The RCP System: Relevance Competency and Passion

The point

Identify the three most important processes you do, break them into sub-processes and evaluate on relevancy, competency, passion. Don't do anything you're only able to do incrementally. Give it to somebody who's great at it.

Jay Abraham · Two Day Rapid-Result "Instant Immersion" — Day 2 Cued to 1:07:10 2 min 4 sec loading…

Why it matters

What is an hour of your time worth? Not what you want it to be worth — what it earned the last seven days. You pour your hours into work worth $10 while the work worth $10,000 sits and waits, and the gap between what your hours earn and what they could earn is an asset you already own.

Relevancy asks whether the work moves your most important result or only feels productive — you can be excellent at something so irrelevant that doing it burns opportunity cost, the most precious resource you have. Competency asks whether you are the best one alive to do it or merely the most available; only incrementally good means handing it to someone great and operating in your superpower. Passion asks whether the work gives you energy or quietly takes it, because dispassionate work costs more focus than it returns.

An appraiser never prices land by what it happens to be doing today. He prices it by its highest and best use, the most valuable purpose that land could serve. Your calendar deserves the same appraisal. Most of it clears one lens and some of it two, and the narrow band that clears all three is worth more than everything else combined.

If you cannot afford to pay anyone yet, pay on results, or defer until there is profit. Every hour you take back becomes an hour redeployed into work that multiplies the business, and the same week starts producing a larger enterprise.

The mistake almost everyone makes

You hand off the work you dislike and keep the work you do well. Being good at it is exactly why it never leaves your calendar — but good is not the standard. The question is whether anyone alive would do it better than you.

The test: Name the task you are proudest of doing yourself, then answer relevancy, competency and passion on it. If competency is your only yes, you are the most available, not the best.

Where it shows up — 8 worked examples

Who	What happened
Aussie Broadband	Founded in the country town of Morwell, Aussie Broadband built 1,721 kilometres of its own fibre and reached 780,259 broadband connections by June 2024.
Bathu	Put its 30-plus stores and its online shop on one shared till and stock system, and revenue rose 26 percent.
Riverford Organic Farmers	Guy Singh-Watson handed 76 percent of a £108-million business to an employee trust rather than keep making every decision himself.
Physics Wallah	Alakh Pandey stopped teaching one room at a time and recorded the syllabus once, so a single hour of his now reaches millions.
Accountants' World	Built payroll and bookkeeping tools so an accountant's own hours could move off compliance and onto the advice clients actually pay for.
Tim Ferriss	Wrote decision rules for his supplement company's outsourcers, cut his own week from eighty hours to about four, and revenue went up.
Chris Ducker	Listed every task only he was doing, handed each one to his Philippine team, and stopped being the bottleneck in his own call centres.
Centratel (Sam Carpenter)	Wrote down every procedure in a small Oregon answering service, cut his own week from a hundred hours to about two, and profit rose.

What it solves

The words a business owner uses for this before anybody has told them the name of it. If one of these is a sentence you have said out loud, this is your strategy.

Busy and nothing moved“I worked 12 hours yesterday and I could not tell you which of them made this business any bigger.”You put a dollar figure on an hour of your own time, then see which hours on the last seven days's calendar actually earned it.
Keeping the work you are good at“The jobs I keep for myself are the ones I do best, and that has always seemed like plain good sense.”Competency asks whether you are the best one alive to do it or merely the most available, and merely good is precisely what keeps it yours.
Excellent at something that does not matter“I am the best person in this company at a job that would not change our year if nobody did it at all.”Relevancy separates work that moves your most important result from work that only feels productive, so being excellent at the irrelevant stops costing you opportunity cost.
The part of the job you dread“There is a piece of this I dread every single week, and I have still done it myself every week for six years.”Passion is treated as economics rather than sentiment: dispassionate work costs more focus than it returns, which is what makes it too expensive to keep.
Cannot afford to hand it over“I know I should not be doing half of this myself, but I cannot put another salary on the payroll right now.”The fallback is pay on results, or defer until there is profit, so the handover stops waiting on a salary you cannot yet write.
Client who will not let go“My client agrees with every word I say about delegating, then goes back to doing all of it himself the following week.”Three lenses held against their own real calendar turn an argument about delegating into an appraisal they run themselves, hour by hour, with a number attached.

The challenge

Price an hour of your time, then audit the last seven days

Print the last seven days's calendar, every hour. Write one number at the top: what an hour of your time earned the last seven days — profit divided by hours worked. Hold each block against the three lenses and mark how many it clears: moved your most important result, only you could do it, gave you energy. Take the three biggest blocks clearing nothing, multiply their hours by your number, and in the next seven days hand each one to someone or kill it — paid on results or deferred until profit, if cash is short.

How you will know it is done Your calendar is marked hour by hour, your hourly figure sits at the top, and the three worst blocks are handed off or gone.

The AI layer · second pass

Once this is working, here is what to multiply

Improve the system first. Then multiply it. This panel is the second run at the strategy above, and it is deliberately useless until the first run is done.

Before you point anything at this You have run one real week of your calendar through relevance, competency and passion, by hand.

What it multiplies Taking over the hours that failed all three lenses, the drafting and scheduling and summarising and chasing, and returning them to your week without a payroll line.

The trap Automating the ten-dollar work instead of ending it. Delegation and elimination were both on the table; making the task cheap quietly removes elimination, and the hours come back and go straight into more ten-dollar work, because nothing decided in advance where a reclaimed hour belongs.