What wartime ‘munitionettes’ teach us about burnout
bbc.com
bbc.com
I know I’m more productive when I step away from my work for downtime, and yet at the same time I have times when I feel it’s near impossible to do.
This is an incredibly hard habit to break.
On the other hand, working long hours for a few months on something you like with people you admire won't burn you out. I was raised on a farm where you worked hard at different things depending on the season, with slack periods between. This was much healthier than engineering.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/eastmidlands/series2/blast_ch...
Show me anything revolutionary that was done by a group of people that weren't obsessed to the point of neglecting the rest of their life. True, productivity drops after 40 hours. But not to zero. You are 2/3 as productive at 60 hours a week. That's still more productive than not working at all.
People literally worked to death during The Apollo program to get to the moon. Same with every major Infrastructure project like the Hoover dam, disease eradicating efforts like the Salk polio project etc. Do you think spacex is launching space internet satellites built by people who have plenty of time for their hobbies?
It's ok to be obsessed. Find something you actually believe in and if you're being worked to death on something you don't care about well, quit. Can't "afford" to quit? Then reevaluate your life to figure out what's worth risking being homeless to do.
Or continue to work towards some milquetoast weekend hedonism, but stop shaming the idea of being obsessed.
Watson and Crick didn't work very hard, but managed to infer the structure of DNA from data that their competitors had well before them (necessarily, because Watson and Crick basically swiped it).
EDIT: And for that matter Rosalind Franklin, whose data they used, had an active life outside of work as well.
The whole point here is not to find one or two nitpicking examples of some lounging geniuses that stumbled into something but rather the larger trend that massive impacts take narrow person to work. Sometimes that even allows for you to take a bike ride everyday. The point is the same.
Sure.
>The whole point here is not to find one or two nitpicking example...
Oh, OK then.
To work hard (presumably for you) or what?
We'll get back to you on that...
Newton invented calculus in a few months goofing off on his family farm while avoiding the plague. This "work yourself to death" mentality is moronic. It's about 1000x more moronic when you're working on some dumb ass app which makes life worse and which makes someone else rich, which is, realistically what most of you are working on.
I'm not disputing your overall point, but I don't think the example of Newton helps your case.
Newton accumulated writings at the time of his death run to about ten million words:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Alchemy
10 million words on science, philosophy, religion and combating counterfeiting during his 33-year tenure with the Royal Mint is a lot even for a long life. (Newton lived to 84.)
And Newton never had sex. (He boasted of the fact on his death bed.)
And look at all the serious things he pursued after he invented calculus (intro to the same Wikipedia page):
>Beyond his work on the mathematical sciences, Newton dedicated much of his time to the study of alchemy and biblical chronology, but most of his work in those areas remained unpublished until long after his death. . . . Newton served two brief terms as Member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge, in 1689–90 and 1701–02. He . . . spent the last three decades of his life in London, serving as Warden (1696–1700) and Master (1700–1727) of the Royal Mint, as well as president of the Royal Society (1703–1727).
Given all he did after inventing calculus combined with the fact that he was ambitious and from a poor family, I'm inclined to think he worked his ass off when he was a student unless you can present strong evidence to the contrary.
I don't know what point you're trying to make here. The fact that Newton did a lot of stuff doesn't mean he burned himself out with Travis Bickle hours the way modern ding dongs do to excuse not having a life.
Let's use another example of a great man who accomplished a lot without working real hard: Winston Churchill. A day drinker who was fond of long meals, boozy parties and who took a daily hour and a half long nap. Somehow he managed to take up painting, write a couple dozen encyclopediac books, ran many important government offices and defeated Hitler.
I'll go out of my way to notice that the great ancient Greek and even Roman types were all unconscionably lazy by modern American standards, and Aristotle did his best work relaxing in a bath. Darwin was lazy as was da Vinci. Being lazy is civilized and normal.
