You say 7 to 9 hours of sleep is non-negotiable, but you also sacrificed a lot of sleep early on. Is it worth sacrificing sleep in the early days, since it's more of a volume game? I'm a high school senior with school, studying and the gym, and I feel I have to sacrifice sleep to work on my business.
If you're a beginner entrepreneur, or at the beginning of any journey, heavily prioritize your sleep. If time is your bottleneck and you sacrifice sleep to solve it, sleep immediately becomes a much larger bottleneck. Look at the upside and downside of sacrificing even one hour a day: if you have 16 waking hours and go to 17, you've gained roughly a 6% increase in time. What you lose is effectiveness, your mind's ability to solve problems, probably on the order of 20 to 30%. It doesn't happen all at once, but keep that lifestyle up for a week or two and you become 20 to 30% less effective, so someone else can do what you do 20 to 30% faster or achieve 20 to 30% more per unit of time. A 6.25% upside in time against a 20 to 30% downside in effectiveness doesn't make sense. I didn't know this when I started, so I had a lot of sleepless nights and accelerated my aging — that's where the white hairs come from. It's not worth it, and I say that as somebody who wants to make as much money as humanly possible.
I would first understand that human beings are just the stories we tell ourselves. If you wake up and your sleep tracker says you had bad sleep versus great sleep, you’ll perform differently even with the same amount of sleep. Studies show how suggestible we are, meaning we have far more control over our daily state and performance than we think. You can improve performance just by thinking, 'I’m fantastic and incredible at this; I crush it.' This is neurobiological. If you suggest a task is tiring you out, you increase the chance of burnout. Many high achievers adopt a nihilistic, existential viewpoint, zooming out. For example, the president works a lot despite his age; he takes vacations but still works long hours. My grandfather’s routine was waking up, going to the store, brunch, then sleeping six hours, then seeing friends at night. The point is that when you zoom out and realize your struggles are a tiny fraction of global struggles, it helps. Your life isn’t that important in the grand scheme; there are many things consuming vast amounts of energy. Adopting a nihilistic viewpoint frees you from cultural expectations about cognitive effort. In university, people complained about burnout, but historically, farming and shepherding involved 12‑14‑hour days as the norm. It’s about what you establish as your norm. By zooming out and seeing your struggles as a small chunk of worldwide struggles, you can reduce the perceived burden.
No, I don’t have a specific routine to shut off work on weekends. I’ve struggled with this too, and I think the idea of strict work‑mode vs. relax‑mode is a false dichotomy. In reality, effort exists on a gradient—some days I’m at 20% effort, other days at 80%. On low‑effort days I still do a little work that moves the business forward, like client fulfillment, community management, or content creation, then I rest the rest of the day. I often unwind early in the morning (around 5–6 a.m.) so the rest of the day is free for whatever I want. Other days I work most of the time and still carve out some unwind or play time, like playing League of Legends. I don’t follow a strict on/off schedule; I accept shades of gray. Financially, metrics are useful for business but shouldn’t be the only measure of life success. I’ve gotten ahead financially by sacrificing other areas—relationships, fun, experiences—but I’ve recently started prioritizing family and personal time. Others may be ahead of me in emotional intelligence or life experiences, reminding me that business performance isn’t life performance.
I wouldn't do it all at once, as sexy as it sounds and as incredible as the big gurus on YouTube make working for yourself seem. There are a lot of problems with it too. The main one is you're going from an environment where everybody essentially has their day structured for them to an environment where you actually structure every waking moment of your day completely yourself. One of two things happens: it's really overwhelming and you end up not utilizing that time effectively, which leads to you making less money. That's basically the only thing that happens. You're starting this off as an infant — if this is the first time you've ever done self-employment, you have to learn that skill. It doesn't matter how long you've been in IT or how much time or energy you've invested in a specific niche; you're learning an entirely new skill from scratch. So rather than going from 100% corporate to 0% corporate overnight, I'd recommend tranching it or breaking it up. What we'll have people in Maker School do is try to get to 80% of their time in a full-time job. If they can get to 80%, most of their work's already done for them, because the jump from 100 to 80 means you can now introduce 20% of fully self-structured time where you work on your own business. Maybe instead of working 9 to 5, you work 9 to 3:30 — even an additional hour and a half. The second you learn to utilize that hour and a half effectively, it'll carry over to the rest of the time, and usually you don't even have to work a full 8 hours a day head-down after you've learned to be extraordinarily effective with that hour and a half. That's what I would do. I wouldn't go 100 to zero, because I did that for myself and I was completely lost for a very long time — on the brink of eviction multiple times, living in a converted garage, eating rice and beans all day. You don't need to make it that hard for yourself, especially if you're not going to be saving 6 to 12 months of expenses, because it's very difficult and not really worth it. The exhaustion you feel at your current job is probably going to be multiplied tenfold if you do the exact same thing and then switch. Alternatively, you'll make far less money, which leads to a different type of existential threat or exhaustion.
My routine shifts a lot, but the number‑one priority is daily actionables focused on lead generation and marketing. I front‑load growth‑related tasks first. I usually wake up between 4:30 am and 5:30 am, then spend time on community management because it’s high ROI and feeds lead gen. After that I handle client management and fulfillment in dedicated windows. I record content for my channels, work on automation builds, and then hit the gym, trying to front‑load that as well. The rest of the day is a mix of more content creation, client calls, and assorted tasks. I do try to get sleep, because I’ve had virtually no churn and I prioritize rest to avoid hustle‑culture burnout.