5. What Would You Trade to Have Fridays Off?

What would you be willing to trade or let go of to have Fridays off? This question is posed directly specifically to the entrepreneurs, and those who have direct control over their time also applies to those of you all who don't yet have full control of your time. So one of the things I learned very quickly as an entrepreneur was that I could work as many hours or as few hours as I wanted to. But I had to figure out how to make a certain amount of money.

And the more my expenses were, the more I had to work in general.

And of course, if I had a brilliant idea or sold something huge, great. And as entrepreneurs, we convince ourselves very often that we're about to discover the next greatest thing that's going to sell truckloads of stuff. And nobody's ever seen anything else like that. And it's great to think like that. And if it happens, that's awesome.

But overall, very often we're faced with the reality that something we tried didn't turn out the way we wanted. We didn't make as much money as we thought we were going to. And so it brings me right back to my initial question, what would you give up or what are you willing to trade in order to have Fridays Off? Example that happened for me is for years I had a car that I loved. It was a convertible, my beach mobile.

And one day it just died. I just couldn't do it anymore. It was done with. And at the time, I was still working from home. My wife was not working in a job.

She was help raising our kids from home. We had another car. So we originally had two cars. One died. So we had one car left.

And I was thinking, Well, do I really want to get a second car? The only thing I really needed it for was to go to the beach. And so I figured, okay, well, I could buy a nice bike. Beach is about 8 miles away where I like to go. And okay, the bike cost $500.

And let's find this out. Let's see how long I can go without this second car. For three years, we did without a second car. And I would ride my bike to the beach when I needed to. And every once a while I'd have to go running in the errands and I'd ride my bike.

And I also sought those a challenge of, okay, dude, get on your bike, get some exercise ride where you need to ride. And unless it's absolutely urgent, you'll be fine. And where that came from for me was at the time the math for me, it's not exactly like this, but I'll make it simple. For the case of math, let's say you made $250 a day after tax, so it would be $250 a day. That would be let's say you're making or taking home about $5,000 a month for 20 days times 250.

So about $5,000 a month I was taken home. It wasn't the exact number, but I'm going to make life simple. Let's say it was $250 a day and a car would cost me $500 a month. So I learned very quickly that at certain times of the year, business would just come in. My business.

My software business is kind of seasonal, so business would come in no matter what. But then at other times of the year, I'd really have to stir up business. I'd really have to go after it and prospect and make a lot of stuff happen. But if I saved $500 by not having the second car, then I didn't have to do that. And I could take two days off those Fridays, just go to the beach and play volleyball.

And so from that perspective, what I want you to consider is a lot of the time. This is about simply looking your expenses and seeing what do I really need to create the lifestyle I want? And in my case, I did that same concept with many of our expenses. We didn't use as much cable TV. We didn't use as much of the gym memberships and all these little things.

I'd kind of add them up and say, okay, where can I assemble $250 and it might be 60 here and 80 here and another 110 there or whatever it might be. But make it to where each one of those was another day that I didn't need to work. Now, ultimately, I still want to make a lot of money. I still am going after big projects and big things, but I wanted to make sure my lifestyle was contained within my regular income, the income that was more steady than I knew I could count on without doing foolish things because I've done foolish things in the past.

I'll share those on some other episodes where I was impatient and I tried to make something happen too fast, and I tried to leverage cash or property or real estate and got my butt kicked and actually lost a lot of what I worked towards.

So I want to be able to do this in a steady way, in a sustainable way. So to be clear, these are not strategies that only apply if you're making 100,000, 200,000, $500,000 a year. These strategies work at all levels, and in fact, they're even more important. The less you're making. And I just think of all my volleyball buddies and beach volleyball players have a mindset that's kind of similar to surfers in that if they're really hardcore, the beach volleyball is kind of more important than a lot of other things going on in their life.

I remember once this hilarious friend of mine in College, he and I are going to a volleyball tournament, and his girlfriend at the time came with us, and then we were always playing volleyball and stuff. And one day she said to him, I feel like I'm competing for your attention with a volleyball. And he said, Well, I could understand how you'd feel that way because I didn't have a better answer than that. And so people who are beach volleyball players, people are surfers. People say, Well, you live this life, and it's so amazing.

And you're always at the beach playing volleyball. The beach is sort of the common thing because there's so much that's awesome at the beach. So how do you do that? And I said, Well, because that's what I choose. I don't have.

Now you look at the list of what they don't have. Many of them. I don't have the fancy car. My car is ten years old, and this my whatever. I live in a decent place or whatever.

But I've got this thing up here, and some of them do make lots of money, but a lot of them just the lifestyle comes first. And so I've had one person tell me something that I think somebody told us. I'm pretty sure, but it's my answer now. And people ask me, wait, what's the key to staying married? And the key is making that choice every day.

And, of course, we want to be a happy marriage, too. And making the choice to do everything you can to contribute to the other person's happiness, regardless of whether they contribute to yours on that day. And so in that sense, a lot of this is a choice. So I invite you to consider, what would you trade, what's not as important. And this is where all of a sudden you might find the designer clothes, all the things that you might if you're into this of the designer, this and the fancy car and this and that you might say, okay, those are really cool.

And a lot of people come from the place of, well, wait, if I'm going to be working all these hours, so take that supremacy. If I'm going to work 80 hours a week, well, then, damn it, I'm going to have a nice car. Understood, man, if you have to work, if you have a gun to your head and you have to work 80 hours a week, man, live it up for the hours. You're not working. But if there's not a gun to your head, and if you don't have to do that now, the conversation shifts because the initial premise changes.

What if you don't have to work 80 hours a week, then do you really want the car that might show? Hey, I'm doing really well, but that will keep you working 80 hours a week, or maybe you don't. And the same thing goes with the house, the lifestyle, the decisions, the clothes, the everything else. So anyway, hope you find this helpful. If you go to four dayworkweek comTools, that's number fourdayworkweek comTools or even fourdaytools com, you'll see, this is one of the tools that's on there one of the things you give up or trade to have Fridays off.

And there's a tool there where you can write out some things. There's also part of it, a little bit of a calculator. You can check that out, doing whatever I can to help you create a four day work week lifestyle for you and your loved ones and the people around you. If you have any questions or have any suggestions on how I can better help you, let me know. As always, I look forward to helping you make more money and less time doing what you do best so you can create the lifestyle you most desire.

Thank you