In polytechnic, I could play Dota until 10 p.m., suddenly remember an assignment was due, and work until four or five in the morning. Sleep for an hour, leave home at six, reach school by eight, and keep functioning until mid-afternoon before crashing. Sometimes I went close to 30 hours without proper sleep. I was not at my best, but I could function. One full night of rest and I was almost normal again.
National Service was the same thing in a different uniform. Several days on a mission, five or six hours of sleep across all of it. Nobody was in good condition, but at that age the body simply endured.
At university I was studying, collecting scholarships and study awards, and running my first business at the same time. For four years I slept four or five hours a night. After graduation, before marriage and children, the pace held. I could train, work long hours, make deliveries, unload containers, run the warehouse, handle admin, and still keep most things growing.
I am not saying this was healthy, and I am not telling young people to deprive themselves of sleep just because you can. But there was a level of intensity I could sustain then that I cannot reproduce now.
When You Have Nothing Else, You Have Effort
A young entrepreneur usually has very little capital. No established reputation. No strong management team. No systems, no recurring profits, no institutional knowledge, no deep network of people who already trust you. You may not even have good judgment yet, because judgment is built by making hundreds of decisions, watching the consequences, and slowly learning which details matter.
What you do have is time, energy, hunger, and a low cost of failure.
So you answer the enquiries yourself. You carry the stock, do the deliveries, chase the payment, update the accounts, clean the premises, talk to customers, and solve problems at midnight because there is nobody else to solve them. At that stage effort is not merely a virtue. It is your capital. You are converting time and physical energy into experience, relationships, cash flow, and eventually a business asset.
When we started, we paid ourselves around $500 a month for the first two years. It did not feel like suffering. We were young, our expectations were low, and failure would not have destroyed a family that depended on us. The hours were hard, but the progress itself was exciting.
For a young person with little money, hard work may be the only real advantage available, and that advantage should be used. You cannot behave like a chairman when you have not yet built anything worth chairing.
But the Job Eventually Changes
The mistake is believing the same operating model should continue forever. I am about ten years older now. A wife, two children, multiple businesses, many employees, and far more decisions carrying real consequences. An entire night spent solving a small operational problem no longer affects only me. It touches my health, my patience with my children, my marriage, and the quality of every decision I make the next day.
But I also have things my younger self did not. More capital. Manpower. Systems. People whose time and expertise I can leverage. Fifteen years of accumulated context. Enough mistakes behind me to recognise certain patterns earlier. And now AI, which lets me analyse, draft, compare, and think through information far faster than before.
Less raw capacity to grind, far more leverage. That should change how I work.
A Founder’s Most Valuable Work Is Often Invisible
It is easy to feel productive solving bugs, carrying the last pallet into the warehouse or reconciling stock counts. The work is tangible. You can see what you finished. Strategic work feels less satisfying, because it often means sitting quietly, thinking, asking questions, or rejecting an opportunity.
But weigh the consequences. The pallet must be carried correctly and the stock count must be accurate, yes, but another competent person can do that. A decision on whether to take a particular location may shape the business for the next ten years. A negotiation with a landlord may move hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent. A call on culture may decide whether good people stay and whether weak behaviour spreads. A senior hire may remove years of operational burden or create years of chaos. A capital allocation may build a new stream of recurring income or destroy money that took years to accumulate.
These decisions may take only a few hours, but they outweigh many weeks of routine labour. If I exhaust myself on work another person could do, then bring a tired and cluttered mind to the decisions that actually matter, I have not worked hard. I have allocated my energy badly.
The Founder’s Ego Can Become the Bottleneck
Many entrepreneurs build their identity around being the person who works harder than everyone else. That identity is useful early, when nobody believes in the business and there is nobody else to carry the load. Later, the same identity becomes a liability.
You feel guilty when others do the operating work. You feel you are not contributing unless you are visibly busy. You interfere in decisions your managers should be learning to make. You keep doing $30-an-hour work because it makes you feel hardworking, while neglecting decisions worth hundreds of thousands.
At some point a founder has to stop proving his value through exhaustion. The purpose of building a business is not to create a more demanding job for yourself. It is to build an organisation where people, systems, capital, and knowledge combine to produce results beyond what any one person could manage alone.
Delegation is not laziness. Hiring strong people is not an admission of weakness. Doing less operating work does not mean contributing less. Sometimes doing less is exactly what protects the business from poor judgment.
Young Founders Should Work Hard. Older Founders Must Work Differently.
I still believe young entrepreneurs should work extremely hard. With little experience, little capital, and no platform, strategy alone will not save you. You need volume. More customers, more problems solved, more attempts, experience accumulated faster. You have to earn your judgment.
But that cannot stay the permanent model. As you become more established, the work has to evolve: from doing everything yourself to building people who can; from solving every problem to creating systems that prevent them recurring; from measuring contribution in hours to measuring it in consequence; from using your body as the main engine to using judgment, people, technology, and capital as leverage.
This holds even when you start a new business later in life. A 40-year-old founder need not imitate a 23-year-old one. He may still work hard, but the work should be informed by experience. He should know which assumptions need testing, which risks are fatal, which tasks can be outsourced, which people are trustworthy, and where his own involvement makes the greatest difference. The goal is not to avoid hard work. It is to stop spending scarce attention on work that does not require you.
The Scarce Resource Changes
When I was younger, money was scarce. Manpower was scarce. Experience was scarce. Time and energy felt almost unlimited. Today the equation is inverted. More money, more people, more resources, more room to recover from mistakes. But attention is scarcer. Mental clarity is scarcer. Time with my children is scarcest of all, because their childhood will not wait for the business to slow down.
So my ability to think carefully in moments of real consequence is something I have to protect. That may mean hiring two people to take routine work off me. It may mean accepting that I do not need to be in every operational detail. It may mean exercising, sleeping properly, being present with my family, and leaving my mind enough room to notice the opportunity or the danger that is invisible when every day is full of emergencies.
To an outsider this can look like working less. But if the result is better decisions, stronger people, a healthier culture, and businesses that run without depending on my constant presence, it is not a retreat from work. It is the next stage of it.
When you are young, work as hard as you reasonably can. Effort may be the only currency you have. But do not spend your whole life proving you can still survive on four hours of sleep and carry the last pallet yourself. Eventually you must convert effort into experience, experience into judgment, judgment into systems, and systems into leverage.
The younger entrepreneur wins by doing more. The mature entrepreneur wins by understanding what only he should do, and having the discipline to leave the rest to others.
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