Many successful people love what they do. So they work "insane" hours.
For better or worse, these people choose "work" (in quotes because it doesn't feel like work) over watching TV, taking vacations, and spending time with friends.
When outsiders observe people like this, outsiders come to the conclusion that said people are successful because of the long hours. When in fact, they're successful because they're obsessed with making it successful.
In other words, the takeaway should be "do something you love," rather than "work long hours."
FTA: "I recommend that you do what you love because you love doing it. If that means long hours, fantastic. If that means leaving the office by 6pm every day for your underwater basket-weaving class, also fantastic."
Being able to do, and get paid to do, something one loves is a luxury that very few people have. ("Do something you love" is actually quite impracticable as advice.) If you happen to love doing something remunerative, bully for you---but plenty of people have jobs they merely (if they're lucky!) like.
It's also highly questionable that people who are successful are successful because they're obsessed with making it successful. Obsessives and workaholics love to play it as if that's what turns the trick, but it's really just as silly as a sports team attributing its success to having "wanted it more". What, like the other guys didn't want it?
... following up to myself (why not?), it's also important, I think, to resist the fallacious inference from "X loves his job" to "X would be happy to work all hours". It really does not hold up, but it's distressingly common in conversations like this to hear the proviso "well of course if you love your job you'll work the long hours and that's fine", but one could well love one's job and have other interests one also considers worth pursuing. Nothing to excess! (Plus holding the fallacious inference to be sound contributes to its pernicious contrapositive: "if you don't want to work all hours, you must dislike it here".)
In the book "What I wish I knew when I was 20", the Author brings forth a similar point, stating that doing what you love as a standalone piece of advice isn't that helpful, but a widely held conception. What she advocates is to attempt to find the intersection of "what you love" and "what people are willing to pay you for".
From another point of view, Robert Greene tries to mount the horse from the other side, in his book "The 50th Law", where he brings forth that the mastery of any skill at a sufficient level will make you love that skill (kinda like Intellectual Stockholm Syndrome). So there are arguments from the other side as well.
If we are to follow Greene's train of thought, most work can be made enjoyable through an unhealthy dose of obsession.
On the question whether people are sucessful because they are obsessed, I personally think that it's a contributing factor. The existence of people that are obsessed but not sucessful seems to prove that obsession does not lead directly to sucess, but most people I consider sucessful posess some element of obession.
I actually tend to group people by obsession, for example Tim Feriss, Robert Greene, Neil Strauss, Cal Newport, Stephen Key,Perry Marshal etc. by their obsession for different kinds of Systems.
But you don't HAVE to. Look at the Buffer guys, especially Joel. He works like 2 hours a day on Buffer, but extraordinarily efficiently, and they were profitable and growing before going back in the red to grow more (I'm not actually sure they're back in the red, but the way they're hiring I think they are).
I wish more people would read this... the idea that engineers need to work crazy hours is both abusive and wrong.
We should be working less hours; as the mental capacity and focus required to do our jobs well is strictly necessary to do a good job.
Just because someone, somewhere, got rich working stupid hours doesn't mean you will-- if anything you probably won't and why would you want to? Your life just vanished; because you spent it working like a dog for nothing.
While I think DHH (of Rails fame) is often kind of a douche (I am too, so don't take too much offense)-- his, public, views on how to run an office and actually work a start up are vastly better and more realistic for the masses.
I wish more people would read this... the idea that engineers need to work crazy hours is both abusive and wrong.
This is true not just for engineers, but teachers, manufacturing workers, and number of people where the workforce size is suppressed and individuals are stretched to the limit for the benefit of the C suite and the shareholders.
One not actually unfortunate aspect of the preferability of sane to insane work hours is that a lot of aspects of corporate culture that are much esteemed in startup-land are really basically designed to get you to work insane hours, from undergrad-dorm-esque offices (hey, remember when we pulled all-nighters all the time and it was totally cool?), to employer provision of services since you wouldn't otherwise have time to run errands, to, most mind-bogglingly to me, employer provision of dinner. It really shocks me when I see a company drawing attention to how it provides free evening meals to its employees (or just to its engineering staff or whatever), because why the fuck would I be there at dinner time? And why are you all stretched so thin in the first place? (I mean, at my actual job, I am there at dinner time, on occasion. Which is less than ideal. But at least no one acts as if that's a great state of affairs.) And that doesn't get into the corrosive mindset according to which your job is supposed to be your primary leisure pursuit as well, because you love it so damn much.
I remember the time I pulled a punch of all nighters in undergrad. I weakened my immune system and contracted a four-month spell of mono.
It's absolutely a corrosive mindset. It's also one not conducive to learning new tricks or to meaningful thinking– just shallow processing, to paraphrase Nassim Taleb.
Don't get me wrong, I'll be up late tonight. I've got some big things tomorrow that I need to prep for. It happens once in a while.
Sleep's important, but the kind of masochistic bullshit you correctly ID isn't. Or shouldn't be.
I had a similar thing happen to me, but still in highschool, where I pulled allnighters to make an insanely stringent schedule work so I could catch up to those pesky A+sians that played the Violin and helped blind orphans speak (or something along those lines).
I mean workwise, I feel better sprinting short burst than to walk for long periods, but trying to take on a 4 year death marathon, starting at 6 in the morning and ending 2 in the evening, wasn't much of a bright idea. I ended up crashing every second term, to get sick weekly during that time and to pull down my hard earned grades into the D range.
