The Aspirational Hourly Rate
Set an absurdly high personal hourly rate and let it decide what you refuse to do.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
Pick an hourly rate for yourself that reflects the person you intend to become, not the market's current opinion. Naval used five thousand dollars an hour for decades before he had any real money, and reckons his true rate at the time was nearer a thousand. Then apply it as a filter to every decision. An hour spent crossing town to collect something costs you the rate. Returning a broken item costs you the rate plus the mental hassle. If you can hire someone below the rate, hire them; if you cannot, throw the thing away and move on. The same filter guts your calendar: downgrade meetings to calls, calls to email, email to text, and ignore most texts. The rate should feel absurd. If it does not, it is too low.
Origin
Extracted from Naval. Naval describes silently repeating a five-thousand-dollar hourly rate to himself long before he had money, and theatrically binning or donating broken items rather than returning them, as the enforcement mechanism for the rule.
Core principles
- 01Nobody will value you more than you value yourself.
- 02The rate is aspirational, set from your future self, not your current invoice.
- 03Anything you can outsource below the rate should be outsourced or dropped.
- 04High-output mental hours are the scarce asset, not clock hours.
- 05Penny pinching and wealth creation are different games with different rules.
- 06Meetings are the largest uncosted drain on the rate.
How to run it
- 1
Choose an absurd rate
Fast-forward to your wealthy self and pick an intermediate hourly rate from there. It should feel uncomfortably, theatrically high when you say it out loud.
Pro tip Whatever number you land on, raise it. Naval's rule is that if it does not feel absurd it is not high enough.
- 2
Price every task against it
Before any errand, repair, return or favour, convert it to hours and multiply. Ask explicitly whether you would pay that amount in cash to make the task disappear.
Pro tip Include the mental overhead, not just the clock time; a nagging open loop costs more than the minutes.
Watch out Remember you have far fewer high-output mental hours than waking hours; spend those on the big stuff.
- 3
Outsource or abandon everything below the rate
If somebody can do it for less than your rate, hire them. If nobody can, do not do it at all. Give the broken item away rather than fighting for the refund.
Pro tip Make the refusal visible and consistent so the people around you stop routing these tasks to you.
Watch out Doing it yourself for the joy of it is legitimate, but be honest that you have just made something else the priority.
- 4
Apply the rate to your calendar
Decline meetings ruthlessly. Push each request down the ladder: meeting to phone call, phone call to email, email to text message, and ignore most texts unless genuinely urgent.
Pro tip When a meeting is unavoidable, walk it or stand it, keep it small, short and actionable.
Watch out Eight people around a conference table produces nothing. You are dying one hour at a time.
- 5
Stay busy while the calendar stays empty
The goal is not idleness. It is an uncluttered calendar plus constant work on whatever is highest-impact and most inspiring right now.
Pro tip A busy calendar and a busy mind both destroy the ability to do great work; protect free time and a free mind.
In the wild
Naval describes making a theatrical show of throwing something into the trash pile or giving it to the Salvation Army rather than attempting a return, and handing broken items to someone rather than fixing them. He did this before he had money. He also tells girlfriends, his wife and his mother the same thing when they hand him small to-dos: that is not a problem he solves, and he would rather hire an assistant. He admits he still occasionally argued with an electrician, and says he should not have.
→ The rate becomes a visible, enforced policy rather than a private intention, so other people stop assigning him sub-rate work.
Naval says Nivi used to reply to coffee and get-to-know-you requests by stating that they do not do meetings unless it is life-and-death urgent, forcing the requester to either assert that it is or drop it. Naval's own version is to tell people outright that he does not do non-transactional meetings and does not meet without a strict agenda. The result is a calendar so empty that people who see it almost weep, while he works constantly.
→ Near-zero scheduled obligations with no loss of genuinely valuable conversations.
Common mistakes
Setting the rate at what you currently earn
A rate derived from today's market price only confirms your current ceiling. The number has to come from the person you intend to be, which is why it should feel absurd.
Penny pinching while claiming to build wealth
Frugality can get you to basic sustenance and early retirement, which is a valid but different goal. Optimising for saved pennies while claiming to optimise for wealth creation guarantees neither.
Taking coffee meetings to stay open to serendipity
Networking meetings are type-two hustle luck at best. Later in a career, when more is coming at you than you have time for, they are pure rate leakage.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders, creators and knowledge workers whose output is nonlinear and whose bottleneck is mentally fresh hours rather than money.
Not ideal for
Anyone in genuine financial scarcity where cash, not time, is the binding constraint, or whose explicit goal is frugal early retirement.
From the transcript
“So no one is going to value you more than you value yourself. So you just have to set a very high personal hourly rate…”
“if you can outsource something or not do something for less than your hourly rate, outsource it or don't do it”
“So set a very high hourly aspirational rate for yourself and stick to it. And it should seem and feel absurdly high. If it doesn't,…”
From the episode
How to Get Rich: Every Episode