The advice in today’s “continuous and persistent hustle is the only way to succeed” society is an interesting dichotomy. It is both the biggest possible harm to a business, or the most pivotal improvement possible. One piece of tactical or strategic insight can completely change a business’ trajectory.

On a rolling basis, we’re challenged to sift through the proliferation of information immediately accessible or fed to us by “influencers”. With that in mind, we need to discern what is useful and what is not. Alas, the Internet is the biggest blessing and the biggest curse to new and existing business owners.

A person who is challenging this paradigm is Jonathan Goodman.

While other entrepreneurial figureheads will tell you that you need to hustle 18 hours a day for your first two years in business or that you need be too busy working to participate in normal everyday activities, Goodman preaches and focuses on consistent and conservative growth.

It’s the difference between always looking for a big win or the next big thing vs playing the long game, confident that whatever method of tactic is in vogue today will be gone tomorrow and what matters is the work and the reputation.

So who is Jonathan Goodman and why is he able to share this type of counterargument with us?

In 2011, he launched the soon to be world’s biggest online resource for personal trainers, the Personal Trainer Development Centre (the PTDC), which has become a 7-figure business with only a handful of employees.

If you were to look at charts of an audience and financial growth of the business you won’t see anything special, and that’s just the point —there are no spikes, just small consistent growth—almost—every week, month, and every year since inception.  

What has this created for Goodman?

Goodman is now the leading global authority in online personal training.

He is a Forbes featured entrepreneur, author of three must have books for fitness trainers, creator of the world’s first textbook for online trainers and internationally renowned fitness coach. Heck, he even wrote a rhyming children’s book with his wife.

Most importantly, he has helped tens of thousands of other personal trainers grow their own online businesses without sacrificing their own lifestyle in exchange.

You see, Goodman lives differently from the rest of us. He has focused on creating a lifestyle that allows him to both produce more with his business and be more present with the people who matter most to him: his wife and his son, Calvin.

When we look at the lifestyles of entrepreneurial influencers we see hustle, hustle, hustle. What this doesn’t reveal is the burnout, the trade-offs and the time we spent on chasing more.

More money, more growth, and more exposure.

We get swept up in the idea that this will create the life we want, and in exchange, we offer our most precious resource, time. We hustle from 6 AM to 12 PM, day in and day out until we either crash or have companies that we don’t know what to do with because we’re told that it is what we’re supposed to do.

Interestingly, most of this hustle is misaligned with what’s actually necessary to produce real-world, sustainable, long-term results. Instead, all that happens is the endless pursuit of vanity metrics: more likes and follows without really knowing why or putting much thought into whether these are people who both care about you, and would be willing to invest money into what you do.

Goodman said, “Most people will be better served to figure out themselves how they work best, find their place in the business world, and enjoy long-steady growth vs. trying to blow the roof off today, right now, without giving much thought as to what they are going to do tomorrow.”

And Goodman is right.

In today’s era of the glorification of the hustle, we need to learn what is going to be best for us. Life isn’t meant to be about the hustle. It is about the joys of spending the small time we have on the planet with the people we love.

Working 16 hours a day is not success, it’s ludicrous.

Your career is something that is meant to monetise the lifestyle you want to lead and not the other way around. The strategy of slow and steady wins the race is true. The cumulative 1% efforts all add up over time to create a lifestyle, not a monetary goal. Goodman is living proof of this.

If you want to learn more about online training and the lifestyle Jon Goodman has created you can find him here.