Great Things require dedication, passion, and vision. Working yourself to death is not on the list of requirements, and in fact can often be counter-productive.
If you're passionate about your job, you're likely to work hard. But there's a line between "working hard", and overworking. Beyond a certain point, more hours may (or may not) mean more things done, but almost certainly doesn't mean more of the right things done.
well said. as a corollary, id say that finding the right balance is really energizing. in some sense, i think its backwards to decide you want to do something "great"- i think its better to get in tune with what kind of processes and styles you like, and let that dictate where you go, knowing that because you are doing things that are suited to you, you are going to progress much faster.
Great Things require dedication, passion, and vision. Working yourself to death is not on the list of requirements
If that's true, it should be possible to make a list of companies that have been built without the founders working very hard (or rather, extremely long hours). What are some companies that could go onto such a list?
As a filter, let's use criteria "The founders got rich enough not to have to work anymore, or the company went public," since that's generally why people start startups.
EDIT: I've updated the question to ask specifically for instances of companies that have IPO'd or been acquired without the founders working extremely long hours, and also to clarify that I'm asking about the founders' working hours, not the employees. Thanks, enjo.
You got the wrong phrase. The question is can you build a successful company without working long hours, not "without working very hard". At Quickoffice we worked very hard.
We'd have the occasional long night, but there weren't many even 60 hour weeks being put in.
I think you are confusing working hard vs working to death. I work hard everyday but at some point in a given day I realize that I am not productive anymore.
If something is menial, doesn't require much mental process. Than its okay to keep going but if its something new which require even small amount of mental effort than working super hard is not going to get you anywhere.
I also sometimes work late, because I don't want the context switch that will happen if I leave the task in half completed state right now so I want to take it to logical conclusion where it would easy to pickup next day (in most cases I am excited to see the end product of task).
As with everything in life there is fine line between working hard vs working yourself to death and nobody else can decide this line for you.
I agree with everything you've said, but if it's true that you can get rich from a startup without working extremely long hours, we should be able to find some evidence of that. And if there's no evidence, then maybe we should rethink whether it's true.
Most founders work very hard, often to destructive excess as portrayed in the article. And most startups fail. This suggests that hard work is weakly correlated with startup success.
If so, a dearth of examples of successful startups by founders lacking a chronic death-march work ethic doesn't speak at all to whether burnout is a requirement for success.
That's quite the strawman. Nobody is claiming success doesn't require hard work. But there's a serious gap between working hard and working yourself into an early grave.
And since we're using the criteria of The founders got rich enough not to have to work anymore, or the company went public, which I think is totally accurate in 99% of cases, let's please stop talking about Doing Great Things, which has nothing to do with the above. Let's be honest, most founders are in it to get filthy rich, not to improve the world. Sometimes the two go hand in hand, but less than the startup world thinks.
Awesome, thank you! This is a great example. It's strange to see evidence that founders don't always have to work most evenings. I wonder why the culture surrounding startups has gone in the opposite direction.
I suspect people do it as social signaling because they don't want to be thought of as not dedicated.
If people were more worried about results than appearances, they would not do this though as working that much leads to stupid mistakes and burn-out.
It might make sense if you are just trying to cash out and want to put on a good show for investors by sleeping under your desk, though I would think this only impresses stupid investors.
Is instructive to see the environments where this goes the other way.
In Oxford and Cambridge Universities there is the concept of the 'Grey Man'.
These are the people who are seen to work hard and it used to be considered a terrible affliction and an indication of mediocre talents.
Consider this quote from Stephen Hawking
“The prevailing attitude at Oxford at that time was very anti-work. You were supposed to either be brilliant without effort or accept your limitations and get a fourth-class degree. To work hard to get a better class of degree was the mark of a ‘grey man’, the worst epithet in the Oxford vocabulary.”
Hawking calculated that he worked on average for about an hour a day as an undergraduate physicist: “We affected an air of complete boredom and the feeling that nothing was worth making an effort for.”
Wasn't Basecamp started as a side project of 37Signals where DHH spent like 10 hours a week working on it?
And yes Basecamp is now a company and god nows how many businesses are involved with Ruby on Rails.
Great point. No matter how engrossing or important the work I'm doing is, I've never been able to push myself to work past midnight. Something biological tells me I am done, my brain turns to soup, and I know I've gone past the point of diminishing returns. I've never been able to fool myself into believing that there is any point in doing any more.
I look at these guys pushing themselves beyond the point of physical, mental and emotion exhaustion, and I just wonder how they do it. I wonder what drives them go on.
This is not the reality of what is required to do great things [1]. This is one path, but there are many others. There are lots of people who work 40-50 hours a week and have incredibly successful startups/companies/whatever. There are people who work 80 hours a week and their startup is a complete piece of garbage.
Jamie Zawinski has a great great blog post about this [2], which I'll quote part of:
> He's trying to make the point that the only path to success in the software industry is to work insane hours, sleep under your desk, and give up your one and only youth, and if you don't do that, you're a pussy. He's using my words to try and back up that thesis. I hate this, because it's not true, and it's disingenuous.
I'm not saying the OP is trying to sell this lie too. He is posting about how he is tired and wants to go home and relax. However, the life he describes is very much in the vein of Jamie's blog post. This lifestyle is not required to succeed, and it may in fact be quite counter-productive (as this blog post is attesting to). If your life isn't like this and you aren't working this hard it really isn't saying anything about how likely to succeed you are.
1: Though I don't know exactly what "great things" is... Making a lot of money? Going to Mars? Getting on the cover of Forbes magazine? Some of these require more effort than others.
Absolutely, and also on the definition of executive. A lot level VP -- one of potentially thousands in the org -- at a mega corp is not living remotely the same life as a corporate officer.
> There are lots of people who work 40-50 hours a week and have incredibly successful startups/companies/whatever. There are people who work 80 hours a week and their startup is a complete piece of garbage.
There are lots of people who work 80 hours a week and their startup is garbage. But there are very few (if any at all) people who got their startup off the ground with 50 hours of work per week. Working long hours is necessary but not sufficient. (There are lots of people who claim it isn't necessary, but none of them actually had a successful startup)
I worked at a very successful startup, including getting it off the ground, and rarely worked more than 50 hours per week. I don't know how common my experience was, but I can assure you it isn't necessary.
Doing great things comes at a great cost. Some people are willing to pay the cost, some think it's too high. The realization that one is unwilling to pay the cost need not be a painful one.
"Great things" means very different things to different people. Working yourself to the point of breaking down just to make money is not a great thing.
Last year I worked for a startup and I allowed myself to be pushed past the breaking point. The founders tempted me with equity (which never actually materialized) and I ended up doing many all nighters and many 90-hour weeks prior to an early release (another company was doing the front-end while we did the server in-house).
I don't have a wife or a puppy, but I shouldn't have allowed this to happen. I was hired to work for a set salary under the assumption of a 40-hour work-week - although I am naturally obsessive so I knew that wouldn't actually last. But I didn't expect my boss to say things like, "If we don't have a working build by 3pm tomorrow, we're all fired," (which turned out to be false, actually).
Pacing is important, and I think it would be interesting to do a startup where pacing is actively encouraged. I think this might be possible at a startup with strong IP protection, good funding, and leadership that sets realistic goals and trusts it's people to be motivated to get it done. It may mean that the public has to wait a bit longer before having a cool new thing available to them, but it also means that the thing will have been constructed by fresh, happy minds.
There is a moral imperative to not buy goods made in sweatshops. There is also a moral imperative to not use software produced under inhumane conditions. Congratulations on discovering this for yourself - and I hope you encourage your coworkers to be humane to each other and themselves as well.
If we don't have a working build by 3pm tomorrow, we're all fired...
This is a bothersome and worrisome comment that probably has been repeated (in some variation) too often. How is this the fault of the developer(s)?
I appreciate that founders need to fulfill their promises, especially when having the backing of investors, but these type of statements seem to indicate a failure in communication and planning (more than execution).
> The founders tempted me with equity (which never actually materialized)
This happens frequently enough that by now it should be a thing that people are 'on to'. If you're being tempted with equity then insist on drawing it up in writing with a solid vesting schedule and don't work a day past the first vesting point without your stock.
Wow, much respect for writing this. While my company isn't quite at Dwolla scale, I've had my own version of too-much-travel this fall, and I am over it. I realized I was making the most impact back home, helping the team create the foundation for us to do more with less.
All these conferences and these meetings are rarely world changing. They hold potential opportunities and the start of relationships, but we never know if those opportunities would have come to us through cheaper, more effective means.
