10 ms·

> If you only have seven good hours a day in you, does that mean the rest of the day that you spend with your family, reading, exercising at the gym, or whateve

by jhp123 3y ago

> If you only have seven good hours a day in you, does that mean the rest of the day that you spend with your family, reading, exercising at the gym, or whatever other virtuous activity you would be spending your time on, are all done poorly? If I do focused mental work for even seven hours I'm completely wiped. I absolutely can't read a normal book at that point. Clicking the next meme on reddit is about all I can manage. And yeah, my wife and kids aren't getting a lot from me on those days. I'm surprised that Carmack seems to find this absurd. Am I super atypical? Or is he? I'm actually curious: after let's say 5 hours of in-person interviews, do most people come home and fire up the CAD software to work on rockets or whatever, like Carmack, or do they hang out on the couch vegetating and feeling like they have a minor hangover or head cold, like me?

avocabros 3y ago
There are plenty of people who do side projects outside of work, train for marathons, etc. That doesn't mean you're atypical - most people don't run marathons, for instance - but I don't think Carmack is this wild, totally out-of-band 1 in a million in terms of energy/motivation
goostavos 3y ago
In-person interviews are kind've a weird thing to just throw in there. I'd describe them as very, very different than the focused mental work that happens during the normal course of a day job. Interviews are high stress, emotionally draining, and, honestly, frequently rather degrading due to being talked down to. It's like having the fight or flight part of your brain firing on max for 5 hours. I agree that the only thing I really want to do at the end of such days is turn off. That is wildly different from my day to day. After work, I'm still hyped to go to the gym, do some woodworking, program more, study. The world is an exciting place. I've also found that if I succumb to the reddit infinite-scroll, a sense of numbness washes over me that takes awhile to shake free. I scroll like I'm seeking a high and nothing is doing it. Contrast that with, say, reading a book after work. Such a thing has never left me feeling the same empty feeling.
- jhp123 3y ago
  that's interesting, for me interviews feel very similar to the work I do day-to-day, except I need to be on the whole time. If I have a work task like a tight deadline or urgent production issue that requires maximum effort for 5–8 hours then the feeling is very similar to how I feel after an interview. Maybe I am too close to the "fight-or-flight" mode during normal, lower-stakes work.
PartiallyTyped 3y ago
He is. He is super atypical. Personally, I am drained by meetings and am in my happy place in front of an editor working on a grand project, one that I find interesting. The moment work stops being interesting, eg due to lack of complexity, I leave. Chaos and complexity energise me.
- cvwright 3y ago
  Carmack is a beast. Here's one of the first articles I ever read on HN, written by a guy who used to work with him: Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls https://waivek.github.io/website/tooltip.html https://waivek.github.io/website/tooltip.html
  - MMAesawy 3y ago
    This was a great read, thanks for that.
scottLobster 3y ago
I've found that I HAVE to stay in shape, sleep well and eat some approximation of healthy to maintain my mental performance for long periods, so many issues that I blamed purely on psychology or "how I was wired" really came down to I wasn't working out at all, was drinking too much on the weekends, and sitting in a cubicle for 8-9 hours a day. That said, even today I can definitely work myself into a state where my brain just collapses if it attempts to do anything complex, and doing even the simplest chores seems like climbing Mt. Everest. However I have some morbidly obese co-workers who still manage to keep up with me and stay sharp for longer in some cases. Likewise I've read some blogs about some people who genetically can be at full capacity, or near to it, off of 5 hours of sleep consistently. I'm honestly jealous I'm sure he has a strong will but I think Carmack is some variety of biologically gifted for sure, lucky bastard.
- llbbdd 3y ago
  Do you happen to have the 5-hour sleep genetics study handy? I've thought that I'm this type of person and I'm curious
  - scottLobster 3y ago
    It's been a while since I read said blogs, but I'm pretty sure they were discussing this one: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/03/410051/scientists-discover-how-gene-mutation-reduces-need-sleep https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/03/410051/scientists-discover...
