
Work like hell - DanielRibeiro
http://dcurt.is/work-like-hell
======
chunkyslink
I love spending time with my family and running trails too much. The fresh
air, the exercise, the wind and rain in my face!

'Work like hell' sounds a lot like, well ... Hell?

~~~
CmonDev
It's a choice between pleasure and accomplishment I guess.

~~~
hobbes
False dichotomy.

Spending time with ones family IS an accomplishment. Climbing a hill IS an
accomplishment. Both pleasurable activities, to my mind.

The choice is between which accomplishments give you pleasure, not between
accomplishments and pleasure.

~~~
circlefavshape
This is just being silly. Spending time with your family is not an
"accomplishment" in the commonly-understood sense of the word.

~~~
binarnosp
Raising an happy and healthy child is an accomplishment, and both parents need
to be involved. Giving happiness to your family is an accomplishment, a much
bigger one than "imagining" (because, lets get real, this is just a nice
dream) futuristic trains travelling in a vacuum pipeline.

You don't have a family? Ok, spend all your time imagining nice stuff and give
press releases about your imaginary stuff, but don't call it job, call it
hobby. Are you still calling it a job? Then you shouldn't be spending so much
time on it.

~~~
CmonDev
I am not an EM fan, but Tesla Motors, SpaceX and PayPal are not imaginary and
all more important than a thousand of happy healthy kids.

------
pyalot2
Working 14 hours a day, 7 days the week will not acomplish more than working 8
hours a day, 5 days the week. This is already true of factory production line
workers. How much more true do you think this is for mentally exhausting
activities like information workers.

This is what's called "dumb working". Dumb because your productivity will drop
permanently more than 60% if you do it for prolonged periods of time.

And if you, somehow, can't measure the drop in your productivity and it seems
that you're at the same level of productivity no matter if you're rested and
relaxed as opposed to stressed out, overworked, sleep-deprived and on the
brink of burnout, then you're not doing actual work. You're doing make-believe
work, like sitting trough endless meetings and nodding your head.

Somehow a lot of smart people seem to think that bruteforcing your way trough
a problem (despite solid statistical data of this not working) is a good thing
to do. But let's suppose that even if you could achieve the imaginary boost in
productivity (2.5x or whatever) for prolonged periods of time (which you
can't), most of the time this will not solve your problem. Performance
increases below a factor of 10x are not very juicy targets. No matter how good
you are, you will not be able to cram 400 hours in a week, because a week only
has 168 hours. The way to solve problems that are that hard that you'd need
10x the amount of time to solve them, is to work much, much smarter, so you
can get to grips with the problem.

Working smarter can make it possible to attack a 10x as hard problem, whereas
scaling up work hours even if it'd work does not.

~~~
quchen
"Nine women can't make a baby in one month."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law)

~~~
nakedrobot2
This phrase is so overused, it has become an excuse to be lazy in many cases.

Look how Cory Doctorow works:

" The “write it now and fix it later” approach sounds perfectly reasonable to
me, but then Doctorow pushes it to an extreme. “For instance, I wrote Homeland
[2013] while I was touring Germany to publicise Little Brother [2008]. I had a
translator, we’d visit lots of schools, and so I’d be speaking English half
the time and he’d be speaking German half the time, and I’d write the book
while he was speaking German.” "

[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/9a344ea2-e8af-11e2-aead-00144feabd...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/9a344ea2-e8af-11e2-aead-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2eUDlhKGn)

He is 27 women making 4 babies a week. And he manages to make breakfast for
them all every morning too ;-)

------
breiter
I respect Elon Musk immensely for what he has accomplished. Leading SpaceX and
Tesla to market dominance at the same time is insanely impressive! The guy is
obviously very brilliant and very driven.

But I don't envy him one bit. I remember an interview with Elon where they
asked him why he doesn't just relax, now that he has so much money. And he
replied that he's not the type of guy who can sit on the beach. After a couple
days he gets so antsy, he has to go do something incredible (like start the
next multi-billion dollar company).

I would rather be the guy who is able to sit still and be at peace (even if it
means I just have a "regular" job, whatever that means). Why? Because Elon
doesn't have a choice. He HAS to start the next multi-billion dollar company.
He makes it look like it's his choice, but it really isn't. Put him anywhere
else, and he would probably be the most miserable person on the planet. Even
if he DOES successfully IPO all his companies and becomes worth $10 billion
(instead of just $1 billion), he will not be one bit more satisfied. Because
it's not like the additional $9 billion will give him the thing he's missing.
If it were like that, then the first $1 million would've taken care of that
(or the first $2 million, whatever). And so after his current companies
succeed, he'll have to do it all over again. And then again.

Compare this to someone who could decide to work hard and strive to be
successful, but doesn't _HAVE_ to. (i.e. he wouldn't feel terrible if he
wasn't insanely successful)

So while I think Elon is a totally awesome entrepreneur, I don't envy being
him.

------
toadi
Well I always like the following quote:

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an
easy way to do it.”

― Bill Gates

Luckily I don't aspire to be the next Elon Musk. So I don't read it as most to
be successful you need to work like hell. To be like Elon Musk you need to
work like hell. Successful is by every individual defined different.

