
Marissa Mayer says the secret of success is working 130 hours a week - somerandomness
http://www.cnet.com/news/marissa-mayer-says-the-secret-of-success-is-working-130-hours-a-week/
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epicaricacy
130 hrs requires you only get 5.4 hours of sleep a night, never eat, and never
sleep. And that is assuming you don't take breaks on weekends.

Assuming a 5 day work week that means you are only getting 2 hours of sleep a
night.

tl;dr Title should read "Marissa Mayer is full of shit and/or expects everyone
else to live up to expectations she cannot meet herself"

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DougWebb
I went through a six-month period where I was working 80-120 hrs/week. All I
did was eat quickly and sleep when not working.

This did permanent damage to my metabolism. Towards the end, my body temp was
dropping close to 95 deg while sleeping, and a few times I had trouble waking
up. Should've gone to the hospital; any lower and your body probably can't
warm up on it's own. Ever since that time my normal temp is one degree lower
than it was before, and I've struggled with slow and steady weight gain.

The _project_ was a success, but I wouldn't say that I've had success as a
result of that effort.

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dangerboysteve
Yes, if her definition of success is destroying the value of a company, then
she is very successful.

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buckbova
> If success had a formula, everyone would follow it. If, indeed, work could
> be defined in some specific manner, everyone would know what it was.

No, they wouldn't follow it if the model for success is working 130 hours a
week.

Most people, including myself, would just give out. Even if I knew there was
some vast fortune and a windfall success in a year or two, I couldn't hack
that kind of work load.

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PedroBatista
Yes, you could.

She's not a cobblestone paver working under the Sun. Her job is being a boss
and do the bullshitting that comes with it while earning a couple millions
every month.

Are you telling me you couldn't handle it for 1 year?

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dpark
I'm pretty sure I couldn't. If you literally work for 130 hours/week, you have
less than 5.5 hours for hygiene, food, and sleep. So maybe 4 hours of sleep
per day if you're really efficient at everything else and never leave the
office. I couldn't get by on that for long.

Either Marissa Mayer doesn't sleep or she's grossly exaggerating.

I met a bunch of folks at Yahoo who had this same pretend-to-work-long-hours
philosophy. If asked, they'd claim to work 10+ hours/day but actually showed
up at noon and left at 7pm and rarely seemed to do anything from home. My
interpretation was that long hours were expected and the easiest thing was to
just pretend to be doing them.

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gregatragenet3
Perhaps the secret of success she has is convincing the people around and
under her that THEY need to work 130 hours a week.

In my personal opinion the code I've seen written by someone who worked 130
hours the previous week is complete crap. Working that much never gives you a
moment to clear your mind and see the forest of your problem through the
trees.

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cpncrunch
If you look at the history of Google [1], it's pretty clear that Larry and
Sergey didn't work themselves into the ground. On the contrary, they did
things like spending an entire day driving around Palo Alto taking pictures
with a handheld camera.

The reason Google was successful was because of the creativity of the
founders, which was nurtured by their playful attitude to work. Marissa Mayer
seems to have completely the wrong idea about success, and Yahoo provides
proof of it.

[1]
[http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/04/25/googl...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/04/25/google_s_larry_page_the_co_founder_s_untold_story.html)

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dpark
> _Marissa Mayer seems to have completely the wrong idea about success, and
> Yahoo provides proof of it._

That's unfair. Yahoo was sinking long before Mayer, and numerous CEOs were
unable to do anything useful to fix the situation. I'm not sure Steve Jobs
could have saved Yahoo.

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aresant
This pretty well mirror's PG's assessment of startups:

"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole
working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty
years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially
well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast." (1)

I've started or been a member of, I dunno, 7 or 8 startups at this point in a
20 year career.

The biggest success had the absolute worst work culture, longest hours, was
the most detrimental to personal time, personal health etc.

The one with the brightest potential, best team, and best work/life balance
was an utter failure.

(1) [http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html](http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html)

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cableshaft
I've worked at a startup with poor work culture, long, long hours, and super
detrimental to my time and personal health, and it crashed hard.

It gave me a lot of experience but I'm not sure the resulting poor health and
burnout afterwards made it worth it.

Success is not guaranteed by working hard. At best, it increases your chances
of success, and probably not by a whole lot.

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holografix
Yeah cuz that worked out really well at Yahoo.

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coryl
It worked out well for her, considering her personal networth from Google and
Yahoo is probably over $500m now.

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trebor
Did it really? That leaves barely 38 hours a week for vital things like:
sleep, health, family time, friends, etc. You know, real life stuff™. She
can't get those hours back, and given her "work ethic" seems happy to keep
spending her deficit.

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coryl
The thing about life is you get to define your own life's meaning. So I don't
know if she's actually happy, but I do know that judging her life choices is a
largely fruitless endeavour.

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velox_io
Counting working hours is a bit like using LoC to measure success. More helps
but it definitely isn't a good KPI.

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Blankblank
Working 130 hours a week will not make you successful, but if you are
successful, you probably worked 130 hours a week. People are praising the
wrong thing.

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gmarx
Probably? As in you know that more than half the people whom would be
reasonably considered successful worked 130 weeks for a non trivial portion of
their careers? I'm calling bullshit. I'd need to see a study. My belief is
that work hours is one of the most common things to lie about these days. It's
the adult version of how much you can bench

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dvtv75
Sounds like the CEO at my work. I was working 75+ hours a week, no breaks (got
a warning for taking them), using my own equipment just to keep up with the
increased demands on me. Not paid for anything over 40 hours, minimum wage was
almost double what I was paid.

When I complained about it, I was told that I could do the work or quit,
because the CEO goes to bed at 2am and gets up at 6am, works all his other
hours, and it's my problem if I can't keep up with the workload.

(It's worth noting that, in the end, he got his way and drove me to resign.
Years later, I found out that what he does is illegal, but of course you don't
mess with millionaires if you ever want to work again. Still have a couple of
tricks up my sleeve, though.)

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gmarx
Yup, once you take the job you are at a tremendous disadvantage. You can quit
but then you need to find a new job. If you quit the CEO just works the
remaining people harder until you are replaced

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daly
I worked 106 hours a week for 2 years (three jobs) due to a lot of personal
factors. It got so tiring I fell asleep standing up at a urinal, head resting
on the water trap. I don't believe it is possible to do 130 a week for any
continuous stretch of time. If that's how you "succeed", count me out.

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weddpros
That's 5h20 NOT working, 7 days a week... bs ?

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cairo_x
5 mins to hurl something down your throat, and hired help for everything else.
Everything. Else.

Also stimulants. Lots of stimulants -- and blood transfusions.

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yuncun
What are the blood transfusions for?

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PedroBatista
Tiger blood.

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caseyf7
Of course the real secret is to be lucky enough to be one of the first
employees at a company that is eventually worth more than $500 billion.

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nso95
I doubt she worked 130 every week

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ep103
I've done 110 - 120 for 6-8 months straight. Its doable. I ended up quitting
that job in very large part, because I felt like I could fall into a trap
where I never stopped doing that.

At that point, you've cut off so much of the rest of life, and you've started
gaining such large monetary rewards (or else why do it?), that you can get
caught in it, I think.

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maxxxxx
I can see this possible in a company where things are going well and you make
a lot of money and your work is successful. I have worked at a startup where I
pulled around 100 hours per week for 6 months and it ended with the company
laying off almost everybody and all hard work being scrapped. Never again.