- richbell 3y ago
  One of my coworkers only needs 3-5 hours of sleep; he's been that way since he was a child. It's certainly given him an advantage, though he "jokes" that he'll probably die early.
NetBeck 3y ago
Reminds me of excess calories chess players burn when playing. >Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day.[1] [1] https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/27593253/why-grandmasters-magnus-carlsen-fabiano-caruana-lose-weight-playing-chess https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/27593253/why-grandmaste...
- baby 3y ago
  I read these articles and it's apparently because of high stress + breathing. Not because of using one's brain. :(
  - johnfn 3y ago
    That doesn't mean they're unrelated though - maybe high stress and breathing are a necessary requirement of using your brain a lot.
    - Solvency 3y ago
      Restricted shitty breathing, both chronic and short term, jack up your blood pressure, stress and cortisol levels, etc. Healthy athletes know how to breathe. Chess is no different. You can be a great chess player in spite of your terrible body mechanics, breathing patterns, etc. It doesn't mean it's "good" for you, and certainly doesn't mean it's unavoidable.
  - toolz 3y ago
    the same thing goes for physical labor. Exhaling is mechanically how you lose body fat. Breathing more isn't sustainable without creating demand, but if it were sustainable you could just breath faster to lose weight.
    - pizzapill 3y ago
      I don't think that's how you lose fat. You get rid of the exhaust generated during the chemical fat burning process. If you couldn't exhale you would still burn fat.
baby 3y ago
If I'm passionate about something I can code non stop for like 2 days in a row without sleeping (been there done that) I'm not saying my code will look right at that point, or that it's a healthy thing to do, but I don't think the upper bound of maximal throughput + quality is at 7h a day either (or that you should even aim for maximum throughput + quality).
yodsanklai 3y ago
I suspect Carmack is atypical, which is probably why he achieved great things. We're all different. I certainly know people who can be focused for more than seven hours a day (some colleagues, me when I was younger, my family doctor, my dentist). Personally, as an introvert, what drains me most is interacting with people. I think I could be coding 7 hours on my personal project and still be rather fresh. But this isn't what my job looks like, unfortunately.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kenjackson 3y ago
  He’s definitely atypical. I’m certainly not like him. I won’t ever revolutionize an industry — and that’s OK. I’d like to do it in theory, but if it meant being in an office 16 hours a day then I’ll pass. I’m more than happy he gets the spoils for his hard work and brilliance.
- slowking2 3y ago
  Same here, interacting with people makes my performance on all sorts of mental tasks drop much faster. 5-6 hours of meetings, and worst case I don't want to do anything else, best case I still need to go for a walk and another 30 minutes on top of that before I'm back to average coding skill. On the flip side, even for coding I don't love, I can usually grind out 9-10 hours at fairly high productivity; I usually won't because I have other priorities to balance but I can. If I find what I'm working on really interesting, I can do 12 hours at high productivity. For work, I try to have 2 days a week where I put most of my meetings so that hopefully at least 1 or 2 days of the rest are high productivity.
zerr 3y ago
The difference is that while most try to do their hobbies (e.g. game dev) after 8 hours of CRUD/boring/exhausting employment (working for others), Carmack had his hobby (game dev) as his day job, and also, he worked for himself - he never was an employee.
- intelVISA 3y ago
  Big fan of Carmack but yes, he was blessed to have his interests, abilities and 'job' align near perfectly. Being able to solve interesting problems all day and directly reap the rewards is positively alien to the avg SWE enduring their 9-5 grind on 'business problems' in a CRUD gulag to pay off their boss' new yacht.
- bluedino 3y ago
  The id guys took their work computers home to create Commander Keen while they still were employed at Softdisk
atleastoptimal 3y ago
Carmack is one in a million workaholic sociopath autist, you shouldn't feel bad comparing yourself to him
skwirl 3y ago
Carmack is very much atypical, but I don’t think getting completely wiped after 7 hours of any focused work is normal, either. It’s certainly the case if you are doing 7 hours of something you hate or find tedious. I would probably be fried doing 7 hours of nothing but code reviews. But if I’m building something I feel excited about, I can work as many hours as my life obligations will allow and feel pretty good about it. Lots of people have no trouble playing 12 straight hours of civilization or other focused video games.
