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Sometimes, it’s just time to go home

benmilne.com

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Re: Sometimes, it’s just time to go home

#21

Post by lemming »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #13
snewman wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great Things require dedication, passion, and vision. Working yourself to death is not on the list of requirements, and in fact can often be counter-productive. If you're passionate about your job, you're likely to work hard. But there's a line between "working hard", and overworking. Beyond a certain point, more hours may (or may not) mean more things done, but almost certainly doesn't mean more of the right things…

Great Things require dedication, passion, and vision. Working yourself to death is not on the list of requirements If that's true, it should be possible to make a list of companies that have been built without the founders working very hard (or rather, extremely long hours). What are some companies that could go onto such a list? As a filter, let's use criteria "The founders got rich enough not to have to work anymor…

And since we're using the criteria of The founders got rich enough not to have to work anymore, or the company went public, which I think is totally accurate in 99% of cases, let's please stop talking about Doing Great Things, which has nothing to do with the above. Let's be honest, most founders are in it to get filthy rich, not to improve the world. Sometimes the two go hand in hand, but less than the startup world thinks.

Re: Sometimes, it’s just time to go home

#22

Post by chollida1 »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #13
snewman wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great Things require dedication, passion, and vision. Working yourself to death is not on the list of requirements, and in fact can often be counter-productive. If you're passionate about your job, you're likely to work hard. But there's a line between "working hard", and overworking. Beyond a certain point, more hours may (or may not) mean more things done, but almost certainly doesn't mean more of the right things…

Great Things require dedication, passion, and vision. Working yourself to death is not on the list of requirements If that's true, it should be possible to make a list of companies that have been built without the founders working very hard (or rather, extremely long hours). What are some companies that could go onto such a list? As a filter, let's use criteria "The founders got rich enough not to have to work anymor…

Start with Jeff Hawkins

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hawkins

I remember hearing him lecture where he said he always tried to be home by 5:30 to have dinner with his family.

Grid, Palm, Numenta, Handspring, are all great successes.

Re: Sometimes, it’s just time to go home

#23

Post by lotsofmangos »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #20
hemantv wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are confusing working hard vs working to death. I work hard everyday but at some point in a given day I realize that I am not productive anymore. If something is menial, doesn't require much mental process. Than its okay to keep going but if its something new which require even small amount of mental effort than working super hard is not going to get you anywhere. I also sometimes work late, because I don…

I agree with everything you've said, but if it's true that you can get rich from a startup without working extremely long hours, we should be able to find some evidence of that. And if there's no evidence, then maybe we should rethink whether it's true.

The HP garage was a part time venture.

Re: Sometimes, it’s just time to go home

#24

Post by famousactress »

The saddest thing about this post to me is the fact that he could only write it because his startup is apparently doing great.

Most startups aren't, despite the fact that lots of the folks there are in effectively the same personal position and feeling the exact same thing - in addition to the added pressure of not feeling like they measure up to stories like this one because their quarter didn't go nearly as well. I really feel for those people, and I wish they felt more freedom to be honest and public about these kinds of feelings.

Rather tangentially - I have a one and a half year old daughter who recently turned a question we posed her ("Woah, kiddo. Are you freaking out!?") on it's head. Now sometimes when she gets wound up she goes full-meta and runs back and forth in the kitchen waving her hands in the air yelling "freaking out!", in self-parody.

That reminds me, a little bit, of our startup-culture's relationship to overwork... and don't get me wrong, I don't think articles like this are the ridiculous self-parody, I think they're the really troubling and all-too-real consequence.

Put simply I think we need to do a little more wiggling our toes in the carpet and chilling the fuck out. The world's not suffering from a shortage of first-world martyrs.

Take a breath, go home, do great work tomorrow, and for God's sake appreciate the fact that you're in the hilariously small fraction of people who get to blog about the pains of working too hard by choice.

