I Worked Hard all my Life. I Regret it
These 3 things changed everything for me:
1. Kill me EGO. Back in the day, I worked hard, but in most cases, I was simply fighting with my own "intentional" mistakes. Most of the things I did came out of my ego. For example, I'd design things based on my personal taste rather than looking for this year's trend and adopting it. Why did I go for my own taste vs the current thing? because of my EGO. 99% of founders in my network make this mistake as we speak, I see it every day now, but I didn't see it in myself back then. Killing my ego led to becoming 2-5x more productive, which means I don't need to work as "hard" anymore.
2. Validation & Brave Confidence. In old times I'd just go and build the sht instead of validating. In 10 out of 10 cases, I'd build crap that nobody needs and right after that, I'd iterate doing 100-hour work weeks with no sleep or holidays. Could I have avoided all that? Of course. Today I validate things before I write the first line of code. I haven't failed a single launch since then. The productivity gain here is 10-100x. In old times a typical product would need 2 years of iterations to get somewhere, now it's "right" from the start because I iterate on the validation stage using different marketing messages. Compare this to iterating with the SAAS, where each new version might take many months of coding, versus me spending a few minutes to redo my marketing message from a new angle.
3. Reinventing wheels. I'd never reuse external libraries or nocode tools or boilerplates. I was too proud of myself. Every boilerplate had "spaghetti code", SDKs were poorly designed, APIs were limiting me....and all sorts of bullsit excuses I could find to reinvent the wheel yet again. Now my typical project has just 5% of my own code and the rest comes from external boilerplates, apis, sdks, nocodes, lowcodes. This is yet another 10x time saver. I don't need to code for 100 hours a week anymore. I can spend more time inventing cool creative marketing ideas that actually move the needle instead of proudly reinventing the CRUD.
The Moral.
If you have to work hard, it means you're not working "smart". Often founders romanticize the "hard" and look for hard ways instead of going for easy ways. I know it's hard to accept it. I was the one who denied it myself for many years.