- shortrounddev2 3y ago
  7 straight hours of anything will fry me. But most people in the technology field (hell, any field) don't work for 7 straight hours. They work for a couple hours at a time and take breaks in between. I'd be surprised if most office workers do more than 4 hours of actual work a day
  - metabagel 3y ago
    Bingo
  - deprecative 3y ago
    It depends on whether or not you count pretending to be busy as work.
  - laurels-marts 3y ago
    People are very different. My gf cannot sit down and work for more than an hour before she needs to go for a walk and take breaks. In general, she doesn’t find office/computer work fulfilling and is looking for a more dynamic career. I on the other hand can go 12 hours getting up once or twice to go to WC and will skip lunch. Taking a break most of the time sounds like a punishment. When I’m working on a problem and hold a lot of information in my working memory taking a break would only set me way back. Meetings are avoided unless absolutely necessary. Emails and messages are answered before I shut down as they don’t require much focus. That’s how I love working. But I’m also very introverted and robotic. I need to find a more balanced approach and appreciate my gf’s influence on me but it doesn’t come naturally to me.
mcv 3y ago
I think Carmack is absolutely atypical. What he says could absolutely be true for him, but that doesn't mean it's going to be true for everybody. It might only be true for a specific group of outliers. I can totally imagine that someone who's sufficiently intrinsically motivated, and has enough mental capacity, willpower or whatever to put in long hours, longer hours might very well produce a linear increase in productivity. But most people are going to be exhausted at some point. Or demotivated. And enough of that is going to bring productivity down. So it's the kind of thing that might very well work for you, but you can't demand the same thing from others.
- alchemist1e9 3y ago
  When I’m highly motivated and want to accomplish huge technical work I will shift to sleeping 2-3 hours, working 6, then sleeping 2-3 hours, I will keep doing that for as long as 4 days straight and do nothing but work, sleep, eat. I don’t tell many people this as they think you are crazy, but my family knows, and they think I have a mental health problem. I don’t at all. I function completely normally and fully regulated in all ways. I just really really want to accomplish something asap.
  - whatyesaid 3y ago
    Well 6 hours of focused work is really good. 2-3 hours of sleep windows isn't enough for REM/deep I'd imagine which is the crazy thing.
  - lokhura 3y ago
    I do this too. From what I've been told, this may be a symptom of ADHD, namely hyperfocusing [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperfocus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperfocus
  - anoy8888 3y ago
    You certainly have mental or health problems.if you are not an alien and have the same dna as humans , 2 to 3 hours of sleep will absolutely not be enough for your health and brain productivity even if you believe otherwise
epvgwwqe 3y ago
It obviously depends on the person and their approach. Nobody is confused why elite athletes can run faster/longer but there is a lot of debate about "work-life balance". Being a "workaholic" is similar to being an elite athlete if done right, and for most people it requires lots of ramp up time to being able to work longer hours as well as proper "conditioning" such as diet/exercise consideration, as well as a genetic predisposition and explicit effort toward maintaining psych.
- coryrc 3y ago
  I can do tons of work if it's motivating. Most of what's available is tedium and incremental bullshit. Actually I'll go further and say most of our work is a net negative for society. Ads are just psychological manipulation to trigger feelings of jealously and greed. Or producing new mixed plastic silicon junk with a 3-year supported software stack but could run for a decade but then millennia in the trash dump. PFAs in all our water supplies. Okay even more demotivated now.
  - vasco 3y ago
    Maybe change your perspective to be less sour about life, stress kills!
  - TotalCrackpot 3y ago
    You may be interested in reading Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, he wrote about that: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullsh...
