Step one is admitting you have a problem

The cultural bias is staring at us right here: You've implicitly assumed that working 16 hours per day is the way to produce great work. Not necessarily true.

There are, of course, artists who do their work in intense sleepless binges, because when the spirit moves them they forget everything else, even food and sleep. There are also artists who can't work unless they're drunk or stoned. But consider the possibility that this is not the source of their power. This is a handicap that they must overcome.

I know it's difficult to imagine a twenty-year-old version of Steve Wozniak that was even more productive. But everything we know about sleep suggests that if Steve had been able to convince himself to get more rest in the middle of his legendary weekend-long hacking binges, he would indeed have been even more productive. Woz got through that, of course, because he had the brain cycles to waste.

As for this:

Artists of all types do the whole obsessive addiction thing all the time, but we don't point at them and say "hey, you better chill out, don't worry about trying to achieve Artistic Nirvana...

No, we don't, but that's a flaw in our culture. Are you suggesting that it would have been a bad idea to try and get, say, Ramanujan to take some time out to rest and feed himself, rather than letting him remain so addicted to short-term mathematical highs that he let his health decline and died at an early age?

Our romantic artistic culture idolizes burnouts and addicts: Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis. This leads to the illusion that acting like a burnout and acting like an artist are aspects of the same thing. But being a great artist is more about persistence than intensity. It is actually far better for your development as a musician, for example, to practice a few hours a day for a long series of days than to try to pack more practice into each day. Your mind needs rest to assimilate and organize what it learns.

Another point: Many of the musicians who spend 20 hours a day in the studio do so for economic reasons. Every hour of studio time costs money, lots of money, and getting set up in the studio takes hours and hours of work, so once you get set up you have to use the studio as intensely as possible before you have to break down the instruments and pack them up. It makes one wonder how much of the I-don't-need-sleep-I'm-a-superhacker culture derives from the days when hacking took place in night-long binges because the computer's time was cheaper late at night. That was a rational reason to stay up all night. But now computers are cheaper than furniture and there's no reason for a tech worker not to get some sleep. You'll think better.

Is hard work an addiction? It probably is, but not like a cocaine addiction, but more like a become-good-at-golf addiction.

Hard work and becoming really good at something requires sacrifices, no matter if it's for sports or startups. And becoming really good at something isn't for everyone.

I want to become really good at what I do, I love my work and I spend a lot of time "working" (or at least practicing). I don't think hard work is a problem and I don't think DHH should tell us that it's a problem. We all have different values in life and we have different ways of achieving success. I mostly work hard because I enjoy it and because I want to become better.