My favorite observation of his was that in Germany, he would arrive at work, go to his cubicle, work until 4pm, and then go and get beers with his coworkers until 7pm, when they would go home to their partners.
In SV, he would come in, we would socialize, he would work, we'd have lunch and drink a beer, do some work, take a break for some beer, so some work, and then have a beer at work before heading home at 7pm to our partners.
We'd get the same amount of work done, and the same amount of socializing, but it would all be done at work.
He never understood why we would want to do that, and not just work all day and then leave to socialize.
The crazy thing is French gdp per capita (measured hourly) growth was cited to be higher than America’s in this book by Mitt Romney’s partner at Bain. Aka, hustle porn measures hustle not output. The French just work 1700 hours a year versus the Americans who skewed up towards 2100.
Is it possible that your coworker was making choice of going for beer every day till 7pm and other people did not made same choice?
In later jobs that didn't really happen & I think I caught the very end of that type of thing.
The 4-letter word "work" encompasses very different activities:
(1) The so-called "work" that's genuinely interesting to the entrepreneur and he/she would rather not spend time on anything else
-- or --
(2) the work that people just barely tolerate as a job from 9 to 5
This means many observers using mental model (2) are confused why some founders have no "work/life" balance. In a previous comment, I try to explain what mental model (1) of passionate work feels like.[0]
If a person's MITTD (Most Interesting Thing To Do) happens to be a research scientist working 80 hours a week in a lab trying to discover a new molecule, or a musician practicing guitar "until his fingers bleed", or an Olympic athlete spending most of her time for years to prepare for competition, it's more likely that society romanticizes that "unbalanced life" with more positive labels such as "intense dedication".
But if that MITTD for a human happens to be working 80+ hours a week on an internet startup, we label it with negative labels such as "work" and that the entrepreneur is illogical for not having a good work-life balance.
If Warren Buffet is already worth $80 billion and owns a private jet that can take him to any exotic location in the world, why does he bother going into a boring Omaha Nebraska office every day to look at financial statements?!? Because looking at business numbers is the most interesting activity to him. Other entrepreneurs understand why WB doesn't just take it easy and lay in a hammock in the Caribbean or go whale watching in Alaska. WB is not "sacrificing" a tropical island vacation and he's not suffering at work to look at financial statements. That's what he prefers to do with his time. But to the accountant that wants to gouge his eyes out after balancing debits and credits for the 1000th time, WB's passion makes no sense at all.
Founders have less work/life balance than regular workers, in US, in Sweden and everywhere else.
For me: I’ve had many happy times in my life. Many of them where when I was working 60+ hours per week on a project that I didn’t own (sometimes literally owned none of it, other times 0.<many 0s>1 of it).
If you pay me well enough (exact definition subject to negotiation), keep the bullshit to a minimum, and put interesting problems onto the field of play, I’ll happily work 60 hours a week doing puzzles that you’re basically overpaying me to solve because I find them fascinating and would do them for free if the world didn’t run on money.
If you're applying the "work/life balance" to founders that are doing what they prefer to do, it means my previous comment didn't do a good job explaining the flaw with that distorted lens.
Imagine a retired person spending all day in her garden... planting flowers, trimming hedges into pleasing shapes, etc. When not outside in her garden, she's still reading about gardening in magazines and surfing website discussion forums related to gardening. When doing neither of those tasks, she still thinks about gardening while laying in bed and anticipates the tasks she wants to do the following day and the future plans for the next week/month/year. The sum of all of her gardening effort adds up to more than 40+ hours per week. However, most outsiders would not say the retired gardener is having a "work/life balance" problem or that she's a "workaholic". Instead, we give her a charitable label such as, "she's enjoying life".
For many startup founders, building the business is the "garden" or "creative canvas" to express themselves.
For others where the activities at the job are not the most fulfilling form of living, we then have to construct this mathematical ratio of "work:life" because the work is undesirable and it's the life that is desirable. (E.g. sayings such as "work to live instead of live to work" or "working for the weekend".) Therefore, "work-vs-life balance" is indirect code speak for "undesirable-vs-desirable balance".
The founders that are doing what they truly want to do (even if it's 60+ hours a week) don't have this giant misalignment of desirable-vs-undesirable activity and therefore, the whole "work/life balance" is meaningless to them. Their work _is_ the passionate life. You can't apply "work-life balance" to Warren Buffett. He's been fascinated by business financial numbers since he was a little boy. Thus, forcing Warren Buffett go on a whale watching expedition to fulfill our expectations of "life" in the work/life balance equation is actually cruel torture to him.
Daily Work-Load is a function of distance from domicile to workplace.
Germans generally live closer to their workplace, so its easier to come and go early, and also have a lifestyle outside the office (and even away from their own, moderate apartments) in a fairly cosmopolitan cityscape .. whereas Americans make hourly investments in their daily commute, just to get started, and don't typically have the kind of street-life infrastructure of your average European industrial region.
I think when Americans can walk to work, they spend less time overall at the office - but that is because they are more efficient/effective during the day. I have seen American colleagues take a few weeks to get used to the idea of walking everywhere, but then .. usually when the summer starts .. they become as Euro- as anyone.
Purely anecdotal of course, but I've noticed this swing myself over decades across Western world.
(Disclaimer: Japanese work schedule is way different, and I consider it more of an inverse case: Japanese move closer to their workplace, just so they can spend more time working .. and even though they 'walk everywhere' in the big Japanese cities, hours-long commutes are also a norm ..)
The average commute in the US (52 min round-trip, https://www.google.com/search?q=american+average+commute+dur...) is either lower or at most equal to the average European commute (1h24 minutes, https://www.google.com/search?q=Europe+average+commute+durat...)