  - aik 3y ago
    Then do something about it. Or if it bothers you too much but you’re not motivated enough to do anything about it, then it’s misplaced energy.
iLoveOncall 3y ago
It's because he is completely out of touch with the experience of the average person. This is a guy with a net worth of $50M, world famous in his field, that can tell anyone to fuck off. His time outside of work is undoubtedly much more free and dedicated to recharging than the one of the guy that has to do chores on the weekend and has effectively barely any rest.
ren_engineer 3y ago
I think a huge part comes down to if you are actually interested in what you are working on. I can pretty easily do 16+ hour days if I'm doing something I enjoy, whether that's writing code or playing videos games when I was a kid. Another huge factor is being able to avoid external stressors which are what really drain people and cause burnout I think, having bad co-workers or manager, health issues, family issues, etc. is a killer and will impact your focus drastically. Big difference between working long hours because you are having fun versus working long hours because a boss is breathing down your neck and you'll be fired if you don't finish something in a few weeks Carmack is also in a favorable position where he's basically always been able to choose only projects he's passionate about for work, so he can't really see the perspective of somebody being forced to work on something pointless by their boss my take from his comment was that even when you are too mentally drained to write code or something similarly demanding, you could still do stuff like meetings, responding to emails, getting feedback from customers, planning stuff you will code when mentally fresh, etc. So the critical thing is to make sure you can focus on valuable stuff when you are at your best and try to save the other stuff for later
- epolanski 3y ago
  But how many days can you do it? Doesn't matter how much I love an activity I can hardly do it all time for more than few days.
  - kqr 3y ago
    Maybe I'm in the same atypical group as Carmack (a sentence I never thought I'd utter) but during a normal work week, my idea of relaxing is things like studying statistics, product development, numerical methods to solve differential equations, history, etc. This is stuff most people would call "work" because it does take effort, it makes me a better developer and much of it ties somewhat directly into problems I'm facing at work. But for me it's winding down after work, and recharging for the next day. Sometimes I have so much to do at work that I need to just read fiction or play around in the darkroom to relax. But this is not the norm -- it's happened twice in the last decade, and lasted for about a month. So for the question of how many days I can do it? On average 1795.
pwillia7 3y ago
you're the typical one I think
useruser125524 3y ago
Carmack is absolutely not the norm from a brain chemistry perspective. His level of obsessiveness is not naturally achievable for the vast majority of individuals. That whole post is very short-sighted and solipsistic
- Solvency 3y ago
  Having a hyperactive brain often requires unhealthy coping mechanisms and eccentric fuel sources. In his case, way too much processed food, soda, etc. There's no bottomless reservoir. some people prioritize their health. Other people prioritize other things, at the expense of their personal health or longevity.
  - gonehome 3y ago
    He's pretty fit - I think he's just way smarter than average and able to pair that with extreme focus (rare). It comes across in Masters of Doom.
    - Conscat 3y ago
      Personally I'm pretty distrustful of documentaries. To be entertaining, they usually have to do some amount of narrative manipulation or propagandizing. There are many out there that open a small window into someone's life to make them look extremely evil or heroic while the reality is much more mundane. Some even manipulate interviews with credible people to prove the earth is flat or other nonsense. I love the book Blood Sweat and Pixels and find it very entertaining and inspiring, but I don't trust that it's a nuanced objective look on the 5 stories it covers or that the characters within are as perfect irl as they come off.
      - gonehome 3y ago
        Reasonable, his intelligence also comes across in his tech talks too - similar to Andrej Karpathy in clarity and bandwidth for talks. There’s also a lot of other commentary on his capabilities outside of that one account, so it seems likely to be true imo.
shortrounddev2 3y ago
Carmack is definitely atypical
bitwize 3y ago
> Or is he? It's John Carmack. There's nothing typical about him, he's Kristy Hawkins tier atypical.
noisy_boy 3y ago
> I'm surprised that Carmack seems to find this absurd. It's like asking superman how much weight we should be able to lift. Doesn't apply to most average folks.
