Why I take every last Friday of the month off
A pause from clients and content to spend half the day with my daughter, the whole day with my wife, and reclaim presence.
Every last Friday of the month, I step away from work. No meetings, no deadlines, no client calls. It is not an indulgence; it is a system I designed to protect what matters most because the internet rewards speed, but a life worth living is built on presence.
The latest Friday started with my daughter and wife. We cycled to the park, and for a few hours, time slowed and half the day disappeared into laughter, patience, and small milestones.
That evening, the rest of the day belonged to my wife. Dinner, long conversations, window shopping in quiet malls, and the simple joy of spending time together.
I keep these Fridays sacred because I know the cost of ignoring them. For example, years ago, I would have chosen hustle instead of back-to-back meetings and deadlines disguised as purpose.
The dopamine of being “in demand” is a trap because the system teaches us to exchange our hours for approval, paychecks, and status. Yet none of those compounds is the kind of wealth that lasts.
Wealth, as I have come to understand it, is not about the number in your bank account, though money matters. It is assets that earn while you sleep, systems that scale without your constant presence, and relationships that deepen because you chose to show up.
Taking every last Friday off is part of that design and serves as proof that I am building a business around my life, not squeezing life into the gaps left by my company.
Clients respect it because I communicate it upfront, and followers barely notice because my content is designed to run smoothly without my real-time posting. Most importantly, my family feels it most, because those Fridays tell them in the most straightforward way possible: you are not second place to my ambition.
In Singapore, where I navigate life as a gender-fluid parent, visibility comes with scrutiny, like stares in the MRT, questions in bathrooms, and comments on the street. Still, presence with my family anchors me against all that noise. My wife’s acceptance and my daughter’s laughter are the signals I trust more than any metric on LinkedIn.
This is the lesson I now teach creators, founders, and leaders: building a personal brand is not about chasing endless growth, but about designing leverage, clarity, and presence so that you can step away and the system still runs.
Permissionless leverage, such as content, systems, and stories, is the creator economy’s most potent gift. It is what lets me take the last Friday off every month and still grow revenue past five figures.
When I coach clients, I show them how to create the same structure as a story bank that compounds trust and offers that run without pressure and narratives that sell while you rest, because if you cannot walk away for a day, or even a week, without everything collapsing, you do not own your business; it owns you.
Every last Friday, I remind myself that the point of leverage is freedom, not more labour. The point of wealth is presence, not status, and the point of my work is not to escape life, but to design a life I do not need to escape from.
See you next Sunday.
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