No work - No tomatoes
When you decide to grow a garden, or even just a tomato plant or basil on your windowsill, you kind of know: before you get anything useful, you’ve got to care for the soil. Add nutrients. Water it. Give it time and attention.
You wait. No guarantees. Just your belief, or someone else’s experience, knowledge, that it’ll eventually grow and give something back.
Somehow, we forget that this is how the whole life works too.
You invest first. Time. Energy. Care. You don’t get results before the effort, you get them because of it.
But as we’ve made life more convenient, our tolerance for that natural order has dropped.
Many of my clients want more from life, more fulfillment in their business or career, better health, stronger relationships, more with less time and more demands pulling at them from every direction.
The solution isn’t finding more time. We’ve all got the same 24-hour cap.
The solution is building better systems. Systems that buy back your time.
Systems that let you do more of what matters and less of what drains you.
The tricky part: the law of life still applies.
Before you can get more out, you’ve got to put more in, time, energy, often money, with returns that only show up after the fact.
Getting healthier? - time for workouts, money for nourishing food, almost zero additional rewards.
Want more growth in your business or career?
You might have to delegate. Hire an assistant. Cut projects that aren’t moving you forward.
You’ll have to spend money to get help, spend time onboarding, have hard conversations with a lot of NOs. You’ll probably have to give up something, pride, control, status, short-term income. Your business will spend more before it earns you more.
Before you get the upgrade: more impact, more freedom, more income, more profits, fewer distractions.
Even something as small as hiring someone to clean your home so you can spend more time on what matters - family, more fulfilling career, quiet time with yourself - it takes effort. Finding the right person. Training them. Adapting. At first, it costs more time that you already don't have!
But it creates space for your future.
That’s also why AI adoption is slower than it could be.
The upfront cost, learning, setup, shifting habits, become a newbie, losing status, asking for help, not being as efficient - all this cost comes before the return.
So next time you feel buried in tasks, overwhelmed by clutter, constantly searching for files, or cleaning up messes that steal your peace, ask yourself:
Am I suffering because there’s truly no other way?
Or am I just avoiding the upfront work of building better systems, sacrificing my future potential for short-term comfort?
PS Check out essential books to give you tools and inspire better upstream thinking - "Buy back your time", "Come up for air"