Travel bothers me so much because it feels incredibly suboptimal, like I'm working harder not smarter.
There are so many different angles to startup burnout, that sometimes it seems like we're playing a really rough game like American football, only instead of head and spine injuries we've got mental health problems and repetitive stress disorders.
Early in a startup the big enemy is yourself and poverty. Try to get yourself to finish that feature; to push the product over the line. To persevere after the launch basically goes unnoticed. The burnout is emotional because it's rooted in self doubt. Once a startup starts getting traction a different type of mental stress sets in: a fear of squandering an opportunity. All the late nights are rooted in the fear that your startup has had some luck and some traction, and maybe if you don't push so hard it will become another Excite. Used, but left to the wayside while a better contender came in.
One reaction: "grow up". Stop letting other people dictate how you live your life. That is what parents do for children. Becoming an adult means making your own decisions about how to spend your time, and when enough is enough. Grow up. Stop putting other people, ones not even that close to you, first. Grow up.
It shouldn't be the way. We met Brad Feld last year in Las Vegas (Up Summit) and he talked about his depression[1]. I suggest everyone to read the depression archives on Brad Feld blog [2]. Pretty insightful posts. I tend to be obsessive and I lost someone I really care about because of focus on money and too much work. At the end of the day, you have to focus on your priorities, your wife/family is one and should deserve a decent amount of attention. Brad said that when Amy call him whenever he's in a meeting he will still answer, because she's a priority.
Outworking yourself is not likely the way you will succeed in the long run. Work hard != work smart
George Bernard Shaw said: "I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it."
This may be veering off-topic, but reading the suggestions submitted by the reader in that post made me wonder some people (many, in fact) have to actively work so hard to hold off depression. Something is going wrong (organically, culturally, or both) that depression is the default state for so many.
Culturally, I think our relationship with work is certainly part of it. And, some personalities (e.g. driven or obsessive) may just be more susceptible.
> Something is going wrong (organically, culturally, or both) that depression is the default state for so many.
I'm not convinced that this is any different from the "natural state" of humans (which granted is not completely well-defined). I do not see any reason to expect people to be generally happy. While it's overly reductionist to think of evolution in terms of individual "fitness", it is not clear to me that a general trend of being unhappy (which in slightly more outlying cases becomes depression) decreases fitness. The only obvious effect I can see is suicide, but that's pretty rare statistically speaking, and we have strong self-preservation instincts independent of happiness that are pretty hard to override. Being reliably happy on the other hand is probably ruinous to fitness--what motivation would I have to do anything?
From a strict evolutionary fitness perspective, depression is very nearly catastrophic. But, that framing doesn't make sense in the first place, nor is it necessary in order to assess the "natural state" of humans.
Depression is a mental health issue. Unhealthiness is not a natural state.
You are also profoundly misguided in your understanding that depression is the opposite of happiness. Most of your argument seems to rest on that confusion.
Perhaps I was unclear. I'm not arguing that depression is "naturally" common. Only that reliable happiness is perhaps not naturally common. I'm not arguing that depression is the opposite of happiness; however, I do not think it's unreasonable that if people are overall less happy, this will increase the incidence of depression.
Well, it seems that you said what you meant to say, because your clarification still leans pretty heavily on the notion of happiness vs. depression.
>I'm not arguing that depression is "naturally" common. Only that reliable happiness is perhaps not naturally common.
Here's the problem. Statements about "reliable" or "unreliable" happiness in response to a discussion about depression reduce depression to, essentially, a period of unhappiness. Your suggestion is that consistent happiness may not be naturally common. The corollary (in this context) is that the intermittent periods of unhappiness represent depression.
So, I'm really not sure how the response that you're repeating here about "reliable happiness" can be construed than anything other than an erroneous framing of what depression is.
This is not to pick nits, but I think it's a common misconception that reduces depression to a mental state or emotion on par with "happiness" or "sadness". That characterization does a disservice to sufferers, even if unintentional.
Depression is an ugly, dark beast that attaches itself to the depressed person and refuses to let go. In situations that should generate "happiness", the depressed person is often unable to feel it. Depression can be wholly orthogonal to "regular" emotions.
>I'm not arguing that depression is the opposite of happiness; however, I do not think it's unreasonable that if people are overall less happy, this will increase the incidence of depression.
None of what you say contradicts this. You point out
> Depression can be wholly orthogonal to "regular" emotions.
which is certainly true, but it also can be quite parallel to them. In my experience, my worst episodes of depression were usually triggered by periods of profound unhappiness, even if during these episodes the experience is not the same as being continuously unhappy.
(Characterizing depression as coming in "episodes" is also misleading, as it is generally ever-present to some extent; but any characterization less than several pages long is misleading. I'd appreciate the benefit of the doubt that I understand the other issues and subtleties in play even if I do not discuss them.)
Well, I'm in no position to deny you the benefit of the doubt with regard to what you intended. I can only take you at your word there. I'm only pointing out that what you've written doesn't seem consistent with it.
>None of what you say contradicts this.
It actually does in that I've effectively stated that the sentence has no meaning in this context.
Replying further would only belabor the point and I don't want to be antagonistic. I'll just chalk it up to miscommunication. Thanks for the discussion.
The saddest thing about this post to me is the fact that he could only write it because his startup is apparently doing great.
Most startups aren't, despite the fact that lots of the folks there are in effectively the same personal position and feeling the exact same thing - in addition to the added pressure of not feeling like they measure up to stories like this one because their quarter didn't go nearly as well. I really feel for those people, and I wish they felt more freedom to be honest and public about these kinds of feelings.
Rather tangentially - I have a one and a half year old daughter who recently turned a question we posed her ("Woah, kiddo. Are you freaking out!?") on it's head. Now sometimes when she gets wound up she goes full-meta and runs back and forth in the kitchen waving her hands in the air yelling "freaking out!", in self-parody.
That reminds me, a little bit, of our startup-culture's relationship to overwork... and don't get me wrong, I don't think articles like this are the ridiculous self-parody, I think they're the really troubling and all-too-real consequence.
Put simply I think we need to do a little more wiggling our toes in the carpet and chilling the fuck out. The world's not suffering from a shortage of first-world martyrs.
Take a breath, go home, do great work tomorrow, and for God's sake appreciate the fact that you're in the hilariously small fraction of people who get to blog about the pains of working too hard by choice.
The really bothersome thing is that this isn't a revelation. Posts about burnout--and the subsequent replies commiserating and declaring how important of an issue this is and how the replier has been through their own version and how it isn't right and change is needed and-really-just-read-the-rest-of-this-thread--are a weekly occurrence on this message board alone. Who knows how many people are not commenting (remember the 90/9/1 rule of internet engagement), say nothing about the people who are just plane not here!
I started having the notion of starting my own company specifically because I was sick of being treated like nothing more than an input variable on some MBAs Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Does it make any sort of sense to work myself to death, in that same vein, in my own endeavours? I would have only traded one tyrant whom I could escape for one I'd be stuck with forever: myself.
> The saddest thing about this post to me is the fact that he could only write it because his startup is apparently doing great.
Agreed.
> Most startups aren't, despite the fact that lots of the folks there are in effectively the same personal position and feeling the exact same thing - in addition to the added pressure of not feeling like they measure up to stories like this one because their quarter didn't go nearly as well. I really feel for those people, and I wish they felt more freedom to be honest and public about these kinds of feelings.
...and let's also not forget all the folks who are barely making ends meet at their existing jobs, putting in 60+ hour work weeks for a measly salary that's been stagnate for years or all the folks needing to work an extra job or two just to survive.
I certainly haven't! Those were the people I had in mind when I ended the comment with "and for God's sake appreciate the fact that you're in the hilariously small fraction of people who get to blog about the pains of working too hard by choice."
It's hard to fairly cover every situation the OP is enjoying more privilege than, because frankly there's an ocean of them.
And/or lose prospective/confidence-of-current investors.Lots of pressure to appear bulletproof and unburdened by the usual constraints of advanced humanity.
>for God's sake appreciate the fact that you're in the hilariously small fraction of people who get to blog about the pains of working too hard by choice.
This made me think: How would a similar blog post from one of the albañiles (construction worker) be? Earning 13 bucks a day doing hard physical work and then having to do another job to earn a little more.
This was a great read. Something to consider in that moment is scale. It is impossible to be an entire company and survive. A CEO I highly respect told me that you can move a truck with a go kart engine, a big transmission, and a lot of coolant, but adding more cylinders is what makes it a truck. He was explaining to me that 'scaling' people was about figuring out how to take what someone was doing really really well, and turning that into a process for doing that thing. Then handing over that thing to the process.
