Work Hard and Play Just Enough

That’s my line. It isn’t a balanced life, but historically, it gives me the best chance to succeed. And since I’m going for a home run, that’s the line I need to walk.

I guess the important question to answer is: why are you going for a "home run"?

Is it because your life-consuming ambition, the only way you'll ever feel accomplished, is by having a bank account with a LOT of digits in it?

Is it because you have a burning ambition to change the world in a massive way via technology, like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, and you just don't see any way to do it other than building a mega-company?

Or is it because you're letting your environment and peer pressure dictate that a home run is what you should want, even though what you really want is financial independence so you can spend more time reading books, travelling, and painting watercolours?

I think this article hits the nail on the head. Yes, you can build a business and do the whole "only work 20 hours a week" or whatever thing. But can you "hit a home run" doing that? I kinda doubt it.

If you want the home run, if you want to make it to the big leagues, you have to sacrifice (unless you just plain get lucky). And even on the "luck" front, I'm reminded of the old saw "the harder I work, the luckier I get".

Now it is a fair question to ask "why is it so important to you to hit the metaphorical home run"? To which I can only say "it's complicated". And, ultimately, my reasons and my motivations are very personal, and I don't see why I (or any other entrepreneur) should have to justify our drive and ambition to anybody else.

That said, for me personally, it comes down to a combination of factors, including:

1. Desire for financial independence (aka "fuck you money"). I don't need to be Larry Ellison rich, but I'd like to have enough money in the bank to where I don't have to worry about money anymore. I'd like to be able to buy a nice house, a nice car, do some things for some family and friends, and have enough money left to where I can spend my time traveling, reading, playing with geeky shit and never have to worry about "what happens if my car breaks down" or whatever.

2. General sense of accomplishment. I'll admit it, I grew up pretty much dirt poor in the rural South, and I have a chip on my shoulder about people who seem to think that they are better than me because they have more money. I want to prove to (myself|the world|those assholes|whoever) that I am just as capable as anybody. The digits in the bank account don't really matter (other than as in (1) above), but they are a means of keeping score. I want a high-score just to prove a point and because I'm very competitive. It also involves both proving the people wrong who have ever doubted me, AND justifying the faith of the people who believed in me. I have friends, family, etc., that I want to prove something to, so I can feel like I justified their support and belief.

3. Causes / Philanthropy. There are causes and initiatives I believe in very strongly, and I'd like to be in a position to do more to advance those causes. I want to be able to do things like: donate money to libertarian advocacy groups, support libertarian candidates for office, etc.; donate money to support education (especially STEM education) for underprivileged people in areas like where I grew up; donate money to groups like the EFF, FSF, etc.

4. Creating something I always wished existed. I have a vision in my head of the kind of company I want to work for, and that I think (some) other hackers would want to work for. No company seems to exist exactly like what I envision, so my plan is to create it. Being large, profitable and sustainable would give us access to resources to do cool things. It sucks to have all sorts of ideas, but to lack the resources to try to act on them. Ideally I'd like to run a company that can support intrapreneurship, identify employees with really awesome ideas, nurture and incubate those initiatives, and - if they succeed - spin them out as separate companies or whatever.

5. Angel investing. If I make it big, I'd definitely want to help the next round of entrepreneurs by doing some angel investing.

There are other reasons as well, but that starts to get more personal, and I'm not going to go into that here. But I think that is the basic gist of the thing.

"I’m your typical “balls to the wall” founder that will sacrifice all for the sake of the startup" ... "I founded and ran GooseChase, which makes running scavenger hunts incredibly easy via iPhone & Android apps".

Some of this stuff is beyond parody...

"But there’s different classes of success."

Two tips for life:

Never ever let anyone else define what success means to you.

Never be arrogant enough to attempt to define what success means for other people.

The people who advocate "balls to the wall" practices and "not making it home for dinner every night" scare me.

When it's all said and done, and you're ready to leave this world, what are you going to think about? Who are you going to want by your side? What are you going to care about?

If it's all the amazing startups you created, or the enormous sums of money you made, or the years of never making it home for dinner to see your wife/husband/kids/dog/whoever, then you're on the right track.

But if at the end of the day, life means more to you than ferociously competing to see who can work more hours in a week, why the hell are you doing this?

Do you have to make hundreds of millions of dollars to hit a home run? There are different kinds of home runs, my young friends.

Straightaway center field at the polo grounds was 483 ft.

Wrigley is 353 down the right field line.

I appreciate the gesture of being a devil's advocate to the work-life balance posts but the hyperbole of "9am-5am" is hurting your case, you're giving others a straw man to argue against.

A 70 hour work week is not actually that unreasonable. You wake up at 8AM, get to work by 9AM, work until 7PM, and then head out with another 5 hours still before you need to go to sleep and still get a solid 8 hours of rest. Do that 7 days a week and you have 70 hours. As long as you're actively fighting burnout by using those 5 hours to exercise, hang out with friends, or otherwise get your head out of your startup, it can be a healthy lifestyle.