WWLink 3y ago
Of course, being a business owner gives you an additional level of passion and obsession with the work. The prospect of making fucking millions, and the power, and all that? Beats the HELL Out of being paid market rate to be cog #35 in the machine lol. Honestly he sounds a bit narcissistic though. Especially in context. It's hilarious that I say that because I have a LOT of respect for him and iD software producing OpenGL games when everyone else was busy licking Microsoft's DirectX boots for that sweet sweet 24/7 dedicated Microsoft support and accomodation that Apple and the Linux community were never known for lol. At the end of the day, you can be an astronaut or a surgeon or whatever and sure, you'll have your crazy weeks, but you'll also have a life outside of work. If they can live a normal life, IDK why I'd want to go working "passionate" long hours for a company that makes video games.
- rvba 3y ago
  He writes it from a position of a business owner. He would get like 1/6 (?) of what Doom made? Meanwhile someone who is a salaried worker is often not rewarded at all for doing any additional work. Often not even with paid overtime. If you finish a task fast you will get another task, not a promotion. The cynical take is that the managers (or business owners) cannot promote their key employees, because who will then do all the work on time? In fact if the managers have a "star" and two "potatoes" they will usually reward the star with more work. Often without any noticable change in pay. Maybe some small bonus. But that bonus is often nothing when compared to real contribution. If you did 200% more work than the 2 potatoes you will oftenbget a 15% higher bonus. What is simply not worth it. Even if you are a builder who likes to build - you are screwed. Most orgs dont even try to recognize their key talent. They dont know who pushes the company forward (apart from sales teams where it is relatively easy to indentify who sells more, but it doesnt often work that way - best sales people are those who open blue oceans - and I only saw that working once). I actually agree with him that people who spend less hours will probably be less productive. But as someone who switched jobs and had so far 40 half-hour meet and greet calls and who now sits for 6 hours per day in "alignment calls" I wonder when I am supposed yo do any actual work. Im a "builder" but the organization does not give me time to build - constant distractions, constant "update calls" - and when I finally have 2 free hours my energy levels are drained by the useless stuff. So those books that say that those big managers, leaders, builders wake up at 4am to do undistracted work - I understand. Or that they sit until late hours to actually do something, or even write emails in the evenings. In the (very good) book "Master's of doom" we could read that Carmac slept at the office. But at the end of the day he got millions from that. A typical salaried person might get maybe 50% better bonus for spending your life in the office. So why do that? You waste a lot of hours for your life (say 2 hours per day) to get a bonus worth 0,5 of your monhly salary? One could calculate earnings per hour and come to a conclusion it is not worth it. You are already paid what you are paid, the cynical view is do just enough to keep your spot and then optimize for leaving work after 8 hours and doing home stuff at work (buying stuff, reading news..). The whole corporate reaward structure does not reward you for work. It rewards you gor visibility. On a side note: the japanese who stay at work for 12 hours per day seem to mostly sit there, do chores, online shopping, sleep. I actually believe that they make maybe 5 hours if work, but are available (what of course is useful) for 12. If they sat at work for 8 hours, would they have a productive 4 or 6 hours? Most people arent savants like Carmac who are productive for 8 hours in an 8 hour job. Carmac was in an undistracted "builder mode / rhytm" for months. In my corporate envitonments it is a good thing if I can get undistracted 2 hours. Also most people arent rewarded adequatly for contributing more. If the company isnt yours or if you arent getting a % bonus, if you work long hours you will just have a shitty life. (Many poor people have a shitty life too obviously but with even less money) Fuck at my new org I'm even double booked on 2 calls at the same time. Do you think I contributing much to any? Why the whole org cant setup 2 hours with no distraction? Would everyone ignore it? Would many "people managers" who do nothing but distract have nothing to do? In addition reality is that lots of workers need someone standing behind them with a deadline / stick to do make them do work. I maybe should start a blog, or read a book. But would everyone even want to read those thoughts and rants
moomoo11 3y ago
Carmack is 10x the mythical 10x developer. Most of us don’t compare to him lol.
Jach 3y ago
You're both atypical.
jmilloy 3y ago
Seven hours of focused mental work makes me bad at more focused mental work, but it doesn't make me bad at socializing or physical activities, for example, which is exactly what he's trying to say. I disagree with Carmack that most jobs have enough different types of work that you can always find something you're not already burnt out on. That's one thing I think he's missing. But if you figure out what things actually nourish or recharge you and which drain you (which may not be what you think at all and can take some effort and time to figure out), I'd hope you aren't left in the Reddit-swiping vegetative state quite so much! That's another thing I think he's missing: his work was actually nourishing for him, which isn't true for everyone. That's why in some ways being obsessive is "easier", you have a self-recharging activity and don't have to figure that out like everyone else!