The first startup I joined was run by a guy who had not, to my knowledge, ever been more than a line manager (directly managing people who did things, versus managing people who managed people to did things) He had a really really hard time working with the indirection, unable to feel comfortable that things were "in control" unless he went and talked to the actual people doing the work himself. As the company got bigger that became a bigger and bigger issue for him. He didn't scale, and I could tell that there would come a time when he would be 110% subscribed with tasks that he couldn't figure out how to delegate.
The message about getting home though is really really important. Too many people are sleeping at work because they have no home to go home to any more. If you can set a goal for 'quality hours with the family per week' and when that is in jeopardy due to work commitments restructure work to reduce its impact.
I can't help but feel the whole startup culture is a conflict of mission writ large in two ways. First, you're trying to make people's lives better while deleting the idea of a better life for yourself. Second, execution is everything. But when you're working like this the quality of execution inevitably degrades.
I've done startups. At the end I got better at what I was doing but I wasn't ultimately proud of the work I did. The startup even succeeded (I helped other people get rich, I just made a living). Many startups don't even do that.
The startup thing has been both amazing and incredibly devastating.
Haven't seen my folks in years. Spouse dumped me because I practically didn't exist outside of work. Absolutely no hobbies or traveling in years. No guarantee the company will be anything but a massive drop in my financial history. You're constantly running out of money, so you're cutting every unnecessary expense, and you're living on scraps for years, knowing that you could be making 10x that much in the workforce. You can't quit though because so many people look up to you for direction, they need you to be there and lead them, to be certain of where you're going. The stress can be so high you just want to roll up in fetal in a corner and disappear. You understand why so many founders end their lives.
The experiences however and the connections are priceless. The feeling of playing the game on your terms is liberating and the hope of the upside is exhilarating, but I still wish the price wasn't so high. The amount of personal growth is astounding: once you go through the above, everything else feels like easy mode. You have to develop resilience, charisma, diplomacy, discipline and so many other traits or you will sink fast.
In hindsight, I don't know if I'd do anything differently. When you're this deep, you try not to dwell on hypotheticals.
I remember many years ago when I was sold to the startup lifestyle by the sexiness of the message, but the dozens of PG essays and stories of success and freedom. Nowadays I caution people to truly dig deep and understand if this is worth it to them, ask them if they're ready to sacrifice everything for likely nothing at all. Ultimately we're slaves of power law and similar to Hollywood talent in our outcomes: a very small fraction of us is going to becomes gods through either luck or huge sacrifice, and 99.9% of us will be waiting tables for the rest of our lives, or decide to do something else.
Even here, you can't help but romanticize your experience. If you could see through the silicon valley delusion you've been fed, you would realize that you destroyed your life, your marriage, and most of your personal relationships, probably for nothing.
You say you have developed these incredible skills, and perhaps you have. What will they do for you... what is your endgame? Perhaps your next startup will be massive success and you will be rich, but will you be happy with no relationships? Who will be happy for your success that is not also making money from it?
You have been conned into playing a game you cannot win at the cost of your humanity. Run away now.
I too was surprised how the listing of all the things that were lost (really important things in life) were suddenly swept under the carpet with "the experiences.... were priceless".
I don't think that the experience of not seeing or having a family and not having a life (traveling or hobbies) is a priceless experience!!!
The crazy part is that there are plenty of people making money off of "lifestyle" businesses. They cobbled their websites together using technologies we wouldn't even look down our noses at. They work 20 hour weeks and enjoy their freedom the rest of the time.
I think we buy into the story that it has to be so difficult, but it doesn't.
The price does not have to be so high..IF stuff is not working out, you can just quit and try something else. There is nothing heroic or romantic about living in poverty.
Joining the workforce or running a so called lifestyle business that makes actual money is not a bad thing.
All this talk of sacrifice and being gods tells me you need to step outside your bubble. You are trying to start a company, not solve World hunger.
You hit the nail on the head. Once you've done it, there's nothing quite like it. It's like the volume knob on the rest of the world gets turned down.
I'm 3 months out of my last CEO role and depressed, despite being depressed in my CEO role. Now I'm depressed because I'm bored. I don't know what happiness is anymore. It turns out that happiness is chasing the dream, not the dream itself. I've lost sight of it. I don't remember what it is or if it even existed.
It's like what Alan Watts said: it's not the end of the journey, it is the journey. Remember that and try to enjoy it while it lasts.
You neglected your life and took terrible care of yourself and now you are likely suffering from clinical depression. The volume knob got turned down because you stopped listening.
2 big points I've learned & want to share on this topic:
1) In the smart long-term play, family & few close friends are most important. Everything else (including your startup) is trivial.
2) Even if you value your startup at 100% value (over family/friends/health/life), you're incredibly short-sited and killing your own startup baby if you don't have some balance in your life. Startup life is NOT a sprint. It's a marathon. To give the BEST to your startup, you need to bring your BEST every day.
Phrased another way, I often ask, "Let's say you're going to be interviewed on the Colbert Report, or other big-huge-friggin' deal tomorrow, what would you do today?" Often, people say, "I'll eat well, build something, hug my family, build something, help someone, build more, chat with a friend, take a walk, build more, play a game, go to bed early" So, if that's what you do to bring your BEST tomorrow, then what would you do if you wanted to bring your BEST EVERY day?
That tends to drive home the message that work-life balance isn't just helping your life, it's truly what matters to helping your work too.
Corollary: If you're overstressed, you aren't helping your work. Often, overstressed people at startups will add much more friction in the small team, hurting efficiency as arguments & disrespect poisons the day's actions. Not to mention the zombie-brain mistakes in execution when you're not taking proper care of yourself.
Totally agree, you have to keep some energy in reserve to handle the unexpected.
To go further, if you want to do more than just handle the unexpected (which is kind of like putting out a fire) you will need to bring wisdom to the situation.
Developing wisdom requires an even greater reserve of energy _and_ some downtime to reflect.
Aren't we done yet with the rhetoric of "making the world a better place"/"improving people's lives"? I can't help but think about HBO's Silicon Valley every time I read this kind of thing...
This guy is the CEO. So, by definition, this is a management problem. Dwolla has some money now; they can hire people. This guy needs to learn how to build a staff and delegate. He's only done startups, and hasn't worked in a long-established company where they have this figured out.
Some founders have trouble letting go of control. They want to do it all themselves. That doesn't scale.
Saying, "they can just hire people" is quite flippant. No matter how many people a CEO hires there is always more that they can do. Using a topic he discussed the f.ounders event... he cannot hire someone to go to it -- that event is exclusively for founders. By not attending he's missing out on a BD opportunity. Could he have hired someone to cover the BoFA or other meetings? Maybe? Maybe not -- would BoFA take the meeting with the brand new BD team member? Would that member be as effective? "Luck" is preparation meeting opportunity and as you're rapidly scaling any business scaling a team that is prepared and ready to take on the opportunities in front of you is as hard or harder than any technology scaling problem the business will face.
I do think that there's a number of things the CEO shouldn't be doing though. Who was it, Dan Kennedy or someone put it quite aptly "Your job as a CEO is to make sure money keeps coming. Not making sure the printer works or whether the office is clean or any number of things that don't relate to your main goal". Going to a f.ounders event might be part of that, or overhauling the sales funnel or making sure that the next version of the product just kicks ass. Cleaning your own office proably isn't.
Exactly. My parents have been running a company since they were both in their twenties. Starting in a country where literally no one has heard of funding or investment(early years after communism fell), they have started with nearly nothing. For the past 20 years they have been spending every second of their time at work, well into their forties. They kept growing, hiring more people(now almost 200), opening more shops, and they just couldn't manage, there's only so many places you could be in at once. Until in the last few years they hired a couple managers to take the load off their backs. Now they only need to visit our offices a couple times a week, are a lot more relaxed than they were some time ago. But my point is - they didn't arrive at this conclusion that they need managers by themselves. They always thought that if they spent 5 minutes left at the office the whole thing would fall apart. Someone else told them that they will burn our completely if they don't start hiring other people to do their work - and it worked. There's no point in having money if you never have time to spend it.
> There's no point in having money if you never have time to spend it.
Moreover, the only point of money is to spend it. They should focus on enjoyment now. They'll be playing catch up with other people who've been working to live through their forties. Ideally they'd sell the company if they wouldn't have to work again, so it's not a distraction.
I just re-booked my flight to get home from Vegas (where Ben just was) a day earlier as well. My team was super confused about this - but y'all, sometimes you just need to go home and sometimes you just need to be alone.
