How to Work Without Working: 3 Lessons From Three Successful Entrepreneurs

We want to build business empires, amass a huge amount of wealth, and become a worldwide sensation. Yet, we hate to work hard and show up every day to grind. We simply dread working, but we love the results that our work produces.

What if there’s a formula for working without getting bored with doing the work? In other words, you’re working but you’re not feeling the brunt of the process. Drawing from the experience and expertise of three successful entrepreneurs, below, I give you the three tips for working without actually feeling the stress of working.

1. Mark Zuckerberg: Get moving with the easiest tasks

For the average person, working is something huge—like running a marathon or climbing Mount Everest. Most amateur entrepreneurs and career people often spend weeks preparing for a simple task. And when it’s time to do that task, they’ll end up accomplishing only 30 percent of the work. The other 70 percent is buried in “preparation” or procrastination.

But it shouldn’t have to be so. Work should be fun. Mark Zuckerberg never spends 24 hours preparing for work. The young, smart founder of Facebook developed a simple formula for accomplishing any type of work without feeling its impact.

He always begins with the easiest tasks, as opposed to the difficult ones. “I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.” That’s a smart philosophy for a Silicon Valley superstar.

If you start with that simple project, you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment. You motivate yourself to get going. You won’t feel the burden of the work.

2. Sean Lourdes: Be generous

Making more money appears to be the first goal of most career and business people. But it shouldn’t be. That’s because “If you’re too much obsessed with amassing wealth, making more profit, selling all your inventories, that will make your entrepreneurial career boring, burdensome, and tedious”, Sean Lourdes, founder of The Lourdes Foundation, observes.

The better way to make your entrepreneurial career fun and exciting is to give more. Struggle to work hard and make more money, but don’t make the money as your end goal. You’re meant to serve your customers. That should be your end goal. And being generous will help you serve them better and, in turn, helps you make more money along the way.

Just begin to give more than you take—whether it’s delivering more value to your customers, giving more discounts than the buyer asks, or simply donating your personal wealth to charity organizations—and notice how you’ll find meaning in your work, career, and life in general.

3. Robin Sharma: See your work as a craft

It amazes me when I visit a hotel and the person at the front desk barely raises their head to look at me. I always ask myself: Why would anyone be in the hospitality industry when it’s obvious that they hate people?

If you’re not fit in an industry but insist on working in it, you’ll not only find peace in your work-life, but you’ll also be at war with your employer’s customers. Unfortunately, most people work at jobs they hate. In other words, they see their work as work, not as a craft—which they’ll passionately harness to satisfy their clients. The productivity guru Robin Sharma argues that “a job is only a job if you see it as a job.”

And if you see your job as a job, you can’t find value and meaning and passion in what you do. If you see your job as a job, you can’t provide that impeccable value to your clients. If you see your job as a job, you can’t deliver top-notch quality service to your customers. You have to shift your thinking.

“See your work as another opportunity to practice your craft,” Robin Sharma says. “That will push you to love your craft and release magical products.”