Work Less. Accomplish More.

June 12, 2026

Why working less might be the best way to get ahead

Northwestern Mutual recently put the average American's retirement target at $1.46 million, up $200,000 from last year. For high earners, the same study said $2.67 million.

If those numbers just tightened your chest, you're not alone. Numbers like that have a predictable effect: they send people who are already working too hard back to their desks to work even harder.

They also happen to be wrong for more people than you'd think.

If you've felt the rules of getting ahead shift under your feet over the last decade, that's because they have. The grind that built careers in the 1990s isn't producing the same returns today.

And the harder you keep pushing, the further you can drift from what you were working this hard for in the first place.

Why the rules changed

For decades, hustling was how you got ahead. The longer your day, the bigger your paycheck. The harder you outworked your peers, the faster you climbed.

There was a ladder, the rungs were where you expected them to be, and the formula made sense for millions of American families.

I watched the tail end of that era from inside the wealth management industry. The advisors who were in by six in the morning, on the phone all day, and at the steakhouse with prospects three nights a week genuinely did get the corner office.

Then the treadmill sped up. Globalization, hyper-competition, and technology each cranked it higher. By the early 2010s, running no longer cut it. If you wanted to keep up, you had to be sprinting.

Then something almost nobody saw coming happened: the treadmill stopped.

You can see it happen in real time online. Take a look at Gary Vaynerchuk and Naval Ravikant, for example. Gary V built one of the biggest business followings in recent memory by telling everyone to work 18 hours a day. Hustle harder, crush it, and if you're not grinding, someone else is gunning for your spot.

His message still feels true to anyone raised under the old rules.

On the other hand, Naval Ravikant built a major following arguing the exact opposite: read more, think more, and build leverage. He invested early in Twitter and Uber, built AngelList, and across years of essays and podcasts has made the case that modern wealth gets created in entirely different conditions than the ones Gary V is selling.

Naval isn't winning this argument because he's more Zen than Gary V. He's winning it because two critical things changed.

First, technology started doing the work that used to take hours or days or weeks. Algorithms don't sleep. Software doesn't take a lunch break. The work that took ten people to do a generation ago takes one today, and what that one person brings to the table isn't time. It's judgment.

Second, the kind of effort that gets rewarded looks completely different now. One thoughtful decision can create more value than months of frantic activity. One scalable idea can outperform a thousand cold calls.

The economy started rewarding leverage instead of labor.

So, the professional advantage no longer belongs to the person moving the fastest. It belongs to the person thinking the clearest.

What working less looks like

You don't need to leave your job or career to feel the shift. It's more about allocating your time differently, like fewer dashes between meetings in favor of the two or three relationships and decisions that will move your business forward another step.

That's where the compounding really happens now.

So, when was the last time the most valuable thing you produced came from speed? It probably wasn't last Tuesday's inbox grind or collating all your meeting notes using AI. It probably came from a focused stretch of thinking that took longer to set up than to execute.

The same pattern shows up wherever someone has the courage to specialize. The consultant who narrows to one niche and triples her fee while halving her travel. The doctor who shifts from high-volume to a smaller patient list at higher rates per visit. The corporate professional who turns down most committee work and gets known for one thing the company can't replace.

This can take a few years to start showing up in your accounts. But the math at the end looks nothing like what you would have produced grinding through the old model.

What's really stopping you

If all this makes sense to you, the next question is what's keeping you from making a move.

I don't say that like it's easy to do simply because you've identified the issue. If it were, there'd be no need for financial advisors or career coaches.

But knowing what's standing in your way is the first step toward making that change happen. And in my experience, just like we saw at the start, it usually starts with fear, specifically, fear of your retirement number.

The Northwestern Mutual headlines are part of that. So's every retirement calculator built on the 80% rule that tells everyone they're behind. So's the structure of an industry where most advisors get paid more the more you save, which gives them limited incentive to tell you you have enough.

What's really telling is the same fear hits people making half a million or more as much as it hits someone making $75,000.

Recent Acorns research found 43% of Americans with $500,000 to $800,000 in net worth still report financial anxiety. At over $800,000, it's still 24%. So, the fear isn't really about your number after all. It's about the story we've all been told the numbers need to be.

Imagine a 45-year-old earning $250,000 a year with $500,000 already invested. She's convinced she needs $3 million to retire, so she stays in survival mode through long hours, high stress, and a job she's outgrown.

What she hasn't done is run the numbers honestly. When you project that $500,000 over twenty more years of compounding, add what she'll keep contributing to her 401(k), and account for the fact that her spending at 65 won't look like her spending at 45, the real target shrinks.

She's probably a lot closer to a workable retirement than the $3 million figure suggests.

Almost every new client I meet shows up with some version of this in mind. They come in convinced their number’s impossible. We run the projections together. More often than not, it’s more achievable than they thought, and sometimes they've even already met it.

Your shoulders would drop, too, wouldn't they? Because that realization lets you stop worrying. No, it's not a guarantee. But it's a much clearer picture than the one you've been looking at. And it means the goal shifts from maximizing your paycheck to being great at the work you love to do.

This isn't a permission slip to coast. The slower, more focused way of working is harder than a lot of people expect, and effort still matters. In fact, it matters even more because you're being asked to think instead of react.

But it does mean that the old approach, sacrifice now and live later, isn't your only option. There's a different one. And it might actually mean retirement is closer than you think.