Jay Armstrong

Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness. This is hard for most to accept, because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity. Let’s define “laziness” anew—to endure a non-ideal existence, to let circumstance or others decide life for you, or to amass a fortune while passing through life like a spectator from an office window. The size of your bank account doesn’t change this, nor does the number of hours you log in handling unimportant e-mail or minutiae. Focus on being productive instead of busy.

The 4-Hour Workweek was turned down by 26 out of 27 publishers. After it was sold, the president of one potential marketing partner, a large bookseller, e-mailed me historical bestseller statistics to make it clear—this wouldn’t be a mainstream success. So I did all I knew how to do. I wrote it with two of my closest friends in mind, speaking directly to them and their problems— problems I long had—and I focused on the unusual options that had worked for me around the world. I certainly tried to set conditions for making a sleeper hit possible, but I knew it wasn’t likely. I hoped for the best and planned for the worst. May 2, 2007, I receive a call on my cell from my editor. “Tim, you hit the list.” It was just past 5 p.m. in New York City, and I was exhausted. The book had launched five days before, and I had just finished a series of more than twenty radio interviews in succession, beginning at 6 a.m. that morning. I never planned a book tour, preferring instead to “batch” radio satellite tours into 48 hours. “Heather, I love you, but please don’t fuck with me.” “No, you really hit the list. Congratulations, Mr. New York Times bestselling author!” I leaned against the wall and slid down until I was sitting on the floor. I closed my eyes, smiled, and took a deep breath. Things were about to change. Everything was about to change.

Life is unpredictable. There are many unexpected problems that will pop up, and I’ve found that two things help me sail choppy water during the day. Both are done in the morning: A) read a few pages of Stoicism, like Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, and B) control at least a few things you can control. First, for A, here is one Marcus Aurelius quote on my refrigerator that often does the trick: “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.” Now, B) control what you can control. No matter how shitty your day is, no matter how catastrophic it might become, you can make your bed. And that gives you the feeling, at least it gives me the feeling, even in a disastrous day, that I’ve held on to the cliff ledge by a fingernail and I haven’t fallen.