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Comment by ArtWomb | Hacker News Reader

Honestly quite surprised how much work it turns out to be. Would not wish this on my worst enemy territory. You have to like that it is 24/7/366. You need to enjoy wearing different hats on an hourly basis.

Action trumps thought. Let that be your mantra. What you feel needs to be done in the moment. Let that be the thing you intensely focus on 110%.

Because trying to maintain the Ben Franklin schedule of discipline. Isn't going to happen in the mobile connected world. And 5pm video chats with Silicon Valley.

Here it is 10am. 16 degrees outside. Configuring a "hybrid cloud" in my bedroom. Not exactly 99% of people's idea of a blissful heavenly morning ;)

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I really disagree with action trumping thought. When I started my business I took that approach too, but after initial success followed by 3 years of flat revenue growth I’ve realized that action is too easily pointless thrashing. It’s like someone who doesn’t know how to swim will drown while spending every ounce of their energy and someone who knows how to swim can easily float or move using just a small amount of their energy. There is only really one thing that grows my business at this point, so I just focus on that. After a few years of practice I’ve learned the basics (bookkeeping, mostly) so that is easy enough I don’t have to spend any more time then necessary.

If you are working 24/7/"366" either you are creating something so valuable we will know about you sooner than later, or you are doing some things terribly wrong, or you are lying. Which one is it?

I think parent commenter really means that it's a kind of responsibility. You can't just stop and take a break; breaks become stressful. There are no paid or sick days.

You can delegate all this stuff to employees, but there's a lot nobody can delegate. That's also why a lot of founders don't just hire CEOs and live off the passive income.

I think the advice people needs varies quite a bit by personality and background.

The bias for action thing is absolutely true for people who are coming out of a structured environment like education or a big companies.

On the other hand, a lot of the people who want to be solo founders do so because they don't want to be told what to focus on, and this may lead to a willful blindness and taking a lot of low-impact action because they haven't fully thought things through.

I don't feel like "action trumping thought" is a universal rule for early founders, but it could be true in some contexts. I visited your company's website (okaq.com) and I see a static placeholder image of a digipet. I'm curious, what's the "nano games at peta scale" vision? I think that would help contextualize what you wrote here. Whatever it is it seems like a lot of work, so kudos on that.

Constantly doing the action thing, means you have not planned ahead.

And I think the chance is big that you are getting burned out.

The reason they are using schedules is that they otherwise could work for 24 hours and the day after, not that much will have changed.

There are the Elon Musks of course, but that's not 99% off the founders :)

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