The insane "I must eat soylent and snort modafinil to maximize my productivity" calvinist mindset of contemporary American upper middle class strivers is the deviation from the mean of the human race. And don't try to tell me things are particularly amazing in current year because all these strivers are working bugman hours: this lifestyle is wretched and disgusting and our era is marked by stupidity, vice and lack of technical or cultural progress.
Laziness is aristocratic; if people would relax and smell the roses more, well, most of them won't do anything like what Newton did, but they'll have more time to be thoughtful.
I'm don't think taking naps and enjoying parties disqualify the possibility of also working hard. There's probably a difference between doing a lot of work, and feeling that you're "working hard" - I can't say whether Churchill experienced the latter, but he certainly accomplished the former.
He would dictate thousands of words a night and had a team of people who worked slavishly to interpret his volumes.
When he took time off he'd write letters and talk about having had loads of fun writing 2000 words, and laying 200 bricks a day, along with painting a little. Bricklaying was another of his hobbies that persisted until very late in life. Started with garden walls, he worked up to building a whole cottage or two.
Look, I clicked on your profile and know where you're coming from: you were in the military. I used to be a cop. People with this sort of background pride themselves on being able to deal with extreme stress which would paralyze most people. It's a useful superpower, but it is not useful to be this lit up all the time; you have to relax at some point.
Sounds to me like you're equally productive working 40 hours, so you'd have 20 more hours to yourself with equal output. I've burned out before. Productivity fell to nearly zero for several years. If I was employed, not in grad school, I'd have been homeless. I succeeded by changing gears and finding something else to work on, which evolved into a job doing something I love. At my job, I avoid burnout by working reasonable hours and tackling problems before they get deadlines attached to them.
And yeah. Occasionally I BURN with passion to solve a problem. I can't turn off until I've achieved perfection or proven that I've achieved the upper bound on perfection. I burn the midnight oil. Give my kid as much love as I can but all else falls by the wayside until I SOLVE THAT PROBLEM. But I only do that with passion. Never for the wage
That seems obviously false on its face, a ridiculous assertion. The timelines may have been longer for some of the things you mentioned, but you think they simply would not have happened without people putting in long hours each week?
> I'm getting "burned out" of these nihilistic work life balance articles.
Can you explain why Nihilistic? It seems like the opposite -- you should be enjoying your life, your family, your friends, your hobbies, your job. I see articles like this as a valuable counterpoint to the oppressively common idea that we all should be working ourselves to death every day.
How many of them are producing anything even remotely useful, never mind being outstandingly competent and successful?
SpaceX is not revolutionary, it is evolutionary, as rocket's discipline was already well known when they started. You know who was revolutionary with rockets?
This man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
As a child, he was playing with friends launching rockets(and burning crop fields when they failed), actually as a hobby. I call hobby studding something freely just for the sake of it.
Hoover dam is a terrible example, because almost 100 people died building it, and it should not be necessary killing people for building things like a dam, it is actually much better building things without casualties, the project runs smoothier and faster. And it is a known discipline that Romans already did 2000 years ago.
Cinema, in the words of the Lumiere brothers was just a hobby with no real monetary value.
Most of Newton time was studying freely esotericism and alchemy. Most of it gave nothing to the world, like philosophy, it was done for the sake of it(science and all sciences come from it, so a very small portion of it paid off).
Mr Boole spent enormous amount of time trying to prove the existence of God, and invented Boole algebra as a result. It was of no practical use until more than one century later.
The neuron was discovered because of the photography hobby of Ramón y Cajal, staining cells so you can see it.
Most of the greatest discoveries in things like Mathematics were done by outsiders, like lawyers that were only interested on a very narrow part of it. And it was a hobby.
The discovery of DNA (Watson & Crick).
Not if what you're working on is a false path because you're too tired to notice you made a mistake.
What a bumptious comment.
Stop telling us what to do. Every authoritarian regime since the beginning of time has glorified hard work.
I wonder why that is?
The concept of a work life balance exists for a reason, because people need downtime.