If you don’t want to grind, don’t pick a career where only the toughest survive—like startups. In China, programmers get massages. You could be giving the massages. I’m not smart, but I worked 7 days a week for a decade. It takes me 40 hours just to warm up, so real work means 100-hour weeks. Yet I’ve built 3 startups, 2 unicorns. In both, I was the dumbest person in the room—but I outworked everyone.
My brother, if you are taking 40 hours to get to the state where you're warmed up, maybe look into that first.
It's hard. The problem is I'm not a natural builder. I have a really hard time getting into the critical state. The ability to go carefully inch by inch through the code. Test and Doc driven development helps with my temperament a bunch. Mostly I had to just rely on hard work.