I just re-booked my flight to get home from Vegas (where Ben just was) a day earlier as well. My team was super confused about this - but y'all, sometimes you just need to go home and sometimes you just need to be alone.
It's pretty standard to take a break after a long period of hard work. Especially if it starts to feel like burnout.
I'll probably write an enlightening blog post one day about how sometimes you have to take a nap during the day, especially if you feel sleepy. I'll encapsulate it into a life lesson: Don't lie to yourself, you are sleepy so just take that nap.
If you‘re doing something for money so that you can live your life the way you want later, that doesn‘t work because it takes time to learn to live your life the way you want. Typically it takes a lifetime to do that, so you must start early: you must start now if you wish to make it. Otherwise you‘ll end up with a lot of cash and no idea of what kind of life makes you fulfilled.
If you‘re doing something to make a difference – or to make the world a better place – then if you feel like you‘re running out of time then you‘re probably doing it wrong. That sort of goals are rarely if ever such undertakings that are constrained by time. Paradoxically, life is short yet there‘s always plenty of time so as to not have to hurry things. If you work madly for a few years what is it that you think you‘ll win from it if you compare doing that thing you can‘t not do for decades? Or maybe you weren‘t doing a thing you can‘t not do in the first place?
Rush is a sign that you have grown an inflated sense of importance. Nothing is that important, not even the important things.
If you‘re building a company, you have all the time to grow the business. Some families have been doing that for centuries, many individuals for decades. If you have a really great idea, take the time to work on it. If you‘re lucky, someone else does the same thing and finishes faster than you which means you don‘t have to do it at all! You can just enjoy the benefits of the addition of widget X or feature Y in the pool of things tangible in our lives. Maybe the idea wasn‘t that unique after all. But some ideas are and thosee you can work on for years. For many things in life, building them slower makes them last longer. Even a good relationship or a family tree.
For these reasons, I consider it a better approach to weave the things you can‘t not do and your life together. This removes a divide: life goes on at its own pace and along comes your calling but they‘re not in conflict. There‘s no contrast between work and family, or business and private life because everything is scattered around in the timeline of your life in small pieces. There‘s always some work but there‘s always home and family too. Neither is more important than the other and none of the areas can continuously hog a big chunk of your focus.
Daddy must work now, daddy has to write an important email because those people need daddy‘s opinion.
I can‘t have the meeting today, I need to cook dinner and water the garden with my daughter.
For most people a vanishingly small amount of life is now. Most of it has either already happened, or more importantly is still to come.
I agree that there's a need to balance the now and planning for the future, and an awful lot of start ups seem, at least to me, to get the balance badly wrong.
But there are often sacrifices you need to do now to gain far bigger rewards in the future. Whether that's resisting that dessert sat in front of you because you want to be 50lbs lighter, saving money now so that you don't starve in retirement, or sometimes trading off time with the family for time spent working so that you've still got a job or a company in 5 years time.
It is, but acting as if the current "now" is the only thing that matters leads to very short term thinking, which often ends up with bad long term consequences.
There is a balance to everything. Sometimes the balance is in the opposite direction from your assumptions.
If I've learned anything, it's that the really important things you're talking about—those get done. They have my focus for most of every day, and I care deeply about them. I don't let them hit the floor.
The things that are missed are the ones I put out of mind to do that; that are broader than my current focus, more long-term, and especially, the things that are more human and soft. The long-range planning, the investment in systems to make my work more effective and less of a hamster-wheel, and the investment of time in life itself and the things that make me feel like myself, and make me truly inspired and motivated to to better work with the time I have.
It is these things that I forget as I'm trying to work harder and "do the right thing" for my future and my company's future. Ironically, the very things that would help its success most are the ones that fly out the window as soon as the going gets tough. That's why keeping this balance is so incredibly difficult, and incredibly important.
Your company needs a human, not a machine. It needs someone who is sane and effective every day, consistently, without fail. And if you're leading a group, multiply that importance by the number of people in it, because they will all be affected by your imbalance more than you will.
This is one of the kernels of Zen, by the way. The harder you try to hit the target, the further away your arrow lands. Success is not all about pure effort.
My hypothesis about your anecdotal examples is that they were probably missing something else. There are so many things. Or, their lack of investment in their company was not, in fact, balance, but simply lack of care or attention. They are not the same.
> If I've learned anything, it's that the really important things you're talking about—those get done.
And if I've learned anything by looking at obesity, people stuck in an ever downward spiral of payday loans, people who never saved for their pensions etc, they frequently don't.
> Ironically, the very things that would help its success most are the ones that fly out the window as soon as the going gets tough.
Indeed. That's a great example of companies living for the now. "Who cares about whether my employee will be off with stress in a month's time? That's the future and I'll let future me worry about that. I need this bit of work out now."
Like I say, and I think you're agreeing, it's about balance. What it's not about (which is what I was challenging) is always living for the now.
Exactly, I don't think I'm disagreeing with anything. Balance is about both sides of the equation. I do think you came on a bit to one side however, and it's important to have both recognized.
To the examples you listed, I'd say it is extremely important to look at systems and their effects on individual behavior. There's a reason those problems are epidemic and not just outliers. The same goes for management and poor work/life balance: people don't make these types of decisions in absence of influence, and as leaders we have the ability and responsibility to understand that influence.
This is the sort of sentimentality that has no place in modern capitalism.
Why would you need to cook dinner or water a garden (who even has a garden) or even have children in the first place? People have been doing that for thousands of years. If you want to scratch dirt you can move to Kansas and be a dirt farmer. Plenty of time with your kids with that career track.
If you're building a company, you have almost no time to do anything. Building a company is a very difficult task that very few people can successfully execute, and even fewer can successfully execute in the limit. It's just intrinsically hard.
In comparison, cooking dinner or putting the hose on some lettuce or some anemic tomato plants is easy as balls. They pay people pennies an hour to do those things for you. You can just pay them to do them, and do interesting, hard things yourself.
Personally, I think preferring easy things to hard things is a sign of weakness. Doing hard things is fulfilling. Cash is incidental, but it is a very good metric of how hard something is. If you are not making very much money, you aren't doing things that are very hard.
Life is, truly, very short. You can spend it doing hard things and, if you die, know that you were able to go further and faster and better than all the people around you, that you've won, or you can die knowing that you did the same boring things people did since they were barely past apes.
Hey, I applaud you for your mindset for its purity and clarity. I think it's a bit shortsighted myself, but I've found the world a more complex place than I expected when I was younger (I'm in my 30s), and I think it's important to realize that everyone has different priorities.
I agree with the parent of this comment that it takes a life to learn how to live. If you want to live the life of a founder, live that life. I have found great joy in different aspects of life.
I think some people (you, obviously) are motivated by difficult tasks. Some are motivated by other kinds of difficult tasks (even ones that have been done for 1000s of years, like farming--a very difficult task, trust me!). Some people are motivated by learning, some by activism, etc, etc.
> I've found the world a more complex place than I expected when I was younger (I'm in my 30s),
Amen, I'm 34 and for the first time in my life when exposed to unexpected complexity from life I don't retreat back into a set of circumstances that allow me to control the situation (i.e. throw myself into work and minimise all distractions).
I had a fairly horrible (if not unusual) upbringing so I fear messy complex life situations, I deliberately live a Spartan existence (I don't drink, smoke, do drugs or socialise that much (outside the local developer meet up and odd cycle club event)) but I'm working at it, reducing life to a problem simplified enough to be solved is one coping strategy but as I'm starting to realise there are others, my business partner is a Buddhist and while I'm not in the slightest religious I find much of the foundation interesting particulary acceptance and mindfulness.
24 year old me would have never even stopped to question what he was doing, 10 years can make a hell of a difference.
I agree entirely! I look back at my 20s--I had a ton of fun and a lot of experiences, and (cliche alert) "I wouldn't trade it for the world", but man was I dumb!
Life is truly very short, I think everybody's going to agree on that. You can spend your limited time turning it into a competition where you look down on "dirt farmers" for the weakness inherent in them that leads them to make food which allows you to survive, or you can figure that some people aren't worth competing with and find things that make you happy.
Congratulations; you're probably going to go "further and faster and better" than I am. But I've got a job I love, I'm early in my career, I'm married to a woman I'm crazy in love with, and every evening I'm happy to fall asleep, every morning I'm excited to start my day. It's hard for me to see how I could be doing much better than that. Hopefully your categorical victory over me will give you some time to take a break, you sound like you need it.
Work smart, not hard. Cash is a metric of how valuable something is to the purchaser, and not how hard it is for the master to perform, but for the purchaser to perform from scratch. Working hard, without balance, is an obsessive-compulsive behavior, so that you needn't define yourself and figure out how to live your life. The parent of your comment is spot on.
