Are you training for the Grind Olympics, but don’t remember signing up?
It’s the competition that no one officially announces, yet millions enter:
Who can work the longest hours?
Answer the most emails?
Miss the most family dinners?
Delay their life the longest?
The winners receive a gold-colored watch, lukewarm sheet cake, and a retirement party at age 65—assuming the finish line hasn’t been moved to 70.
What Do You Really Win?
I started questioning this when I was a teenager.
I looked at the adults around me and noticed that most traded the majority of their waking hours for work they didn’t even like.
They endured Monday through Friday to reach the weekend. Wednesday was celebrated as “Hump Day”—a strange admission that the work week was something to climb over and survive.
They surrendered 50 weeks to earn two weeks of vacation. They repeated the bargain for 40 years, hoping they would still have enough money, energy, and health to enjoy retirement.
What puzzled me most was where this was happening.
This wasn’t some impoverished nation with few resources and limited opportunity. This was the United States—the most powerful and prosperous nation in the world.
This is the part that I still can’t work out in my head.
Almost everybody falls into a narrow, rigid groove… and grinds.
Eventually, the groove becomes a rut. Then the rut gets a job title and a dental plan. Many even form their identity around this!
Fear is the #1 motivator that gets employees to show up at work.
So then… do most people lead fear-based lives?
Just insane.
Sheesh, we have skyscrapers, interstate highways, world-class universities, abundant natural resources, advantageous geography, rule of law, vast capital markets, and technology that sent people to the moon before I was born.
Endless possibilities.
Yet the standard life plan is to spend our most vivacious years doing something we didn’t want to do.
What a paradox.
How could a nation create so much wealth while so many people have such little control over their own time?
Even then, I remember thinking: There’s got to be a better way.
I didn’t yet know the way.
I started going to college at age 18. But this path put me on that same trajectory.
Get good grades. Land a job. Max out my 401(k), which would reduce my salary. Work for four decades. Then cross my fingers and hope that promotions, inflation, taxes, a stock market that I couldn’t control, and life itself would cooperate.
That plan could kinda work.
But your time is still doing most of the work.
Your employer rents your time, usually one hour at a time. Stop supplying the hours and soon enough, your income stops too.
Capital compounds. Labor doesn’t.
The better path is to gradually separate your income from your time.
That’s what I began doing when I bought my first income-producing rental property a few years after college.
Divergent. Black sheep.
I was stepping out of the groove.
Now I owned an asset that creates leverage and income whether I’m working, sleeping, climbing a mountain, or spending time with my family.
The goal isn’t to avoid hard work entirely. Meaningful work can even provide purpose, achievement, and pride.
But what provides wealth?
It is what happens when you’re sleeping, not working.
Labor produces income. Assets create wealth.
Grinding should be a season—not your entire financial strategy.
Bottom line: We don’t want to win the Grind Olympics. Income-producing assets help us build a life that we don’t have to postpone.
