It’s hard to go a day on Twitter without finding another discussion about hustle culture, hard work, and the ethics of asking employees to go above and beyond.
There are generally two camps of opinion on this:
- Pro-hustlers: Working super-long hours and putting in 100% effort is necessary to building anything valuable.
- Anti-hustlers: Working super-long hours and putting in 100% effort is toxic, unhealthy, and leads to poor performance.
Would it surprise you if we said that neither is painting the real picture?
The “pro-hustlers” are wrong in the sense that most people’s brains are probably only capable of doing about 5 hours of focused knowledge work each day.
They’re missing the fact that it’s intense focus that makes great work, not long hours.
Four hours of intensely-focused work might equal fourteen hours of unfocused work.
The anti-hustlers are partly right.
But, it’s still true that most founders work 12+ hours a day and many startup employees work 50–60+ hours per week.
Most successful people work long, difficult hours, at least to start — and the same can be said for many professionals.
So where does this leave us?
What we think… it’s all about leverage
Most debate about hustle culture is meaningless, because it devolves into the same trappings that ruin most online discussions — oversimplification.
Sure, 12-hour days might be necessary for some people to succeed at some companies.
Others might make a lot not working relatively little (or not working at all) because they build leverage:
- effectively delegate
- use technology to enhance their productivity, and/or
- effectively allocate monetary capital to generate productivity instead
The latter part is effectively what retirees do. They used their labor to build savings, which they converted into investments (e.g., stocks, bonds) where they’re effectively paying people to generate the earnings (i.e., the productivity) for them.
Leverage is everything.
Some might work a lot because all they have is their time (no savings, no employees, no sophisticated technology, no advanced skills). When all you have is your time, there is no leverage.
But they can get there over time if they can focus and grow their skills and learn how to build systems, which create leverage.
If you can build leverage, you can get more and more out of each hour.
Think about it…
- If a CEO of a company has 20 direct reports that each requires 1 hour per week to manage…
- and each of those direct reports works 50 hours each week…
- and each has 10 employees under him or her also working 50 hours each week…
Those 20 hours of work managing is the equivalent of 500,000 work hours of the entire company.
That’s a lot of leverage being produced.
Final word
At most companies, they should just focus on doing great work.
Sometimes that means some extra “hustling.” Sometimes it’s more relaxed. But, in the end, it’s not about hustling at all; it’s about doing focused work.