I think it's important that we get rid of this false dichotomy between working hard and having a work/life balance. I think the author is right that the only way you can increase your odds of success is to consistently work harder, that formula has never failed me my entire life. But burnout prevents you from doing that consistently so balance is needed even in a 70 hour work week, and if you sanitize the hyperbole you'll find that's pretty doable.

> The notion that you need to work like crazy doesn’t come out of the blue, there’s data to back it up.

Then show us some data. I see two successes mentioned that fit this "trend". Treehouse is mentioned as an outlier - but that's 1/3 of the examples. This is not how "data" works.

I've been at the office until the wee hours of the morning.

I don't know how people can still write coherent code at that point. My mind starts tripping under its own weight at the four-five hour mark. I usually can't make it past 2 or 3 hours without a break. Those times when I was hacking away like I was doing something so important that the world just couldn't wait for it... well I'm pretty sure I was at that office so late simply fixing the stupid mistakes I was making just hours before because I was too bleary-eyed, tired, uncomfortable, and frustrated to be effectively working.

In a few years you may or may not realize that there's more to life and that you won't get your youth back.

I lost you when you started classifying success. There are no classes of success - its defined purely by your own drive and identified purpose in life. It maybe important for you to impact the world some how - but to someone else - success (even of the home run variety) may simply be having a successful marriage - happy kids and enough time for people they care about. Would you say Gates, Jobs, Brin and Page hit home runs - or would you the kid who came off the streets and made a decent life for himself - enough to provide for himself and his family and live comfortably - hit a home run?

The nature of work has changed so much that I find many blank stares in the faces of young entrepreneurs when you ask what they do in their off time. What's off time? What if work is play or simply that one so completely enjoys their work and doesn't know how to draw a distinction between Work and Life. On the other hand, a huge plethora of tools, cloud services, saas, etc manke it available to "work" anytime, anywhere as never before. From project management to the ability to create meaningful communication with remarkable time-saving features (15Five.com) the nature and time-required for work is what you make of it.

Over time, I have discovered that I generally work in one of 3 modes:

Mode 1: Unproductive. Like many corporate people. Busy, even completing transactions, but when you get right down to it, not producing much product.

Mode 2: Productive. Writing software. Testing. Talking to users. Crossing stuff off to-do lists. Making progress and feeling good about it.

Mode 3: Transcendence. Being "in the zone". "Seeing" things I hadn't seen before. Making discoveries that leapfrog previous struggles and implementing them quickly. Being ecstatic understanding new possibilities from the things I'm building right now.

I'm usually in Mode 2 (I've discovered tricks to quickly identify and get out of Mode 1.) I LOVE to be in Mode 3, but often don't have as much control getting there when I'd like.

For me, Mode 3 is usually very early in the morning or late at night. I often lose all awareness of time and space and don't leave Mode 3 until I'm spent.

I'd guess I am: Mode 1, 10%. Mode 2, 80%. Mode 3, 10%.

When you're in Modes 1 or 2, you think about things like Work/Life Balance, work hours & conditions, and work habits. When you're in Mode 3, you don't think about much of anything except what you're working on.

If you're building a startup, you should expect to be in Mode 3 quite a bit (certainly more than my 10%). Sure, there's lots of transactions to conduct, but if you want to disrupt, you have to pay your dues in Mode 3.

In Mode 3, expect to miss meals, family, friends, maybe even baths. You can worry about those things when you return to the real world.

>> The notion that you need to work like crazy doesn’t come out of the blue, there’s data to back it up.

From what I've seen*, "data" are usually blog posts like this one. I would love for someone to also include "here are these 20 other startups I knew, everyone worked their butts off. They still failed". Anyone?

- yes, this too is an anecdote

-- there are data

As someone who just took the plunge and started my own company I have thought about this a lot lately. What we have started to do is go on temporary relocations as a team (there are only 3 of us), and do our work from different cities. Our home base is Chicago, but we just spent a week working in SF. Allows us to keep working longer hours and stay sane at the same time.

Working a lot (>60 hours per week) is necessary, but alone insufficient, to result in 'startup success,' I think.

Plus, sitting at a desk typing away for extended periods of time is actually pretty easy -- what's harder is making sure quality stuff is being generated for that entire time.

I can work 70 hours a week consistently and be fine.

I found myself disagreeing with the article until I read this. 70 hours a week seems like a decent number for an early-days startup. That's probably somewhere around my upper bound as well (maybe just a bit above it).

http://firstround.com/article/How-Dave-Goldberg-of-SurveyMon...

What about the flip side? How many people work 70+ hours/week on their "home run" only to find that it didn't succeed at all and they've wasted their 20s in an text editor?

Of the things people regret before dying, having spent way too much time working is #1.

I always laugh at people who say how many hours they worked per day like it's an achievement of any sort.

Anybody can 'sit' at their desk for 10 hours that says absolutely nothing about you or your job performance but hey you can brag about how many hours you worked for.

I will come in focused, do all the work I have to do while you bullshit with co-workers or talk about doing something for the 10th time without doing anything and leave on time.

That what sucks about engineering/start-ups, if person is mediocre all they have to do is stay in the office the longest and even if they can't beat the quality and output of an engineer who does 9-5 that's overlooked by 'hey I 'worked' for 10 hours!'