Is it possible to work less to earn more?

Nope

I think that it's possible after you've reached a certain level. Not from the beginning (although I'm sure that such cases also exist). Take freelancing, for example. At the start, you have to work hard for a low rate and take all of the projects that come your way, because you need to gain skills and earn a good reputation. After a while, when you've reached a high level of expertise, you can start increasing rates and denying projects that you don't like. Your reputation begins working for you, and you may not spend as much time on cold emailing as before. In the end, you might work fewer hours, but earn more than in the beginning.

No pain. No gain.

Doing this is difficult. One issue faced by employees in traditional occupations is that their manager is highly concerned with productivity but isn't sure how to quantify it. Therefore, they frequently base their evaluation of your success in significant part on how busy you appear to be. This is the origin of the proverb "appear busy, the boss is coming." It's also a factor in the abundance of workplace complaints. Some of the whining stems from the fact that most jobs are lousy, but some of it also comes from individuals attempting to appear busy and important. "Man, I'm overloaded." "I've spent the entire day putting out flames." How do you release yourself?

This is a tricky question - while it certainly isn't possible to achieve anything without putting in the necessary sweat equity, we all know that scalability is the difference between success with a lower case 's' and Success on the highest level. So ultimately, you have to put in the work on the front end to build something that'll grow beyond you.

I suppose it matters what you consider by 'work less'. A big part of moving any company or occupation forward is delegating tasks and hyper focusing on whatever part of the chain you handle as the owner/management. So in some ways, you are doing less work per dollar earned, but I don't know how well it will work in practice, if you are delegating for the sole purpose of working less, instead of delegating to become more efficient and growing your company. It's a whole other story if you are talking about principles such as the 4 day work week. In which case I would have a few questions. 😁