- physicles 3y ago
  > Seven hours of focused mental work makes me bad at more focused mental work, but it doesn't make me bad at socializing or physical activities, for example, which is exactly what he's trying to say. I’m exactly like this too. I enjoy my work way more than average, but depending on the day I have between 6 and 12 (median 7) focused hours to do work before my brain sort of grinds to a halt. But when I get home, if I unwind mindfully and don’t get trapped on HN or YouTube, I can go meet some friends for dinner or go to the climbing gym, and that feels energizing instead of draining.
timacles 3y ago
You're asking if a guy whos like the equivalent of Michael Jordan in his field, except that he writes text in a box, is a atypical? Who is even in the Carmack tier of programmers? Like maybe 3-4 other people ever?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thr_low_latency 3y ago
> If you only have seven good hours a day in you, does that mean the rest of the day that you spend with your family, reading, exercising at the gym, or whatever other virtuous activity you would be spending your time on, are all done poorly? Yes.
TheAlchemist 3y ago
I think you miss the point (or I misinterpret it). What he is saying, is that success has a price. If you want to achieve something great, you need to work your ass off (well, unless you're inheriting a fortune or some other unusual situations). When you work in a job where giving your best doesn't make much difference - that may be not obvious. But if you are working towards meaningful, it does - a huge one.
theLiminator 3y ago
> Am I super atypical? Or is he? There's an obvious answer here being that he's the John Carmack.
Antoninus 3y ago
I'm good for about 3-4 hours of focused knowledge work a day before I need a break or change in context. In the evenings when things are much quieter in my environment, I can squeeze in another 1-2 hours if its necessary. I do agree with the "go to the gym" part of his spiel.
reidrac 3y ago
I experience it exactly like you. I need some time to recover to get my brain functioning again. When I finish my 8 to 4 work day of average intensity (as in not exceptionally stressful or busy), WFH I'm with my kids, there are a lot of things I can't do until I have some rest. You mention hangover, perhaps. Is more like waking up after only sleeping 4 hours. When the kids are on bed and the house jobs are done, say 9pm I can have a shower and I may be 80% to do any intellectual activity. Sometimes, as you say, may be watching a series or something like that; definitely not rockets.
lisper 3y ago
I’m usually fried after 4-5 hours. And I can do pretty much whatever I want. But I’m also 58. When I was younger I could do more, but causality is hard to pin down because there was no internet then.
nvarsj 3y ago
If you read more from Carmack, I think you can see why. He pretty much just works on things he finds interesting. Even at FB/Meta, he avoided the draining work of active leadership and was basically a research scientist that occasionally made posts to try and influence people. It's pretty easy in my experience to work long hours on things that are intellectually engaging. It's the stuff which is frustrating and causes stress/burnout that is hard to work on all the time. I could easily spend 50 hours a week building a compiler but not 50 hours a week writing google docs, sitting in meetings, and talking to people - that would kill me.
raverbashing 3y ago
> I'm surprised that Carmack seems to find this absurd No, he doesn't. Right after the quote you have: > No, it just means that focusing on a single thing for an extended period of time is challenging.
tlb 3y ago
Clicking through Reddit seems to burn the same mental energy needed to program. So you can't program for 6 hours, Reddit for an hour, then program like you're fresh again. If you sit outside and gaze at the clouds & trees for an hour instead, your programming neurons will be rested and ready to fire again for a few more hours. YMMV I guess, but I'd be surprised if anyone's programming neurons are replenished by memes. Maybe by a nice movie. Mental faculties are like muscle in that they get tired and need rest. A difference is that it's easy to sense how tired muscles are and hard to sense how tired the mind is.
- Timon3 3y ago
  It doesn't seem to be the case for me. