Never Enough: Why You Don't Want to Be a Billionaire

by Andrew Wilkinson

This was how every business worked—creating the demand, building the systems and processes, hiring other people to do the work, then charging enough for whatever it is that you’re selling that you turn a profit. Counterintuitively, you didn’t actually do most of the work yourself, and yet you earned the profits for putting it all together.

I was embracing what I came to call Lazy Leadership: the idea that a CEO’s job is not to do all the work, but more importantly to design the machine and systems. Not a player on the field. Not the coach. But the owner, sitting up in a little box at the top of the arena, passively observing until the next critical fifty-thousand-foot decision had to be made.

This had led me to the epiphany that there is always somebody else who loves the job you hate.

My key insight at this time was one that would become the core of how I run my businesses today: It’s not enough to do what you love. You also have to stop doing what you hate. The goal isn’t—as many people think—to not work at all; it’s to only work on things that you enjoy doing. The stuff that you’d do even if you didn’t get paid for it.