How do some people claim to work 80-100 hours a week? Is it actually possible? by Kyle Phoenix

 

I have regularly done so for about 20 years. I have had the freedom to do so because during that time I didn’t have children/spouse to attend to so I was just my own freewheeling self. But I will also add that I don’t attribute the word “work” to the way most people do.

I was raised, and it was deeply instilled by my parents, was to—-Work Smarter, Not Harder—-so I’ve always had a side project, side hustle, small or national business going. Something that brings a few to $50,000+ a year besides a “normal” salary from a job/career.

Before My Teens, Under 12

I did 40 hours a week at school and then another 10+ on the weekends buying and selling newspapers in my building and then managing the babysitter’s kids to franchise out to our buildings. My mother wrote up a contract for a $5 loan; I repaid her charging 75 cents a Sunday newspaper and then self-funded the enterprise from there. I think I did it a little over a year.

I franchised out, hiring the babysitter’s children for several months but they insisted that ALL of the profits be split 3 ways, though they had put in no money. I fired them. The first employees I ever fired. I continued to work my building and a couple of theirs—-as they didn’t have the bank-resource I did to buy inventory. I stayed in another year for comic books, action figures.

Don’t judge.

Pre Teens/Teens

In middle school I would take orders for drawings of comic book characters and make enlarged panel and full role playing game booklet copies, at my mother’s office at AT&T. 25 cents a pic, $1 for a custom, $1 for an 11x17. Bought the RPG booklets for $6 to $20 (my advantage was that my parents taught and trusted me to travel so I could go throughout the 5 boroughs to comic stores that my peers couldn’t and get the original/new RPG books to make copies of.) I would then resell for half the cover price. Completely ignoring copyright laws.

By 12–13, I was also working at Charles Fried Chicken, 35 hours a week, for $30 dollars a week plus tips. I did that for a few months.

By the time I turned 14, I was able to legally get my Working Papers and work near full time, after school. I travelled on the bus from the Bronx to Hartsdale because that Pathmark paid more than any in the city AND the bus route passed by The Dragon’s Den, a huge specialty comic book shop. (And supply shop for my side hustle.)

Through high school I worked 30–40 hours a week at D’Agostino supermarket, Wendy’s and A&S Department store PLUS, always, always a side hustle.

By my teens, I’d started a national entrepreneurial venture of an amateur comic book company. Amateur writers and artists produced comic books and we published them, everyone paying a yearly membership fee to offset production expenses. It lasted for years but folded because of focusing on production and not recruitment—-or having a full enough staff to do so. But it was small business experience in my teens. My mother gave me a TAX ID for my 14th birthday.

My 20s.

While we were middle class and my mother had side hustles (tax prep, leather sales, timeshares) she got laid off from AT&T after years just as she was starting her fashion agency/model show business. We struck a deal—-I would continue to work full time and not go away or add the burden of a college tuition bill for a year or so—-give her time to get her business off the ground—-so that I could continue to help with 50% of the mortgage/home bills. At 14 or so I was paying my own phone line bill and bringing in food from the supermarkets several times a month and cooking dinner. By 18 I was paying half of the mortgage on our co-op.

By 21 she’d reached a profitable space to be able to set up a trust fund for me to go to university. However when I chose a university she didn’t want me to go to, she took it away. I went anyway. And proceeded to work 5 jobs plus student loans to pay for my college:

1. Worked 10+ hours a week in university office as an admin—-basically shredding thousands of pages of waste paper.
2. I became a Resident Advisor, in by 10pm most nights to be present on floor plus monthly 24 hour shift in exchange for a room to one’s self, rebate on dorm fees (about $2000 per semester) AND the room had a private bath!
3. TA’ed for 3 Professors. The first undergraduate in the SUNY system to ever do so—-I went to Work Study and asked could the professors sign off on my timesheets? they had agreed. Did it for 4 1/2 years and eventually they upped me to the Graduate fee scale/grant even though I wasn’t a graduate student. ($3500 a semester.)
4. Ran the first Uber service with my beloved Bronco II. Through the student grapevine I let it be known that for $5 per person plus 1 travel suitcase—-I would run you to the airport, bus station, train station—-generally in the evening.
5. I worked for the university Public Safety as a security patrol and door monitor for several years.
6. Oh, and I also went to classes, 20+ credit hours a semester.
7. And yes, there were times, later evenings, when I’d be the RA on night duty, doing PA patrols and Ubering students. All at the same time in the PA uniform with walkie talkie. lol

Then I went to Swarthmore College in Philly and worked at their bistro as the Featured Sunday chef, while working full time at Core States bank. 60+ hours a week.

Then I got to NYC—-first commuting to Midtown as a temp and then to 50th/Lexington, from the family home in the mountains in Pennsylvania, so that meant a 90 minute commute each way; back to my mother’s house in the mountains, then up and out by 5 AM.

I first worked at a commercial real estate firm, often 8 AM to 8 PM (I finally learned that you got a free dinner and private car home if you worked past 7pm) and then for years did a lot of consulting work eventually summing to Williams Communications as an Executive Assistant specializing in Staff Trainings for the tri-state area and forensic Accounting/Auditing to discover embezzlers. For two years I billed and worked 80–100 hours a week. They also provided dinner and private cars home.

