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Comment by georgewsinger | Hacker News Reader

"You shouldn't work long hours" is consensus advice masquerading as contrarian advice. You can see this for two reasons: (i) count the number of people in threads like this who advise against working long hours; (ii) go to Amazon.com and count the number of books that advocate (often using empirical evidence) against working long hours. The same is true for "you shouldn't multitask". Everyone thinks they're clever for saying this. But in fact it's just consensus advice (and of course: there are good reasons to think it).

The question then is: under what conditions is the consensus opinion wrong? Why do notable outliers (i.e., people like Elon Musk) do the opposite of consensus and perform so well (Elon in particular not only consistently works 80+ hour weeks, but seems to multitask quite a bit)?

The interesting data points are always the outliers, not the averages.

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Not everyone works the same way. For example, consensus is that you should have at least 8 hours a sleep at night. A fairly large chunk of 'successful' people need &/or get a lot less than that. If I try that kind of schedule I am a zombie within a few days.

Do we even have well-documented cases of these outliers? Are any unbiased outsiders allowed to watch what e.g. Musk does in his 80-hour week? How do we know it's not 40 hours of hard work interleaved with 40 hours of "working" meals, travelling and other low-productivity time?

> other low-productivity time?

How would you even measure low productivity time for someone like Musk who has incredible leverage?

For example I was chatting with a friebd about his companies product and it sounds awesome.

Yet for me this was a “low value” conversation as I know I couldnt get my workplace to purchase it.

Musk on the other hand can delegate the evaluation and if it’s a good fit his company will buy it.

So for Musk the same conversation could be very high productivity.

Musk spending time with his children could be seen as training future C*Os (I'm not saying this is what he claims to do). Someone reading an business magazine is business development. Someone reading up on video game development is educating themselves in the database query issue they're currently investigating at their workplace.

> The question then is: under what conditions is the consensus opinion wrong? Why do notable outliers (i.e., people like Elon Musk) do the opposite of consensus and perform so well (Elon in particular not only consistently works 80+ hour weeks, but seems to multitask quite a bit)?

From all outwards appearances, Elon Musk may be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His public behaviour is becoming increasingly irrational, erratic, and likely counterproductive to his businesses. (TSLA private at $420, boring questions, pedoguy, etc.)

> From all outwards appearances, Elon Musk may be on the verge of a nervous breakdown

A couple of stupid comments don’t indicate you are on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

If that was true the vast majority of us would permanently be on the verge of a breakdown.

Is it wrong? Or is Musk just still ‘succeeding’ despite his 80 hour workweeks?

Either way, if he built even slightly decent companies, what Musk does should have very little effect on their trajectory unless he wants it to.

I feel working in an executive role, where most of the day goes into meetings is easier than working for the same time in a technical role.

I do not think it is possible to work in a software only role for 80 hrs/week productively. That that's just me.

"under what conditions is the consensus opinion wrong"

Someone I read suggested (specifically regarding Musk), it's a productive state of hypomania, that isn't full-blown mania.

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