The choice to have kids in the first place is a purely individual choice. For some, it may be incredibly important. For others, I think it's perfectly acceptable to opt out of the whole thing.
Once you've had the kids, however, I'd suggest that most startups (perhaps not absolutely all) are objectively less important than making sure your kids grow up to be decent, empathetic, constructive members of society – for whatever definition of society you choose. It may be tough for your kid to grow up to change everyone's world, but it's really easy to let one grow up to destroy someone's world, and preventing that is the job you took on when you decided to take the step of having a child that may one day interact with mine.
>>Building a company is a very difficult task that very few people can successfully execute, and even fewer can successfully execute in the limit. It's just intrinsically hard.
Please do not act as if 100% of the things you do on a daily basis are "hard" things. You're commenting on HN, so I know you are not 100% tapped on the hard things.
I believe that the author chose to use the example of cooking as a way to do a relaxing (easy) thing that doesn't need a whole lot of brain power.
>> Life is, truly, very short. You can spend it doing hard things and, if you die, know that you were able to go further and faster and better than all the people around you, that you've won, or you can die knowing that you did the same boring things people did since they were barely past apes.
Yes, life is truly, very short. And in both cases, when all the people who knew you themselves die, you'll be completely forgotten. So you can spend life being happy or you can spend it being miserable. And when you die, it won't matter either way.
You don't get to say "haha, I won". There is no past tense to death. You're going to die and you're going to cease to be. That's it.
And nobody will thank you for the things you do. Even if--in the exceedingly rare case somewhere did--you won't know it.
And who knows, maybe you're all a figment of my imagination and the universe itself ceases to exist around me when I die. What then about all my achievements? What will I do with my degree and my money and my wife and my car and my house and my whatever when the universe ceases to exist?
NOTHING. That's the point. Nothing.
You think you are so big, but you are so small. You are just as small as the rest of us. And there is nothing you can do about it.
>Cash is incidental, but it is a very good metric of how hard something is. If you are not making very much money, you aren't doing things that are very hard.
This is the just world fallacy. How much people earn isn't analogous to how hard they work, how important their work is or how challenging. It's a product of supply and demand.
It sounds like you're just a simpler person than most, who can be fulfilled by one thing: [your definition of] success. That may actually be pleasant. But a lot of people are not that simple.
And if you say that farming and parenting are easy, then we know two things about you:
(1) You call the things that you value "hard."
(2) You've never farmed or raised a child.
You also clearly believe in an afterlife ("if you die, [you can] know..."); and you believe in one that looks something like a throne from which you can gaze down on your own and others' accomplishments. These two ideas may well have some truth to them, but neither are guaranteed.
Frankly, it's strange to me that in a society in which we are constantly exposed to the memoirs, memories, junkets, and essays of the roundly accomplished, we still think they are any happier than anyone else. Surely some must be or must have been, but I don't know of any confessors. I have heard plenty admit to dissatisfaction, to put it mildly. I hope you don't run into the same trap that many do.
The only thing I agree with you on is that I, too, am a misanthrope in even some of my best hours. I just don't think any more highly of myself for the fact.
Still, I would be proud to have made a better world for the people I do care about--and would even be happy with this George Eliot line for an epitaph, although the pronouns don't map quite right:
"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
Yeah, it is. And you can't take your money with you. Your startup might be the next Facebook. It also might fail in six weeks time leaving you with nothing.
The fact that you define life success in terms of whether you won against other people guarantees one thing: you will lose. There will always be someone above you that you can stress and obsess over beating. Or, you can decide you want none of it and find success on your own terms.
I echo the other poster that described your mentality as "simple". In other situations I'd consider that a little too insulting to say, but you've already described people who focus on anything other than "hard" things as "weak". Truly complex people get fulfillment from a variety of sources. Cooking, gardening, spending time with a loved one, whatever. Success is not the only metric for most of us.
This is just such a sad perspective. The trajectory of your life, which will be tragic, is surely obvious to everyone around you except yourself. This is entirely a delusion you have chosen to believe.
"know that you were able to go further and faster and better than all the people around you, that you've won"
What exactly has been won here? There have probably been ultra-driven people for as long as people have been cooking or gardening or "scratching dirt." Being ultra-driven and ambitious is probably as boring and quotidian as any of those other things.
All of us die, it is usually unremarkable, and after a while no one remembers. You're optimizing so that you spend most of your life doing the things that seems most meaningful to you. Those people who are having children and watering gardens are probably doing the same. Each type of person can do that without condescending to the other type of person.
I think life is actually more about being happy. If that dirt scratcher is happier than the person killing themselves to make some random startup a success, then I think the dirt scratcher has won. You see, when you die you don't "know that you were able to..." You don't know anything, because you are dead. All you have is how you feel right now, because life could end at any moment and you won't know it at all, you'll just be dead and gone and the only thing that will have mattered to you is how you felt while you were alive.
Startups thinking they are "going to make peoples lives better" or "make the world a better place"... no you're really not. At least not very much. The vast vast majority of people in the world will never ever know about you. It's even quite easy to make the argument that services like Google, Facebook, and Twitter that people have heard of have create at least as many if not more problems than they've solved. Don't get too conceited.
I wish I had the balls to write this post. Mine would certainly not be so honest and raw. It's also sad that it comes to this. I get home for dinner but work till midnight. I'm in town for birthdays but leave at 6am the next morning. I still talk to my very best friends but no one else. I hope to heaven that the startup never ruins my marriage but it's not impossible to see it could happen.
Maybe these "compromises" mean I will never quite get to that level - but regardless I'm not willing to do compromise them. At any expense.
> I hope to heaven that the startup never ruins my marriage
That's probably already happening, you're just not being told/aware of it yet. If you're only in town for birthdays and leave at 6 am the next morning and wreck your social life you're well underway. Been there, done that so take it from me as an experience to avoid.
Thank you for the concern. This is not happening, I'm just saying that as a founder I can understand how people's obsession can go overboard and ruin important stuff. Clay Christensen's "How to Measure Your Life" is the best book on this subject and is a guiding principle for me. If my wife said "You need to quit your startup it's ruining us" I would do it in a second. As much as I love what I do, it's not even close to the plane and importance of my family.
> "I hope to heaven that the startup never ruins my marriage but it's not impossible to see it could happen"
I know it's (way) easier said than done, but I would suggets to stop hoping and start doing. I have never been married nor in a big commitment relationship, but I would assume than when you start thinking that a bad thing could happen, it's probably happening right now, or soon.
Good luck anyway, hope everything work out for you.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] thread"I'm not working even close to that level."
In a way, it's a glimpse into the reality required to do Great Things. Followed by the painful self-awareness that you're nowhere close.
If you're passionate about your job, you're likely to work hard. But there's a line between "working hard", and overworking. Beyond a certain point, more hours may (or may not) mean more things done, but almost certainly doesn't mean more of the right things done.
If that's true, it should be possible to make a list of companies that have been built without the founders working very hard (or rather, extremely long hours). What are some companies that could go onto such a list?
As a filter, let's use criteria "The founders got rich enough not to have to work anymore, or the company went public," since that's generally why people start startups.
EDIT: I've updated the question to ask specifically for instances of companies that have IPO'd or been acquired without the founders working extremely long hours, and also to clarify that I'm asking about the founders' working hours, not the employees. Thanks, enjo.
We'd have the occasional long night, but there weren't many even 60 hour weeks being put in.
If something is menial, doesn't require much mental process. Than its okay to keep going but if its something new which require even small amount of mental effort than working super hard is not going to get you anywhere.
I also sometimes work late, because I don't want the context switch that will happen if I leave the task in half completed state right now so I want to take it to logical conclusion where it would easy to pickup next day (in most cases I am excited to see the end product of task).
As with everything in life there is fine line between working hard vs working yourself to death and nobody else can decide this line for you.
If so, a dearth of examples of successful startups by founders lacking a chronic death-march work ethic doesn't speak at all to whether burnout is a requirement for success.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hawkins
I remember hearing him lecture where he said he always tried to be home by 5:30 to have dinner with his family.
Grid, Palm, Numenta, Handspring, are all great successes.
If people were more worried about results than appearances, they would not do this though as working that much leads to stupid mistakes and burn-out.
It might make sense if you are just trying to cash out and want to put on a good show for investors by sleeping under your desk, though I would think this only impresses stupid investors.
Is instructive to see the environments where this goes the other way.
In Oxford and Cambridge Universities there is the concept of the 'Grey Man'.
