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Comment by holoduke | Hacker News Reader

Without bragging, but I have succeeded in two of my startups and I have always been super lazy. Work life was mixed all the time. But never had stress. Always took time for myself. And maybe worked 3 days effectively a week. Remaining time I spend with my kids and hobbies. I dont believe in this rat race 60 hour a week thing.

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You are totally bragging, but that's OK. I would hope you recognize the huge amounts of luck and context that go into a success like yours; many people work their asses off and still fail.

>> I dont believe in this rat race 60 hour a week thing.

The question is do you believe you were successful because of, or in spite of this?

Neither.

Success is never determined by hard work. It's always a combination of many other factors and at best hard work may contribute a little. Otherwise the billions of very hard working people struggling to feed their families would be extremely successful.

But that's not a story that you put on a poster, so people prefer to believe the lie that killing themselves chasing "success" is a good thing.

Hard work is preferred by employers over slacking off (for obvious reasons), so that's what gets promoted as the way to success.

I like this view. I’m not especially successful (by any of the measures knocking about) but in the midst of a startup again for the last year. This time I work how I want to work and am actually enjoying myself. The whole 80 hours a week startup thing is padded with a lot of performance art in my experience. I am actively avoiding all that this time around. I find that I solve a lot of things by not doing them or solving them when not actively trying. We’ve made great progress so far.

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