~~~
hellrich
Are you sure about the source of this quote? I've seen it attributed to
Napoelon before.

~~~
NateDad
"Never trust the stated source of a quote online." \--Ben Franklin

------
nakedrobot2
I concur with the quote by Elon Musk. If your goal is to "achieve greatness",
that is. That's not what a lot of people want to do. In that case, those
people should work smarter for less time.

If you _do_ want to achieve greatness, yes, you will burn out from time to
time. Deal with it.

Yes, it's harder when you have kids, but it's doable, _if_ you have a loving
and supporting partner at home.

If you are hungry enough, you can do it.

If you're not hungry enough, that's ok. Enjoy yourself.

~~~
Peroni
100hr week = 16hr days assuming you take one day off per week.

16hr days + 6hrs sleep = 2 non-working hours a day.

Personally I would rather live in comfortable mediocrity and spend significant
time with my wife and son than distance myself from them in exchange for
money.

Each to his own I guess.

~~~
nugget
It's not always about money. Some people just want to put that dent in the
universe.

~~~
Peroni
I'd argue that I'm doing my bit to change the world by ensuring I raise an
emotionally stable, empathetic, happy human being.

During the day I do my bit by helping others find a job that actually makes
them happy.

I may not be sending folk to space or building faster ways for people to get
to work but I feel like I make _some_ difference.

Again, different strokes for different folks.

------
dalek_cannes
1\. Yes, but he'll sustain his work rate for years while you'll burn out in
one, therefore achieving less in the long run.

2\. Yes, but do it for your own ambitions and projects, NEVER for a
corporation -- they'll squeeze every bit of productivity out of you and then
replace you once you turn in to a burnt out husk.

3\. Yes, but set yourself a goal and slow down once you reach it. Then enjoy
the wealth you've earned.

Source: Personal experience. I violated all of the above and suffered the
consequences before becoming enlightened.

Edit: typo

------
harrytuttle
I prefer:

"Work smarter". If other people are putting in a 40 hour week, then you can
automate yourself and increase efficiency, then do a 20 hour week and do stuff
you _want_ to do rather than _must_ do. In my case that means spending time
with my family.

Elon does a miserable job of family by the looks.

~~~
BasDirks
I don't think it's completely cool to judge someone's family life.

~~~
noir_lord
When that person is suggesting that working 100 hours a week I think having a
look at their work/life balance is sensible.

~~~
nakedrobot2
It is up to them and the people who they live with, how they want to live
their life. Musk, from the sound of it, is not interested in getting home at
6pm and shutting off work. One would assume that the Musk household lives
accordingly.

There is no need to compare your own family life with what you expect others'
family life should look like.

------
brey
ignoring burnout completely - even for the medium term (anything more than a
couple of days), I very much doubt that someone doing a 100 hour week is 2.5x
as productive as someone doing a 40 hour week

~~~
venomsnake
He is usually from half as productive to 10% more from my observations

------
pdpi
Why do we glorify this sort of thing?

