The Aspirational Hourly Rate
Set an ambitious personal price to ruthlessly protect your time and outsource everything below it
Naval proposes a deceptively simple heuristic: set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem would save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task would cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it. The rate should be aspirational -- higher than your current market rate -- because it forces you to focus on the activities that will actually move you toward your wealth goals.
The power of this framework is in its simplicity as a decision filter. Every time you are about to spend an hour on something, you ask: 'Would I pay someone my hourly rate to do this for me?' If the answer is no, you should not be doing it yourself. This applies to household chores, administrative tasks, low-value meetings, and any activity that does not directly contribute to building specific knowledge, applying leverage, or exercising judgment.
Naval emphasizes that you should be too busy to 'do coffee' while still keeping an uncluttered calendar. This is not a contradiction -- it means you should be spending your unscheduled time on thinking, creating, and exercising judgment rather than filling it with low-value social and administrative obligations.
- You do not get rich by spending your time to save money -- you get rich by saving your time to make money
- Your hourly rate should be aspirational, not current -- it pulls you toward higher-value activities
- If outsourcing costs less than your rate, outsource it without guilt
- Protect empty space on your calendar fiercely -- boredom precedes great ideas
- The direction you are heading matters far more than how fast you move
- Work as hard as you can, but who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard
- Set Your Aspirational Hourly RateChoose a rate that is higher than your current market rate -- high enough that it feels slightly uncomfortable. This is the rate you are working toward, not the rate you currently earn. Naval suggests starting at a level that forces you to seriously reconsider how you spend each hour.
- Audit Your Current Time AllocationFor one week, track how you spend every hour. Categorize each activity by its approximate value per hour. Identify all the tasks you are doing that fall below your aspirational rate -- household chores, administrative work, low-value meetings, errands that could be outsourced or eliminated.
- Eliminate or Outsource Below-Rate ActivitiesSystematically remove or delegate every task below your aspirational rate. Hire help for cleaning, errands, and administrative work. Decline meetings that do not justify the cost. Let go of problems that are not worth your time to fix. Redirect the freed hours toward your highest-leverage activities.
- Protect Empty Thinking TimeReserve at least one to two days per week with no meetings and no obligations. Great ideas and good judgment emerge from boredom and unstructured thinking, not from packed schedules. You should be too busy for coffee but never too busy to think.
Naval describes how he applied this principle by refusing to do coffee meetings, outsourcing all tasks below his rate, and keeping his calendar deliberately uncluttered. He found that the year he generated the most wealth was the year he worked the least hard and cared the least about the future, because he had freed up time for his highest-value projects.
Naval included this as one of the key principles in his 'How to Get Rich' tweetstorm: 'Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it.' The principle emerged from his observation that most people undervalue their time by orders of magnitude. They will spend hours doing tasks worth ten dollars to save money while neglecting activities worth thousands of dollars per hour -- like thinking clearly about strategy, building relationships, or creating leveraged assets.