I believe that the mind is a lot like muscle in that respect. Don't excercise it, and it will atrophy. Strain it constantly, and it will break down, along with your bodily health. The point to building mental muscle seems to be alternating between periods of excertion and recuperation.
Anyone telling you that carrying weights constantly is the path to strenght is proably trying to get you to build their pyramids, pulling stone slabs up an incline day and night.
a lot of aspects of corporate culture that are much esteemed in startup-land are really basically designed to get you to work insane hours, from undergrad-dorm-esque offices
This is how margins are increased (runway gain) by the people who are going to be selling the company: cheap offices and more hours under the same salary. You want respect for your time from a startup? Work hourly.
The thing that I most don't understand is that there is tons of very clear research on the subject and founders and VCs all seem to just be able to pretend like it doesn't exist. Is it just like, once you own your own business you start expecting the people you hire to work like slaves no matter what the rationality? This is something I will never understand.
for most of us (those launching pure software startups - sorry hardware folks) we now have the benefit of 6c per hour servers and the luxury of avoiding VCs completely.
we can burn 12-18c an hour ($133/month) while we find product market fit with a business model such that adding users adds profit. that's what you are doing right?
if not, then yes, you are falling into the VC trap.
otherwise, you own your culture. think about what you want.
Depends on what kind of hardware though. With certain things, you can test a product market fit with some ducttape and a lot of creativity. There's a pretty good book on that called "One simple idea" by Stephen Key, which, whilst it has a focus on licensing such producs out, should come in handy for stress testing a hardware idea. And for the more high tech folks that won't go to the mall to test out whether their stuff will sell, there's still Kickstarter.
It is possible to launch a software startup to profitability without VC funding.
I don't think this fact changes the "do what you love" message at all; it just means that you have a better chance at getting a decent slice of the pie if and when doing what you love becomes lucrative.
I think it's interesting that Arrington seems to accidentally agree with Jamie.
> "I've been burned badly by VCs. Treated unfairly. But my response was simply to stop doing what I was doing and start doing something else."
Isn't that exactly what Jamie is saying? Once what you're doing stops being fun, don't force yourself to keep slogging because you think keeping your nose to the grindstone will make you rich.
really? what about people who wish they had "done more with [their] life" or "done something more meaningful." I'm sure many people think this. They look back on an easy-going life with a good amount of leisure and wonder what it was all for.
depriving yourself from sleep is demonstrably bad for you. i wonder why we reached a consensus that smocking crack, drinking underage and driving fast or without a seatbelt should be forcibly prevented, but driving yourself crazy on adderall to build an app so people can write a blog on their favorite sushi restaurants and VC can prosper is socially rewarded.
Out of interest, how many hours do successful startup founders tend to work? Does anyone have a solid view on this, and is there any anecdotal evidence out of YC to suggest any sort of correlation of this kind?
The thinking (if I can speculate) probably is that if an item was submitted that didn't make it to the homepage, but it gets resubmitted a year later and does make it, it's worth everyone seeing it again.
Or, it could just be too annoying for the less-than-part-time maintainers of HN to keep the blacklist past 10,000 items or something.
Totally agree. I view startup as a marathon rather than short run. The most important thing for an engineer is productivity. I dont think any engineer would be productive after 8 hours of working. If this happens frequently, something's wrong with that company.
100% agreed. And maybe more than 100%. I gave a talk a couple years back on "Building a Sustainable Startup" and said that it was even worse than running a marathon. Doing a startup was like developing a running career.
You can watch the video if you want, but the relevant gist is that I knew people who trained for marathons and really wrecked themselves. They did one, said "never again", and then quit running. Whereas I, a slow fat guy, took my running much more gradually, and now have been running 7 years. I even just did my first triathlon a couple months back.
IMHO it's not about just putting in hours. It's about believing in what you strive to acomplish, so that you can make concious choices about which tasks are useful or not. Once you have a clear goal, go ahead and put in the hours if you want, but never continue when the goal gets fuzzy. I guess I'm saying that you primarily have to work conciously and goal-directed. The really hard work part is secondary, but also probably quite necessary given the size and complexity of most projects.
Heh, "under the radar" is an interesting way of looking at it.
They might not make a lot of noise now, but CrunchFund was the trigger for several days of utter and very public chaos at AOL/TechCrunch when it launched, leading to Arrington being fired because of AOL's own choices and disclaimer of journalistic ethics, but not really, but oh maybe really, but no, but yes, but now he's back, and AOL still doesn't know WTF they're doing...
Sigh... This meme of criticizing UX instead of the article is getting old on HN.
Email jwz your suggestions. Also have you seen his homepage? http://www.jwz.org/ OMG, it's like... So horrible hurts my eyes, god who would care about what jwz says with that design!
In all seriousness, what issues do you have with it?
Reading it on my tablet at night means I don't get blinded by a light background, and the green is something my eyes deal with easily. Honestly, I think his site looks better than most of the same vanilla layouts we see here posted every day.
For better or worse, these people choose "work" (in quotes because it doesn't feel like work) over watching TV, taking vacations, and spending time with friends.
When outsiders observe people like this, outsiders come to the conclusion that said people are successful because of the long hours. When in fact, they're successful because they're obsessed with making it successful.
In other words, the takeaway should be "do something you love," rather than "work long hours."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...