effort I invested on a Tuesday in 2023 is still producing results — without requiring me to be present, without consuming additional hours, without trading more of my finite time for more linear output.
Leverage is not laziness. It’s the refusal to waste the only non-renewable resource you have on work that disappears the moment you stop doing it.
Proverbs 21:5 says: “The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty.”
Plans. Not just effort. The diligent person doesn’t just work — they plan the work. They think before they swing. They ask: is there a way to get this result that doesn’t require me to be physically present for every unit of output? Is there a system I can build? A process I can automate? A skill I can develop that multiplies the value of every hour I invest?
The hasty person skips straight to effort. They’re in motion before they’ve thought about direction. They’re swinging before they’ve sharpened. And they mistake the exhaustion for evidence that they’re doing it right.
They’re not. They’re just tired.
Seneca, who understood the finite nature of time better than almost any philosopher who ever lived, wrote: “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a great deal of it.”
And the greatest waste is not idleness. The greatest waste is unstrategic effort — years of hard work poured into systems that don’t scale, don’t compound, and don’t survive the day you stop showing up. You can fill every hour of every day with labor and still waste your life if the labor has no leverage behind it.
There is no virtue in being busy. There is virtue in being effective. And effectiveness, in a world where your time is the scarcest resource you possess, means building things that outlast the effort that created them.
This applies to everything. Not just business. Not just money.
Your health — you can do random workouts every day for years, or you can invest time into understanding programming, nutrition, and recovery and build a system that produces results with less wasted effort and more targeted impact. Both are hard work. One of them compounds. The other just makes you sore.
Your relationships — you can react to every crisis as it arrives, or you can invest in communication skills, emotional intelligence, and boundaries that prevent the crises from occurring. Both require energy. One of them is maintenance. The other is architecture.
Your career — you can trade hours for wages indefinitely, or you can invest in skills, platforms, and assets that generate income beyond the hours you’re physically working. Both demand discipline. One of them has a ceiling. The other doesn’t.
The principle is universal: wherever you are spending time linearly, there is an opportunity to convert that time into leverage. The question is whether you’ll take the time to sharpen the axe — or keep swinging the dull one because the rhythm is familiar.
Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what’s left and live it properly.”
What’s left is less than you think. And the way you spend it — linearly or leveraged, grinding or building, chopping with a dull blade or pausing long enough to sharpen it — will determine whether you reach the end having built something that mattered or having simply been busy until the clock ran out.
You’re going to work hard either way. That’s not the variable. The variable is what your hard work produces after you stop doing it.
Sharpen the axe. Build the system. Create the leverage.
Your time is finite. Make sure your effort isn’t.