Let's say you sleep 8 hours a night (and don't fool yourself into thinking you
don't need all that sleep). In between work and sleep, that's 156 out of 168
hours accounted for every week. How the hell are you supposed to enjoy life
with the 12 hours you have left?

------
forgottenpaswrd
Or you will simply burn yourself out , hate life, lose support from your
family and friends, get out of shape, feel exhausted and make productivity go
the drain way.

Elon Musk could do it because he loves his work so much he is not really
working. But I met people that did the "100 hours thing" not enjoying it with
so bad consequences(suicide, their children taking drugs or becoming
prostitutes or joining gangs as they don't see their parents and are in
constant search for love).

------
Bjorkbat
Back when I dropped out and went on my little "farming adventure" I was put in
a position where I was working around 90 hours a week. So yeah, pretty close.

I didn't get more done than the other guys. One guy I met managed a 400 acre
pecan orchard. He had an army of undocumented labor and expensive harvesting
tech. Another guy, well, onetime he bought a $20,000 high-tech cucumber seed-
sowing machine that you pulled behind a tractor. I remember him telling me
that this thing was intelligent enough to plant seeds at the perfect depth and
discard any bad seeds before it plants them, all using some sort of
engineering wizardy that I've since forgotten the details of.

Me? There were these two kids who helped harvest stuff for me so I could focus
on everything else I had to do. Farmer I was working for also had two Farmall
tractors from the 40s or 50s. Pretty neat actually...when the good one worked,
and the other was just there for parts, because the logic is if you buy two
broken tractors then hopefully you can get one decent one by combining the
two. Didn't always work out that way.

I worked like hell alright, but I sure didn't feel like I was getting anything
done faster. I was working hard, but I sure wasn't working smart, not compared
to the other guys

------
selectnull
Unless you burn out, in which case you might achieve considerably less and
have bad consequences.

------
voyou
But if you work for 200 hours a week you'ld accomplish the same in only 2
months. Think about that, Elon so-called Musk.

------
binarnosp
And then you die

~~~
CmonDev
And if you are lazy you never die.

~~~
binarnosp
Working 40 hours per week is not being lazy: is balancing work & real life,
keeping them separate and have both of them.

We work to live, we don't live to work.

What Elon Musk does is not "work": for him is an hobby and you can put how
many hours you want in an hobby, but I don't believe for one second that his
employees enjoy putting 100 hours WORKING hours and live an healthy and happy
life

------
beloch
If I worked 100 hours weeks I'd go nuts in very short order. I'd hate it. I've
known at least one person who has probably worked 100+ hour weeks for most of
his life. This person has a wife and a son, and he hates them. Well, perhaps
not hate, but he certainly avoids them most of the time. If you tear him away
from work for something, he'll insist on talking about work. If you go to a
conference with him you can see him slowly going mad being separated from work
for such an extended period of time, even if it's to talk to other people
about work! He loves what he does and is ridiculously happy doing it, but
that's all there is to his life. Retirement _will_ kill him. He is very
accomplished, but there are people who work 20 hours a week out there who are
more accomplished.

Don't listen to people who tell you that you'll burn out if you work X hours
or be a failure if you only work Y hours. Human beings are variable. Find your
optimum.

------
Choronzon
Musk is a good general staff officer in the von Hammerstein classification
system(Hey it makes more sense than myers briggs or that crap always posted
here based on watching mediocre sitcoms.)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-
Equord](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord)

I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and
lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and
diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy
-- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties.
Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership
duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure
necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and
diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will
always cause only mischief

------
aytekin
Work like hell, time to time.

Sometimes you have to work very hard to get the ball rolling. Once it is
rolling you can take it easy, relax, move onto the next thing, spend more time
with your family and friends.

Most good things in life cannot be accomplished with half assed effort. So,
you cannot do the 4-hour work week thing all the time.

------
azsromej
I remember a few of us developers resisting a push for 10-12 hours days at a
company I worked at. It was easy to find precedent in research and blog posts
about how it wasn't sustainable.

