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Brian Tracy said, "As I become more successful, I couldn't afford to do things I used to, like mowing the lawn."

There have been insanely productive times when I've accomplished things in the span of a few hours that generated millions of dollars of future revenue.

Conversely, there have been times where I've spent a full day on nonsense. Stuff that had zero positive impact on my business. Things like emails, pointless meetings, and admin tasks.

The more successful you become, the less you can afford to do certain things.

You'll find that team members, clients, and vendors try and pull you into meetings, ask you to put out fires, and just chit-chat.

These aren't bad in themselves, but they come at a huge opportunity cost.

We entreprenuers have what I call Superman Syndrome. There's a problem, we'll fix it. Someone needs us, we're there.

It feels good to say yes, to be needed, and to be at the center of things, but it comes at a price.

Whenever you say yes, to be needed, and to be at the center of things, but it comes at a price.

Whenever you say yes to something, you're implicitly saying no to something else.

That something else is usually the important, value-building work.

One thing that helped me refocus on what I would say yes or no to is by setting an aspirational value to an hour of my time.

I initially set it to $5,000 per hour.

So if someone requested a 30-minute meeting, I would think twice instead of just saying yes, because that meeting is going to cost me $2,500. It had better be worth at least that.

Now to be clear, I wasn't actually making $5,000 an hour at the time, but what comes first, the chicken or the egg?

If I continued wasting my time on low-value tasks, I'd never get even close to that hourly rate. Whereas if I used this hourly rate as a filter for what I said yes or no to, I'd be working on high-value things that massively improved my chances of getting there.

What will you reset your aspirational hourly rate to?