I really don't know why the popular stereotype, that I held too, is the other way around.
Japan comes in at 1h19 (https://www.google.com/search?q=japanese+average+commute)
I think it's a SV (and some other industries) thing. Even more specific, it's a thing for a certain type of product. For a product like the one in the OP it's a natural monopoly. To be really successful you need the designers of a building and the builders using the same software. The plumbing contractor can't say that they don't use PlanGrid and expect to get the bid if that's what everyone else uses. So there's enormous pressure to be the winner since there's only going to be one while everyone else loses.
And the rewards for winning are tremendous. She spent ~7 years on PlanGrid and now is (presumably) extremely wealthy. She never has to work a day again in her life. In terms of balance that is pretty great, no?
You just answered your own question. Moderate success can co-exist with any number of other goals and priorities. Extreme success requires extreme dedication.
The great thing about the modern world - no one is "forced" to pursue extreme success. Everyone is free to pursue their own goals and life purpose. You don't have to justify your priorities, and neither does the workaholic.
Work is work. Especially if you work for someone else - they pay for your time, that is all. Nothing more.
I saw a monk once, on his hands and knees, maintaining the grass at a temple. This is the craft he has dedicated himself to. Others have chosen other things.
It is not hard to see why many see their life's work as important to them. That isn't romanticism. That's just a different preference vector.
Personally, having read The Remains of The Day, there are certain end results I would consider failure. But clearly men such as Newton did not consider them that.
I think I see both sides. On one hand, as someone else said, it's not the building a SaaS app that entrepreneurs are proud of -- it's building the business and building the company. That in and of itself is a lot more impressive to me than building just an app.
Is it as impressive and historically significant as the great scientific discoveries of Newton? Maybe, but probably not. Or maybe they are apples and oranges. Suppose Newton had a collaborator who built a giant manufacturing empire with his discoveries. Would those two be comparable in terms of "who was more important", or would comparison simply cease to be meaningful at this point?
To your point, maybe that's what makes the Newton comparison somewhat of a non-sequitor -- it's at best a reach.
So, for instance, while you'd (taking a leap here and guessing) rate it useless for a Theravada monk to master his chanting, there is a portion of it that to him is sufficient to just be good at. A portion apart from the outcome that is just dedicated to the craft itself.
If you're not driven by the craft, you likely won't get it. That's okay. The path to living a fulfilling life is to find your preference vector and optimize for it.
>> When we only had months of runway left in the bank, there was no work-life balance. We had to work around the clock so that our company could survive. When we were behind on our big product launch, when we’re behind on our revenue goals, when we released nasty bugs to our users, or when our servers were down, there was no work-life balance.
This doesn't sound like someone dedicating themselves to the art of their craft, and I would argue that we released nasty bugs is the complete antithesis of what you meant. This sounds like making desparate moves trying to stay alive.
To me, a perfect modern example of someone putting the craft above all else (including their family) is Jiro Ono [0]. He does that because he wants to, not because he'd go broke otherwise.
I read GP's comment as not critizing craftsmen, but criticizing someone prioritizing the daily grind above their life. And let's face it, startups (or any other business) is 90% daily grind.
--
For what it's worth, I think it depends on the shape of the thing. "What actually" is not a fixed concept like that. For instance, "what makes a good vacation?". One could say "not having faeces on your nose for the whole time" since, after all, it is unlikely that having faeces on your nose the whole time is likely to make a good vacation even if you're on the most lovely beach surrounded by all you live. But that's a baseline that's easy to meet. So what _actually_ makes a good vacation? The truth is: ∄ an activity or characteristic X such that ∀ vacations V that have X, V is a good vacation.
So what "actually makes people happy"? No one knows. We know things that can make you unhappy (faeces on the nose, not having any relationships) and we know that there exists a baseline happiness we have (the Hedonic Treadmill, etc.). But really, not much more.
There isn't one path to happiness. Yes, close relationships and helping others in close proximity can feel good. So can wealth, social status, or building a business that positively impacts millions of people. It depends on your values, and your ability to align your actions with your values.
> People like her and even the greatest in the field, like Steve Jobs, may lead extraordinary lives in our imaginations, but inside, they almost always feel horrible most of the time.
I believe you are actually the one romanticizing here. Most people do not have this type of success, and therefore, tend to discredit the lives of those that do in order to protect their self-image.
The story of the outwardly successful CEO who is inwardly emotional distraught is a great Hollywood story, but it's an exception. If you actually follow the lives of most successful entrepreneurs, I think you will find that they are quite happy - enjoying their wealth and social status in their free time.
Yes, the day to day work of a CEO is very stressful. But, when they have time to step back from it all, knowing that they gave it their all and made an impact can be deeply satisfying.
Again, the key is to not assume everyone shares the same values. Family and friendships are one thing to value. Impact, contribution, wealth, and social status are other values. No value system is better or worse, objectively -- as long as you are capable of fulfilling your values.
Reminds me of this scene in Margin Call, about the 2009 financial crash:
"You're one of the luckiest guys in the world, Sam. You could have been digging ditches all these years."
"That's true, and if I had, at least there'd be some holes in the ground to show for it."
Personally, I have found fulfillment from menial labour only when I have found no fulfillment from knowledge work. Achievement at the latter beats out the former by a large multiple, and doing the former when I have access to the latter feels me leaving like I've wasted time.
Obviously this is an extreme example, but some people just love what they are doing and happen to get paid for it and in this case he was in love with his project.
I enjoy having sex, but if I have sex 7 times a day I probably have a problem.
If that sex results in you having enough children to take care of you and work on/build a family empire with you, you may have more of a solution than a problem. Historically speaking, this happened quite frequently with male royalty.