Last month, a 22-year-old entrepreneur named Emil Barr published a Wall Street Journal op-ed boasting a provocative title: “‘Work-Life Balance’ Will Keep You Mediocre.”
He opens with a spicy take:
“I’m 22 and I’ve built two companies that together are valued at more than $20 million…When people ask how I did it, the answer isn’t what they expect—or want—to hear. I eliminated work-life balance entirely and just worked. When you front-load success early, you buy the luxury of choice for the rest of your life.”
As Barr elaborates, when starting his first company, he slept only three and a half hours per night. “The physical and mental toll was brutal: I gained 80 pounds, lived on Red Bull and struggled with anxiety,” he writes. “But this level of intensity was the only way to build a multimillion-dollar company.”
He ends the piece with a wonderfully cringe-inducing flourish. “I plan to become a billionaire by age 30,” he writes. “Then I will have the time and resources to tackle problems close to my heart like climate change, species extinction and economic inequality.”
(Hold for applause.)
It’s easy to mock Barr’s twenty-something bravado, even if I do have to be careful not to be the pot calling the kettle black (ahem).
Yet, some of this knee-jerk mockery might stem from the uncomfortable realization that beneath this performative busyness, there may lie a kernel of truth. Are we forfeiting our opportunity to make a meaningful impact with our work if we prioritize balance too much? As NYU professor Suzy Welch noted, “I do give [Barr] points for saying something I only mutter to my M.B.A. students …You cannot well-being yourself to wealth.”
To help address these fears, let’s turn to the advice of another twenty-something: me. In an essay I published when I was all of 27—around the time I was finishing my doctoral dissertation at MIT—I wrote the following:
“I found writing my thesis to be similar to writing my books. It’s an exercise in grit: You have to apply hard focus, almost every day, over a long period of time.
To me, this is the definition of what I call hard work. The important point, however, is that the regular blocks of hard focus that comprise hard work do not have to be excessively long. That is, there’s nothing painful or unsustainable about hard work. With only a few exceptions, for example, I was easily able to maintain my fixed 9 to 5:30 schedule while writing my thesis.
By contrast, the work schedule [followed by many graduate students] meets the definition of what I call hard to do work. Working 14 hours a day, with no break, for months on end, is very hard to do! It exhausts you. It’s painful. It’s impossible to sustain.
I’m increasingly convinced that a lot of student stress is caused by a failure to recognize the difference between these two work types. Students feel that big projects should be hard, so hard to do habits seem a natural fit.
I am hoping that by explicitly describing the alternative of doing plain hard work, I can help convince you that the hard to do strategy is a terrible way to tackle large…challenges.”
I gave that article a simple, declarative title: Focus Hard. In Reasonable Bursts. One Day at a Time.
This strategy has continued to serve me well. I’m now 43 years old and, I suppose, still managing to avoid mediocrity—all while continuing to rarely work past 5:30 p.m. I’m not willing to sacrifice all the other things I care about in order to grind.
Barr is still young, and his body is resilient enough to get away with his hustle for a while longer. I hope, however, that those who found his message appealing might also hear mine. Deep results require disciplined, relentless action over a long period of time, and this is a very different commitment than the type of unfocused freneticism lionized by Barr. I work hard almost every day. But those days are rarely hard to get through. This distinction matters.
Hi, Cal
I’m seeing this with indie fiction writers. Nora Roberts has a career of longer than 20 years and has written 200 books. There was an author at a writing conference who had written for 7 years and had more than 100 books. The act of writing is about 1,000 words an hour, so these writers are probably running at 10-12 hour days. I’m now seeing a lot with series that suddenly disappear, probably because they’re burning out.
There’s a point where you can’t keep up with it. $30M isn’t going help much if you destroy your body in the process.
Thank you….very helpful as we enter our brave new world.
There’s a tendency in US society to worship the pursuit of efficiency and valorize sacrifices in the pursuit of wealth. This suits the military – industrial complex perfectly at the expense of the individual’s spirit.
Your blog post is a useful corrective, but (for me) doesn’t get to the core of the issue:
What is the point of making a billion dollars or even 10 million as an end in itself? There is no mention in the WSJ op-ed about the writer’s purpose in making these sacrifices, other than the pursuit of mammon. It’s a sad commentary on the values – or lack thereof – of certain people. This young man may yet achieve his goal, but is the goal worth it?