These are the people who are seen to work hard and it used to be considered a terrible affliction and an indication of mediocre talents.
Consider this quote from Stephen Hawking
“The prevailing attitude at Oxford at that time was very anti-work. You were supposed to either be brilliant without effort or accept your limitations and get a fourth-class degree. To work hard to get a better class of degree was the mark of a ‘grey man’, the worst epithet in the Oxford vocabulary.”
Hawking calculated that he worked on average for about an hour a day as an undergraduate physicist: “We affected an air of complete boredom and the feeling that nothing was worth making an effort for.”
from here - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e59f5792-1a23-11e3-b3da-00144feab7...
I look at these guys pushing themselves beyond the point of physical, mental and emotion exhaustion, and I just wonder how they do it. I wonder what drives them go on.
Jamie Zawinski has a great great blog post about this [2], which I'll quote part of:
> He's trying to make the point that the only path to success in the software industry is to work insane hours, sleep under your desk, and give up your one and only youth, and if you don't do that, you're a pussy. He's using my words to try and back up that thesis. I hate this, because it's not true, and it's disingenuous.
I'm not saying the OP is trying to sell this lie too. He is posting about how he is tired and wants to go home and relax. However, the life he describes is very much in the vein of Jamie's blog post. This lifestyle is not required to succeed, and it may in fact be quite counter-productive (as this blog post is attesting to). If your life isn't like this and you aren't working this hard it really isn't saying anything about how likely to succeed you are.
1: Though I don't know exactly what "great things" is... Making a lot of money? Going to Mars? Getting on the cover of Forbes magazine? Some of these require more effort than others.
2: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-se...
>But the people who made 100x as much as the engineers did? I can tell you for a fact that none of them slept under their desk.
There are lots of people who work 80 hours a week and their startup is garbage. But there are very few (if any at all) people who got their startup off the ground with 50 hours of work per week. Working long hours is necessary but not sufficient. (There are lots of people who claim it isn't necessary, but none of them actually had a successful startup)
Awesome , gutsy article though.
I don't have a wife or a puppy, but I shouldn't have allowed this to happen. I was hired to work for a set salary under the assumption of a 40-hour work-week - although I am naturally obsessive so I knew that wouldn't actually last. But I didn't expect my boss to say things like, "If we don't have a working build by 3pm tomorrow, we're all fired," (which turned out to be false, actually).
Pacing is important, and I think it would be interesting to do a startup where pacing is actively encouraged. I think this might be possible at a startup with strong IP protection, good funding, and leadership that sets realistic goals and trusts it's people to be motivated to get it done. It may mean that the public has to wait a bit longer before having a cool new thing available to them, but it also means that the thing will have been constructed by fresh, happy minds.
There is a moral imperative to not buy goods made in sweatshops. There is also a moral imperative to not use software produced under inhumane conditions. Congratulations on discovering this for yourself - and I hope you encourage your coworkers to be humane to each other and themselves as well.
This is a bothersome and worrisome comment that probably has been repeated (in some variation) too often. How is this the fault of the developer(s)?
I appreciate that founders need to fulfill their promises, especially when having the backing of investors, but these type of statements seem to indicate a failure in communication and planning (more than execution).
This happens frequently enough that by now it should be a thing that people are 'on to'. If you're being tempted with equity then insist on drawing it up in writing with a solid vesting schedule and don't work a day past the first vesting point without your stock.
All these conferences and these meetings are rarely world changing. They hold potential opportunities and the start of relationships, but we never know if those opportunities would have come to us through cheaper, more effective means.
Travel bothers me so much because it feels incredibly suboptimal, like I'm working harder not smarter.
There are so many different angles to startup burnout, that sometimes it seems like we're playing a really rough game like American football, only instead of head and spine injuries we've got mental health problems and repetitive stress disorders.
Early in a startup the big enemy is yourself and poverty. Try to get yourself to finish that feature; to push the product over the line. To persevere after the launch basically goes unnoticed. The burnout is emotional because it's rooted in self doubt. Once a startup starts getting traction a different type of mental stress sets in: a fear of squandering an opportunity. All the late nights are rooted in the fear that your startup has had some luck and some traction, and maybe if you don't push so hard it will become another Excite. Used, but left to the wayside while a better contender came in.
George Bernard Shaw said: "I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it."
1. http://www.inc.com/magazine/201307/brad-feld/many-entreprene...
2. http://www.feld.com/archives/tag/depression
http://www.feld.com/archives/2014/10/helps-depressed.html
This may be veering off-topic, but reading the suggestions submitted by the reader in that post made me wonder some people (many, in fact) have to actively work so hard to hold off depression. Something is going wrong (organically, culturally, or both) that depression is the default state for so many.
Culturally, I think our relationship with work is certainly part of it. And, some personalities (e.g. driven or obsessive) may just be more susceptible.
I'm not convinced that this is any different from the "natural state" of humans (which granted is not completely well-defined). I do not see any reason to expect people to be generally happy. While it's overly reductionist to think of evolution in terms of individual "fitness", it is not clear to me that a general trend of being unhappy (which in slightly more outlying cases becomes depression) decreases fitness. The only obvious effect I can see is suicide, but that's pretty rare statistically speaking, and we have strong self-preservation instincts independent of happiness that are pretty hard to override. Being reliably happy on the other hand is probably ruinous to fitness--what motivation would I have to do anything?
Depression is a mental health issue. Unhealthiness is not a natural state.
You are also profoundly misguided in your understanding that depression is the opposite of happiness. Most of your argument seems to rest on that confusion.
Well, it seems that you said what you meant to say, because your clarification still leans pretty heavily on the notion of happiness vs. depression.
>I'm not arguing that depression is "naturally" common. Only that reliable happiness is perhaps not naturally common.
Here's the problem. Statements about "reliable" or "unreliable" happiness in response to a discussion about depression reduce depression to, essentially, a period of unhappiness. Your suggestion is that consistent happiness may not be naturally common. The corollary (in this context) is that the intermittent periods of unhappiness represent depression.
So, I'm really not sure how the response that you're repeating here about "reliable happiness" can be construed than anything other than an erroneous framing of what depression is.
This is not to pick nits, but I think it's a common misconception that reduces depression to a mental state or emotion on par with "happiness" or "sadness". That characterization does a disservice to sufferers, even if unintentional.
Depression is an ugly, dark beast that attaches itself to the depressed person and refuses to let go. In situations that should generate "happiness", the depressed person is often unable to feel it. Depression can be wholly orthogonal to "regular" emotions.
>I'm not arguing that depression is the opposite of happiness; however, I do not think it's unreasonable that if people are overall less happy, this will increase the incidence of depression.
None of what you say contradicts this. You point out
> Depression can be wholly orthogonal to "regular" emotions.
which is certainly true, but it also can be quite parallel to them. In my experience, my worst episodes of depression were usually triggered by periods of profound unhappiness, even if during these episodes the experience is not the same as being continuously unhappy.
(Characterizing depression as coming in "episodes" is also misleading, as it is generally ever-present to some extent; but any characterization less than several pages long is misleading. I'd appreciate the benefit of the doubt that I understand the other issues and subtleties in play even if I do not discuss them.)
>None of what you say contradicts this.
It actually does in that I've effectively stated that the sentence has no meaning in this context.
Replying further would only belabor the point and I don't want to be antagonistic. I'll just chalk it up to miscommunication. Thanks for the discussion.
Most startups aren't, despite the fact that lots of the folks there are in effectively the same personal position and feeling the exact same thing - in addition to the added pressure of not feeling like they measure up to stories like this one because their quarter didn't go nearly as well. I really feel for those people, and I wish they felt more freedom to be honest and public about these kinds of feelings.
Rather tangentially - I have a one and a half year old daughter who recently turned a question we posed her ("Woah, kiddo. Are you freaking out!?") on it's head. Now sometimes when she gets wound up she goes full-meta and runs back and forth in the kitchen waving her hands in the air yelling "freaking out!", in self-parody.
That reminds me, a little bit, of our startup-culture's relationship to overwork... and don't get me wrong, I don't think articles like this are the ridiculous self-parody, I think they're the really troubling and all-too-real consequence.
Put simply I think we need to do a little more wiggling our toes in the carpet and chilling the fuck out. The world's not suffering from a shortage of first-world martyrs.
Take a breath, go home, do great work tomorrow, and for God's sake appreciate the fact that you're in the hilariously small fraction of people who get to blog about the pains of working too hard by choice.