Re: Sometimes, it’s just time to go home

#25

Post by sillysaurus3 »

chollida1 wrote: post #22
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great Things require dedication, passion, and vision. Working yourself to death is not on the list of requirements If that's true, it should be possible to make a list of companies that have been built without the founders working very hard (or rather, extremely long hours). What are some companies that could go onto such a list? As a filter, let's use criteria "The founders got rich enough not to have to work anymor…

Start with Jeff Hawkins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hawkins I remember hearing him lecture where he said he always tried to be home by 5:30 to have dinner with his family. Grid, Palm, Numenta, Handspring, are all great successes.

Awesome, thank you! This is a great example. It's strange to see evidence that founders don't always have to work most evenings. I wonder why the culture surrounding startups has gone in the opposite direction.

Re: Sometimes, it’s just time to go home

#27

Post by ChuckMcM »

This was a great read. Something to consider in that moment is scale. It is impossible to be an entire company and survive. A CEO I highly respect told me that you can move a truck with a go kart engine, a big transmission, and a lot of coolant, but adding more cylinders is what makes it a truck. He was explaining to me that 'scaling' people was about figuring out how to take what someone was doing really really well, and turning that into a process for doing that thing. Then handing over that thing to the process.

The first startup I joined was run by a guy who had not, to my knowledge, ever been more than a line manager (directly managing people who did things, versus managing people who managed people to did things) He had a really really hard time working with the indirection, unable to feel comfortable that things were "in control" unless he went and talked to the actual people doing the work himself. As the company got bigger that became a bigger and bigger issue for him. He didn't scale, and I could tell that there would come a time when he would be 110% subscribed with tasks that he couldn't figure out how to delegate.

The message about getting home though is really really important. Too many people are sleeping at work because they have no home to go home to any more. If you can set a goal for 'quality hours with the family per week' and when that is in jeopardy due to work commitments restructure work to reduce its impact.

Re: Sometimes, it’s just time to go home

#29

Post by lotsofmangos »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #25
chollida1 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start with Jeff Hawkins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hawkins I remember hearing him lecture where he said he always tried to be home by 5:30 to have dinner with his family. Grid, Palm, Numenta, Handspring, are all great successes.

Awesome, thank you! This is a great example. It's strange to see evidence that founders don't always have to work most evenings. I wonder why the culture surrounding startups has gone in the opposite direction.

I suspect people do it as social signaling because they don't want to be thought of as not dedicated.

If people were more worried about results than appearances, they would not do this though as working that much leads to stupid mistakes and burn-out.

It might make sense if you are just trying to cash out and want to put on a good show for investors by sleeping under your desk, though I would think this only impresses stupid investors.

Is instructive to see the environments where this goes the other way.

In Oxford and Cambridge Universities there is the concept of the 'Grey Man'.

These are the people who are seen to work hard and it used to be considered a terrible affliction and an indication of mediocre talents.

Consider this quote from Stephen Hawking

“The prevailing attitude at Oxford at that time was very anti-work. You were supposed to either be brilliant without effort or accept your limitations and get a fourth-class degree. To work hard to get a better class of degree was the mark of a ‘grey man’, the worst epithet in the Oxford vocabulary.”

Hawking calculated that he worked on average for about an hour a day as an undergraduate physicist: “We affected an air of complete boredom and the feeling that nothing was worth making an effort for.”

from here - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e59f5792-1a23-11e3-b3da-00144feab7...

Re: Sometimes, it’s just time to go home

#30

Post by nickbauman »

I can't help but feel the whole startup culture is a conflict of mission writ large in two ways. First, you're trying to make people's lives better while deleting the idea of a better life for yourself. Second, execution is everything. But when you're working like this the quality of execution inevitably degrades.

I've done startups. At the end I got better at what I was doing but I wasn't ultimately proud of the work I did. The startup even succeeded (I helped other people get rich, I just made a living). Many startups don't even do that.

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