The Provider Who Wasn’t There
Richer Soul Podcast • Episode 516 • John Briggs
The Modern Problem
A lot of successful people measure whether they’re providing for their family by one input: hours worked, money brought home. It’s an easy number to track and an easy story to tell yourself at two in the morning. John Briggs told that story to himself for years, right up until his wife told him a different one.
The Hidden Pattern
John’s firm was built the same way his own accounting education was: on the assumption that more hours produce more results. He worked eighty-hour weeks, believed he was crushing it, and came home one night to a wife who told him, through tears, “I’m a single parent.” His first internal reaction, by his own admission, wasn’t guilt. It was something closer to indignation: why does she get to have a breakdown when he’s the one who’s exhausted. That reaction is the tell. Hustle doesn’t just cost time, it can quietly convince a good person that showing up financially cancels out not showing up at all.
The Assumption We Carry
Most of us never separate “hard work” from “long work.” John says it plainly: “A lot of people misunderstand hard work. They interpret it as all-the-time work. That’s not the case.” The assumption is baked in early, in school, in first jobs, in entire industries, that suffering hours is what work ethic looks like, and that a person who works fewer hours must simply care less.
The Clearer Lens
What John found when he actually researched the science was the opposite of the story he’d been telling himself. The brain runs on a natural cycle, roughly three hours of focus followed by a state of distraction, and pushing through that cycle doesn’t produce more work, it produces the appearance of more input while the actual output stalls. He built his firm’s schedule around that cycle instead of fighting it: three hours of real focus, followed by a real recovery break, no scrolling, no shopping, no caffeine, just something that actually lets the brain reset. Three years later, his firm’s profitability was up 492 percent. Not despite the rest. Because of it.
The Implication For Life
The uncomfortable part isn’t the science, it’s what the science proves about the story John had been telling himself and his wife. If working fewer, better hours produces more of the thing you were chasing, then the extra hours were never about the business. They were about something else, a belief that presence has to be earned through exhaustion, that rest has to be justified, that stopping might mean you didn’t care enough. John’s employees, when he first introduced real breaks, thought he was pranking them. That’s how deep the belief runs, even in people who never lived through his particular version of it.
One Question to Sit With: What is your hustle actually protecting you from having to feel?
About John Briggs
John Briggs is a CPA and the founder and CEO of Incite Tax, a tax and accounting firm he launched in 2009. What started as a solo practice with a contrarian idea, that the tax industry treats business owners as an afterthought, has grown into a nationwide firm of roughly 300 employees serving about 18,000 clients.
Briggs built Incite Tax around a client-first philosophy and a willingness to challenge how the industry and the IRS operate. That stance became the firm’s identity and set it apart from the big traditional players. Today he leads a buy-and-build strategy, acquiring owner-operated tax, bookkeeping, and payroll firms and integrating them into an operation designed to run on systems rather than on any single founder. For sellers, that means a real transition and a professional home for the business they built.
He holds a Master of Accountancy in Tax and a B.S. in Accounting from Brigham Young University, and he spent years as a partner at other tax and accounting firms before building his own. Briggs is also an author and speaker. His book Take Breaks, Work Better introduces the 3.3 Rule, his framework for measuring impact instead of hours, built on the idea that deliberate rest produces better work than grinding longer days.”
Links
Website: https://therealjohnbriggs.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/therealjohnbriggs/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61587661719945
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therealjohnbriggs/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@therealjohnbriggs
Substack: https://therealjohnbriggs.substack.com/
Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@richersoul
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