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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.