It's been interesting to see what my wife experiences as a medical resident
lately, in contrast to what I'm used to in the software world: 10-16 hours a
day, 6 days a week, and it's incredibly normal, necessary, unquestioned.
Today's residents have it easier with the lower 80-hour restrictions in place.
When there's talk about the workload, it tends to center around how the lower
limits might actually be bad (eg, this recent New Yorker piece
[http://nyr.kr/15hELxF](http://nyr.kr/15hELxF)).

------
davidjgraph
I've seen software developers putting in 80-90 hour weeks. The general pattern
was arrive 30 minute because they over-slept. Spend an extra hour not being
productive because they are half asleep. 4 coffees later they start fixing the
bugs they introduced last night because they were exhausted.

They don't/can't listen in meetings and as for any ability to architecture
software at a high level, forget it.

One of the most stupid quotes I've heard for a long time. And working 10/4 as
much gains you 12/4 productive hours, you actually become more productive? I
simply don't believe any intelligent person really said this.

------
enord
"If the goal of social development was to enable us to work maximally, we
should go crazy.

The goal is to free people to create maximally. Dance, paint, sing. Whatever
you want."

-Ernst Wigforss Swedish finance minister 1925-1926, 1936-1949.

------
3pt14159
I love Elon Musk, but Dustin doesn't work like that and neither do I.

Plus it is much easier to "Work like hell" if you are a boss of a couple
massive engineering companies and people really need you all the time. It is
harder to be creative AND self-motivating AND productive without missing
details. The most I've worked was 87.5 hours in a week (I had to run 3 massive
construction jobs because two guys got sick while one guy was on vacation) and
then I got into a motor cycle accident due to sleep depravation.

I still work hard, but 100 hours is not sustainable.

------
ohwp
A lot of people immediately start to talk about burnout. But it's important to
understand that a burnout is not about working hours.

The fire burns out when no fuel is added. Fuel can come in many forms and
shapes, like: working out, love what you do, gain energy from your work,
eating healthy, sleeping well, and so on.

So the quote only applies to people who love what they are doing because they
get there fuel from the job (which isn't a job for them but a way of living).

Question is ofcourse: why don't you do what you really love?

------
armansu
It's reasonable for Elon to say things like that as he truly found his life's
work. As Steve Jobs once said, "You have to have a lot of passion for what you
do because if you don't, any rational person would give up". Those of us who
were not hard-working <strike>less fortunate</strike> enough to find IT, have
to resort to more reasonable '4-hour workweeks'.

------
supercoder
I think the more appropriate link to someone browsing hacker news should just
be 'Do _some_ work already would you'.

------
hatu
This is toxic advice and I'm glad to see most of HN agrees. Being ambitious is
one thing but there's only so much a human mind and body can take. Banging
your head against the wall 24 hours a day isn't going to produce better
results than a healthy balanced life, in the long run it will be worse
results.

------
armansu
By the way, here is my response to this post. 'Work like heaven':
[http://nowaternomoon.com/post/60922903254/work-like-
heaven](http://nowaternomoon.com/post/60922903254/work-like-heaven)

------
Tichy
That's just dumb.

The real problem is managing resources, which includes your health and energy.
If you somehow can make yourself fit enough to work 100h, fine. But it is not
just a matter of willpower. Not in the long run anyway.

------
auggierose
You have to find your own pace, the pace which makes you most productive (in
whatever terms you like to measure productivity). If that is 100 hours a week
for Elon Musk, good for him.

------
olav
Even if the quote is by Elon Musk, I assume it is not him personally that
works like this, but maybe some of his co-workers, certainly not for prolonged
periods of time.

------
taude
Ha...unless you've got tunnel vision and started down the path of working on
the wrong thing.

I find things like this to be hindsight accolades.

------
CmonDev
If you are a business owner that is.

------
seivan
As long as you do it for yourself and not some boss.

------
warrenmiller
Burnout much?

------
progx
"If you win in lottery, you make more money than others in many years of
working"

Stupid truism!

~~~
progx
Sorry, i am not Elon Musk, if i was Elon Musk everybody will say "cool, you
are right" to my truism.

------
saguaro
What's the rush?

------
antidaily
Lazy wisdom.

------
yownie
go fuck yourself