I started having the notion of starting my own company specifically because I was sick of being treated like nothing more than an input variable on some MBAs Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Does it make any sort of sense to work myself to death, in that same vein, in my own endeavours? I would have only traded one tyrant whom I could escape for one I'd be stuck with forever: myself.
Agreed.
> Most startups aren't, despite the fact that lots of the folks there are in effectively the same personal position and feeling the exact same thing - in addition to the added pressure of not feeling like they measure up to stories like this one because their quarter didn't go nearly as well. I really feel for those people, and I wish they felt more freedom to be honest and public about these kinds of feelings.
...and let's also not forget all the folks who are barely making ends meet at their existing jobs, putting in 60+ hour work weeks for a measly salary that's been stagnate for years or all the folks needing to work an extra job or two just to survive.
It's hard to fairly cover every situation the OP is enjoying more privilege than, because frankly there's an ocean of them.
Because if his startup was doing bad and he says what he said, he will be ridiculed and/or pitied for being a loser.
This made me think: How would a similar blog post from one of the albañiles (construction worker) be? Earning 13 bucks a day doing hard physical work and then having to do another job to earn a little more.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bwQO1V7...
The first startup I joined was run by a guy who had not, to my knowledge, ever been more than a line manager (directly managing people who did things, versus managing people who managed people to did things) He had a really really hard time working with the indirection, unable to feel comfortable that things were "in control" unless he went and talked to the actual people doing the work himself. As the company got bigger that became a bigger and bigger issue for him. He didn't scale, and I could tell that there would come a time when he would be 110% subscribed with tasks that he couldn't figure out how to delegate.
The message about getting home though is really really important. Too many people are sleeping at work because they have no home to go home to any more. If you can set a goal for 'quality hours with the family per week' and when that is in jeopardy due to work commitments restructure work to reduce its impact.
I've done startups. At the end I got better at what I was doing but I wasn't ultimately proud of the work I did. The startup even succeeded (I helped other people get rich, I just made a living). Many startups don't even do that.
Haven't seen my folks in years. Spouse dumped me because I practically didn't exist outside of work. Absolutely no hobbies or traveling in years. No guarantee the company will be anything but a massive drop in my financial history. You're constantly running out of money, so you're cutting every unnecessary expense, and you're living on scraps for years, knowing that you could be making 10x that much in the workforce. You can't quit though because so many people look up to you for direction, they need you to be there and lead them, to be certain of where you're going. The stress can be so high you just want to roll up in fetal in a corner and disappear. You understand why so many founders end their lives.
The experiences however and the connections are priceless. The feeling of playing the game on your terms is liberating and the hope of the upside is exhilarating, but I still wish the price wasn't so high. The amount of personal growth is astounding: once you go through the above, everything else feels like easy mode. You have to develop resilience, charisma, diplomacy, discipline and so many other traits or you will sink fast.
In hindsight, I don't know if I'd do anything differently. When you're this deep, you try not to dwell on hypotheticals.
I remember many years ago when I was sold to the startup lifestyle by the sexiness of the message, but the dozens of PG essays and stories of success and freedom. Nowadays I caution people to truly dig deep and understand if this is worth it to them, ask them if they're ready to sacrifice everything for likely nothing at all. Ultimately we're slaves of power law and similar to Hollywood talent in our outcomes: a very small fraction of us is going to becomes gods through either luck or huge sacrifice, and 99.9% of us will be waiting tables for the rest of our lives, or decide to do something else.
You say you have developed these incredible skills, and perhaps you have. What will they do for you... what is your endgame? Perhaps your next startup will be massive success and you will be rich, but will you be happy with no relationships? Who will be happy for your success that is not also making money from it?
You have been conned into playing a game you cannot win at the cost of your humanity. Run away now.
I don't think that the experience of not seeing or having a family and not having a life (traveling or hobbies) is a priceless experience!!!
I think we buy into the story that it has to be so difficult, but it doesn't.
All this talk of sacrifice and being gods tells me you need to step outside your bubble. You are trying to start a company, not solve World hunger.
I'm 3 months out of my last CEO role and depressed, despite being depressed in my CEO role. Now I'm depressed because I'm bored. I don't know what happiness is anymore. It turns out that happiness is chasing the dream, not the dream itself. I've lost sight of it. I don't remember what it is or if it even existed.
It's like what Alan Watts said: it's not the end of the journey, it is the journey. Remember that and try to enjoy it while it lasts.
1) In the smart long-term play, family & few close friends are most important. Everything else (including your startup) is trivial.
2) Even if you value your startup at 100% value (over family/friends/health/life), you're incredibly short-sited and killing your own startup baby if you don't have some balance in your life. Startup life is NOT a sprint. It's a marathon. To give the BEST to your startup, you need to bring your BEST every day.
Phrased another way, I often ask, "Let's say you're going to be interviewed on the Colbert Report, or other big-huge-friggin' deal tomorrow, what would you do today?" Often, people say, "I'll eat well, build something, hug my family, build something, help someone, build more, chat with a friend, take a walk, build more, play a game, go to bed early" So, if that's what you do to bring your BEST tomorrow, then what would you do if you wanted to bring your BEST EVERY day?
That tends to drive home the message that work-life balance isn't just helping your life, it's truly what matters to helping your work too.
Corollary: If you're overstressed, you aren't helping your work. Often, overstressed people at startups will add much more friction in the small team, hurting efficiency as arguments & disrespect poisons the day's actions. Not to mention the zombie-brain mistakes in execution when you're not taking proper care of yourself.
To go further, if you want to do more than just handle the unexpected (which is kind of like putting out a fire) you will need to bring wisdom to the situation.
Developing wisdom requires an even greater reserve of energy _and_ some downtime to reflect.
Some founders have trouble letting go of control. They want to do it all themselves. That doesn't scale.
Moreover, the only point of money is to spend it. They should focus on enjoyment now. They'll be playing catch up with other people who've been working to live through their forties. Ideally they'd sell the company if they wouldn't have to work again, so it's not a distraction.
I'll probably write an enlightening blog post one day about how sometimes you have to take a nap during the day, especially if you feel sleepy. I'll encapsulate it into a life lesson: Don't lie to yourself, you are sleepy so just take that nap.
If you‘re doing something for money so that you can live your life the way you want later, that doesn‘t work because it takes time to learn to live your life the way you want. Typically it takes a lifetime to do that, so you must start early: you must start now if you wish to make it. Otherwise you‘ll end up with a lot of cash and no idea of what kind of life makes you fulfilled.
If you‘re doing something to make a difference – or to make the world a better place – then if you feel like you‘re running out of time then you‘re probably doing it wrong. That sort of goals are rarely if ever such undertakings that are constrained by time. Paradoxically, life is short yet there‘s always plenty of time so as to not have to hurry things. If you work madly for a few years what is it that you think you‘ll win from it if you compare doing that thing you can‘t not do for decades? Or maybe you weren‘t doing a thing you can‘t not do in the first place?
Rush is a sign that you have grown an inflated sense of importance. Nothing is that important, not even the important things.
If you‘re building a company, you have all the time to grow the business. Some families have been doing that for centuries, many individuals for decades. If you have a really great idea, take the time to work on it. If you‘re lucky, someone else does the same thing and finishes faster than you which means you don‘t have to do it at all! You can just enjoy the benefits of the addition of widget X or feature Y in the pool of things tangible in our lives. Maybe the idea wasn‘t that unique after all. But some ideas are and thosee you can work on for years. For many things in life, building them slower makes them last longer. Even a good relationship or a family tree.
For these reasons, I consider it a better approach to weave the things you can‘t not do and your life together. This removes a divide: life goes on at its own pace and along comes your calling but they‘re not in conflict. There‘s no contrast between work and family, or business and private life because everything is scattered around in the timeline of your life in small pieces. There‘s always some work but there‘s always home and family too. Neither is more important than the other and none of the areas can continuously hog a big chunk of your focus.
Daddy must work now, daddy has to write an important email because those people need daddy‘s opinion.
I can‘t have the meeting today, I need to cook dinner and water the garden with my daughter.
I agree that there's a need to balance the now and planning for the future, and an awful lot of start ups seem, at least to me, to get the balance badly wrong.
But there are often sacrifices you need to do now to gain far bigger rewards in the future. Whether that's resisting that dessert sat in front of you because you want to be 50lbs lighter, saving money now so that you don't starve in retirement, or sometimes trading off time with the family for time spent working so that you've still got a job or a company in 5 years time.
"Now" is a "rolling window". Lost 'nows" also agrregate.
If I've learned anything, it's that the really important things you're talking about—those get done. They have my focus for most of every day, and I care deeply about them. I don't let them hit the floor.