My 30s

I had a revelation and enlightenment about myself, my work, my destiny, and decided to start another small business. Essentially in the very beginning—-I became an Amazon Merchant store/seller. I also became a Securities Litigation Paralegal—-combining my legal interests and financial analyst skills. But I also wanted something of my own, own a more entrepreneurial nature, inspired by Rich Dad Poor Dad Robert Kiyosaki, I had attended one of his seminars—-so I started selling used books from library and private sales, DVDs, CDs on Amazon.

I would work 40+ hours a week on my business—and started out at making $20 a week and then within 8 months—-$28,000 a week. While consulting as a paralegal at multiple law firms—-40 hours a week—-even once working for two firms in midtown, one from 9am to 5pm, and then getting picked up at home by a car service at 11pm to be taken to another to manage the 12 midnight to 8AM shift at another. And then walk up the block to the other……

I then wisely realized that I was giving too much into law world—once bouncing between two law firms of the 7 working on the same case—-so when I got offered to work for a charter school I jumped at it. And though I did administrative work and test prep with the children, I knew that I wanted to work with adults. I literally took a volunteer then permanent teaching job down the block and then got scooped up from that one to another downtown because I was teaching in so many directions that other agencies heard about me.

After 7 years of non-profit world at 60+ hours a week, honing my skills at teaching and understanding non-profit world, I thought I was good at teaching—-that was the feedback—-so I decided to return to school at Columbia University, to learn Jedi level teaching skills. (Which i have from Professors like Stephen Brookfield.) But in the course of that I first started volunteer teaching classes then got hired.

All the while I was doing Amazon/eBay sales on the side —-some good, some great, some not so great—and then a Columbia, Brookfield, talked to me about how he’d published over a dozen books (which I bought and brought to his first class with me—-subtly freaking him out. lol In my defense his class had been cancelled for a whole semester—-which is how I was standing there looking for something to do and got hired. I wanted autographs. lol)

When we discussed my CV he encouraged me to go back over my notes and materials and pull together a book.

So I published 70+ books. lol That took a few years but I literally had boxes and boxes full of my workshops, classes, projects to cull from.

Right before that Columbia discussion, I started converting my workshops into YouTube videos and then I shopped around for a public access TV studio that I could produce a TV show from—-where I have complete ownership of the shows.

The YouTube has been lightly done, added to for over a decade and the TV show, The Kyle Phoenix Show is going into its 15th year, 52 episodes a year—-broadcast weekly.

Video, book and TV show “work/production time” vary a week, depending upon the complexity of projects and the software (Word, PowerPoint, Premiere, InDesign, etc.) that I’ve had to become fluent in (luckily a lot of my teaching has been computer-software, hardware, systems administrator—-levels for a decade.)

Production Times

• YouTube videos—-easier but it requires a sensitivity to tinkering for attention span or to longer concepts that are content filler and further end up a podcast—-each video can take about 1–2 hours to produce, edit, etc.
• The TV show on average takes 10 hours to produce, edit and there’s never enough time because so many elements of production eon learns in process.
• The books are a longer affair—-the fastest has been a month from idea to publishing, including editing. But those are essentially workshops converted to small books—-under 250 pages.
• Longer books, detailed—I’ve been known to go to a bar/nightclub on it’s near empty lounge nights—2 for 1 drinks, and longhand write out several books. I would call that another 10–20 hours a week.
• The minutiae of running a media business is yet another 10 hours a week. I’ve set up better and better systems over the past 10+ years but I also had to learn which systems worked, why, what I was doing, strategic planning—-incorporating all of my business knowledge, finances, etc.. All while working full time teaching. A minimum of 20–40+ hours a week for a decade just on the media business.

Different Types of Work

A great blog post I found—-that I use to teach about the different types of work:

Algorithmic vs. Heuristic Work

Lately I’ve been intrigued by the difference between algorithmic and heuristic work. In Algorithmic work the process is defined and the end product is expected. We follow a set of instructions down a single pathway to one conclusion. By definition there are no surprises unless the algorithm breaks down and the result is unexpected. Heuristic work is the opposite, because there is no algorithm for it. We devise ideas and strategies, experiment and create hypotheses until a solution is found.

Algorithmic work may include tasks like manufacturing, simple computer programming, delivering packages or checking customers out at the super market. While heuristic tasks might include devising a new script to solve a bug in a software program, creating a new marketing campaign, implementing a new sales presentation or creating a new iPhone app.

The future of our economy will rely more and more on the heuristic approach vs. the algorithmic. Increasingly, algorithmic tasks are being offshored or automated to reduce costs while creative work that is inherently heuristic is more in demand to drive our new economy forward. Heuristic work also has the additional benefit of being more fulfilling than following an algorithm. For those lucky enough to engage in primarily heuristic work, the ability to make an impact is elevated.

Work then is not lifting rocks and pounding pavements—-a lot of it is thinking, moving, doing, solving with solutions and mentality/ideas.

All of those hours aren’t physical, which is how it’s possible. Though working and consulting teaching full time plus the above media production and interviews, I’m looking to slowly move into where my produced work keeps generating royalties and I can do less and less work.

#KylePhoenix

#TheKylePhoenixShow