I left it out of my article, but Emil does address this in a sort of ham-handed, cringe-worthy way. He says, at some point in the article, that his goal is to make a billion dollars by the time he is 30 then turn his attention to solving climate change and inequality.
The key is to make progress with your hard work. Speed or lack of speed will get you there faster or slower, but still get you there. Balance has the advantage of preserving your health in the process.
You don’t need $20 million dollars to have the luxury of choice. Our society tried to sell us that you never have “enough”.
One of the reasons I love your work is because it’s pretty clear that your values and your work align. Discontent comes from those being out of alignment.
This is a great post Cal. I am currently reading Peak Performance, and this is definitely what the authors describe as the set up for burnout.
In a real way, the Growth Equation of Stress+Rest=Growth rings true after reading the WSJ article. Living off Red Bull and gaining 80 pounds should rightly be characterized as the wrong type of stress. In this scenario, rest is considered to be the enemy.
This story also highlights why the Stress+Rest=Growth insight is important for sustaining performance over an extended period of time. Just as wealth building and wealth preservation are two different skills, so too are building a sustainable company and maintaining a sustainable company. Without a serious reduction in the destructive cortisol type of stress, it is only a matter of time before burnout collapses the individual. The same ending occurs in business, sports, academia, etc.
Thanks again for the insights Cal!
I am an internal medicine resident and even though I am done with my hard work of seeing my patients from the 9-5 window, I can’t leave. In residency, our shifts are from 6 am to 7 to 7:30 PM. I know it’s not sustainable but it’s not something I can fight or so I think. What do you have to say for us in medicine who have to be there for long hours for 4-6 week stretches and then we have 2 weeks of clinic time where we work 8-5?
I also want balance but I don’t know how to attain it in residency.
“But this level of intensity was the only way to build a multimillion-dollar company.”
Really? You could not pay me ANY sum of money to gain 80 pounds.
Food for thought: Imagine the bad feedback a young women would receive for boasting gaining 80 pounds to meet her goals? –But it’s okay for a guy to do that…?
Yes- of all the periods in your life to set aside your health and gain 80 pounds, age 22 has to be nearly the worst. (Whether you are male or female, really). Maybe just a few years younger, would be the absolute worst. The health effects will surely haunt him for the rest of his life (and probably take a huge bite out of that supposed “wealth” he says he attained).
What I am saying is not the difference in health detriment based on gender.
Rather–given our culture’s double standard sexism, society’s judgemental gasp will fall much harder on a woman, rather a man, for gaining 80 pounds in pursuit of a goal.
Two problems with your premise:
1. You’re assuming that the work he did was “busyness.”
2. He built two companies. That may not be deep work for you, but clearly it is for him.
(Additional minor point: I wouldn’t assume anyone’s body is resilient enough to come back from having gained eighty pounds.)
Got it, the two work styles make things clear.
The question is, 1) you want to work hard with hard and sustainable focus;
2) or hard to work, just work last a long time(over 10 work hours a day)
I will choose the 1st.
By the way, the two work styles is similar to the distinctions between [work behavior] and [work output].
I find the extreme hustle culture amongst entrepreneurs odd since it is well understood in startup circles that the biggest factor in success is market factors. Marc Andreessen called it “the only thing that matters” https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html There are plenty of hard-working entrepreneurs who never get to product-market-fit.
I’m inclined to believe that many portray their 24/7 culture to signal their commitment and potential to prospective investors in the absence of market-pull which can only be demonstrated by insane growth and profitability.
Pieces like Barr’s always make me cringe. What does “mediocre” even mean to him? Is a person who works only 8 hours a day—but who has robust family ties and quality leisure time—mediocre? Many of the movies and books I read growing up had the message that money and success isn’t everything. But now even that simplistic children’s message is controversial.
And, also, if you’re working overtime constantly and are chronically sleep deprived, you’ll burn out eventually. Leisure time, friend/family time, and “do nothing” time all have restorative functions. Many of my work ideas come from leisure time, actually.