There is a version of entrepreneurship that treats exhaustion as a credential. The seventy-hour week, the grind, the hustle — these are not just practices but identity markers. To work less is to want less. To rest is to lack commitment. To have a life outside the business is to be, in some implicit ranking, less serious than those who don't.
I was influenced by this culture in my early years of building. I wore the hours like a badge. I confused activity with progress. I was proud of how busy I was, even when the busyness was producing nothing worth having.
What changed was a simple observation: the most effective people I knew, in every field, were not the people who worked the most hours. They were the people who were clearest about what mattered, most ruthless about what didn't, and surprisingly protective of the conditions that allowed them to think well. They worked intensely, but not indiscriminately. They rested without apology.
Hustle culture mistakes the inputs for the outputs. Working hard is not the goal. Building something of value is the goal. These are related — serious things require serious effort — but they are not the same. A hundred hours of undirected effort is worth less than twenty hours of focused, clearly-aimed work. And twenty hours of focused work is only possible if the preceding forty hours included rest, recovery, and the slow-burning thinking that looks from the outside like doing nothing.
There is also something troubling about the ideological function of hustle culture. When it is promoted to workers rather than founders, it becomes a way of transferring the costs of economic insecurity onto individuals. The message "you can make it if you just work hard enough" is partly true and partly a way of explaining away structural disadvantages that no amount of hustle can overcome. We should be suspicious of ideologies that ask the most from those who already have the least to spare.
None of this means working less. It means working on the right things, with the right intensity, and recovering enough to sustain the effort over time. It means treating your energy as a resource to be managed, not a virtue to be demonstrated.
Build well. Build sustainably. The point was never the hours.
There is a version of entrepreneurship that treats exhaustion as a credential. The seventy-hour week, the grind, the hustle — these are not just practices but identity markers. To work less is to want less. To rest is to lack commitment. To have a life outside the business is to be, in some implicit ranking, less serious than those who don't.
I was influenced by this culture in my early years of building. I wore the hours like a badge. I confused activity with progress. I was proud of how busy I was, even when the busyness was producing nothing worth having.
What changed was a simple observation: the most effective people I knew, in every field, were not the people who worked the most hours. They were the people who were clearest about what mattered, most ruthless about what didn't, and surprisingly protective of the conditions that allowed them to think well. They worked intensely, but not indiscriminately. They rested without apology.
Hustle culture mistakes the inputs for the outputs. Working hard is not the goal. Building something of value is the goal. These are related — serious things require serious effort — but they are not the same. A hundred hours of undirected effort is worth less than twenty hours of focused, clearly-aimed work. And twenty hours of focused work is only possible if the preceding forty hours included rest, recovery, and the slow-burning thinking that looks from the outside like doing nothing.
There is also something troubling about the ideological function of hustle culture. When it is promoted to workers rather than founders, it becomes a way of transferring the costs of economic insecurity onto individuals. The message "you can make it if you just work hard enough" is partly true and partly a way of explaining away structural disadvantages that no amount of hustle can overcome. We should be suspicious of ideologies that ask the most from those who already have the least to spare.
None of this means working less. It means working on the right things, with the right intensity, and recovering enough to sustain the effort over time. It means treating your energy as a resource to be managed, not a virtue to be demonstrated.
Build well. Build sustainably. The point was never the hours.