The things that are missed are the ones I put out of mind to do that; that are broader than my current focus, more long-term, and especially, the things that are more human and soft. The long-range planning, the investment in systems to make my work more effective and less of a hamster-wheel, and the investment of time in life itself and the things that make me feel like myself, and make me truly inspired and motivated to to better work with the time I have.
It is these things that I forget as I'm trying to work harder and "do the right thing" for my future and my company's future. Ironically, the very things that would help its success most are the ones that fly out the window as soon as the going gets tough. That's why keeping this balance is so incredibly difficult, and incredibly important.
Your company needs a human, not a machine. It needs someone who is sane and effective every day, consistently, without fail. And if you're leading a group, multiply that importance by the number of people in it, because they will all be affected by your imbalance more than you will.
This is one of the kernels of Zen, by the way. The harder you try to hit the target, the further away your arrow lands. Success is not all about pure effort.
My hypothesis about your anecdotal examples is that they were probably missing something else. There are so many things. Or, their lack of investment in their company was not, in fact, balance, but simply lack of care or attention. They are not the same.
And if I've learned anything by looking at obesity, people stuck in an ever downward spiral of payday loans, people who never saved for their pensions etc, they frequently don't.
> Ironically, the very things that would help its success most are the ones that fly out the window as soon as the going gets tough.
Indeed. That's a great example of companies living for the now. "Who cares about whether my employee will be off with stress in a month's time? That's the future and I'll let future me worry about that. I need this bit of work out now."
Like I say, and I think you're agreeing, it's about balance. What it's not about (which is what I was challenging) is always living for the now.
To the examples you listed, I'd say it is extremely important to look at systems and their effects on individual behavior. There's a reason those problems are epidemic and not just outliers. The same goes for management and poor work/life balance: people don't make these types of decisions in absence of influence, and as leaders we have the ability and responsibility to understand that influence.
Why would you need to cook dinner or water a garden (who even has a garden) or even have children in the first place? People have been doing that for thousands of years. If you want to scratch dirt you can move to Kansas and be a dirt farmer. Plenty of time with your kids with that career track.
If you're building a company, you have almost no time to do anything. Building a company is a very difficult task that very few people can successfully execute, and even fewer can successfully execute in the limit. It's just intrinsically hard.
In comparison, cooking dinner or putting the hose on some lettuce or some anemic tomato plants is easy as balls. They pay people pennies an hour to do those things for you. You can just pay them to do them, and do interesting, hard things yourself.
Personally, I think preferring easy things to hard things is a sign of weakness. Doing hard things is fulfilling. Cash is incidental, but it is a very good metric of how hard something is. If you are not making very much money, you aren't doing things that are very hard.
Life is, truly, very short. You can spend it doing hard things and, if you die, know that you were able to go further and faster and better than all the people around you, that you've won, or you can die knowing that you did the same boring things people did since they were barely past apes.
I agree with the parent of this comment that it takes a life to learn how to live. If you want to live the life of a founder, live that life. I have found great joy in different aspects of life.
I think some people (you, obviously) are motivated by difficult tasks. Some are motivated by other kinds of difficult tasks (even ones that have been done for 1000s of years, like farming--a very difficult task, trust me!). Some people are motivated by learning, some by activism, etc, etc.
Amen, I'm 34 and for the first time in my life when exposed to unexpected complexity from life I don't retreat back into a set of circumstances that allow me to control the situation (i.e. throw myself into work and minimise all distractions).
I had a fairly horrible (if not unusual) upbringing so I fear messy complex life situations, I deliberately live a Spartan existence (I don't drink, smoke, do drugs or socialise that much (outside the local developer meet up and odd cycle club event)) but I'm working at it, reducing life to a problem simplified enough to be solved is one coping strategy but as I'm starting to realise there are others, my business partner is a Buddhist and while I'm not in the slightest religious I find much of the foundation interesting particulary acceptance and mindfulness.
24 year old me would have never even stopped to question what he was doing, 10 years can make a hell of a difference.
Life is truly very short, I think everybody's going to agree on that. You can spend your limited time turning it into a competition where you look down on "dirt farmers" for the weakness inherent in them that leads them to make food which allows you to survive, or you can figure that some people aren't worth competing with and find things that make you happy.
Congratulations; you're probably going to go "further and faster and better" than I am. But I've got a job I love, I'm early in my career, I'm married to a woman I'm crazy in love with, and every evening I'm happy to fall asleep, every morning I'm excited to start my day. It's hard for me to see how I could be doing much better than that. Hopefully your categorical victory over me will give you some time to take a break, you sound like you need it.
Once you've had the kids, however, I'd suggest that most startups (perhaps not absolutely all) are objectively less important than making sure your kids grow up to be decent, empathetic, constructive members of society – for whatever definition of society you choose. It may be tough for your kid to grow up to change everyone's world, but it's really easy to let one grow up to destroy someone's world, and preventing that is the job you took on when you decided to take the step of having a child that may one day interact with mine.
Please do not act as if 100% of the things you do on a daily basis are "hard" things. You're commenting on HN, so I know you are not 100% tapped on the hard things.
I believe that the author chose to use the example of cooking as a way to do a relaxing (easy) thing that doesn't need a whole lot of brain power.
Yes, life is truly, very short. And in both cases, when all the people who knew you themselves die, you'll be completely forgotten. So you can spend life being happy or you can spend it being miserable. And when you die, it won't matter either way.
You don't get to say "haha, I won". There is no past tense to death. You're going to die and you're going to cease to be. That's it.
And nobody will thank you for the things you do. Even if--in the exceedingly rare case somewhere did--you won't know it.
And who knows, maybe you're all a figment of my imagination and the universe itself ceases to exist around me when I die. What then about all my achievements? What will I do with my degree and my money and my wife and my car and my house and my whatever when the universe ceases to exist?
NOTHING. That's the point. Nothing.
You think you are so big, but you are so small. You are just as small as the rest of us. And there is nothing you can do about it.
This is the just world fallacy. How much people earn isn't analogous to how hard they work, how important their work is or how challenging. It's a product of supply and demand.
And if you say that farming and parenting are easy, then we know two things about you:
(1) You call the things that you value "hard." (2) You've never farmed or raised a child.
You also clearly believe in an afterlife ("if you die, [you can] know..."); and you believe in one that looks something like a throne from which you can gaze down on your own and others' accomplishments. These two ideas may well have some truth to them, but neither are guaranteed.
Frankly, it's strange to me that in a society in which we are constantly exposed to the memoirs, memories, junkets, and essays of the roundly accomplished, we still think they are any happier than anyone else. Surely some must be or must have been, but I don't know of any confessors. I have heard plenty admit to dissatisfaction, to put it mildly. I hope you don't run into the same trap that many do.
The only thing I agree with you on is that I, too, am a misanthrope in even some of my best hours. I just don't think any more highly of myself for the fact.
Still, I would be proud to have made a better world for the people I do care about--and would even be happy with this George Eliot line for an epitaph, although the pronouns don't map quite right:
"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
Yeah, it is. And you can't take your money with you. Your startup might be the next Facebook. It also might fail in six weeks time leaving you with nothing.
The fact that you define life success in terms of whether you won against other people guarantees one thing: you will lose. There will always be someone above you that you can stress and obsess over beating. Or, you can decide you want none of it and find success on your own terms.
I echo the other poster that described your mentality as "simple". In other situations I'd consider that a little too insulting to say, but you've already described people who focus on anything other than "hard" things as "weak". Truly complex people get fulfillment from a variety of sources. Cooking, gardening, spending time with a loved one, whatever. Success is not the only metric for most of us.
What exactly has been won here? There have probably been ultra-driven people for as long as people have been cooking or gardening or "scratching dirt." Being ultra-driven and ambitious is probably as boring and quotidian as any of those other things.
All of us die, it is usually unremarkable, and after a while no one remembers. You're optimizing so that you spend most of your life doing the things that seems most meaningful to you. Those people who are having children and watering gardens are probably doing the same. Each type of person can do that without condescending to the other type of person.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/
Maybe these "compromises" mean I will never quite get to that level - but regardless I'm not willing to do compromise them. At any expense.
That's probably already happening, you're just not being told/aware of it yet. If you're only in town for birthdays and leave at 6 am the next morning and wreck your social life you're well underway. Been there, done that so take it from me as an experience to avoid.
I know it's (way) easier said than done, but I would suggets to stop hoping and start doing. I have never been married nor in a big commitment relationship, but I would assume than when you start thinking that a bad thing could happen, it's probably happening right now, or soon.
Good luck anyway, hope everything work out for you.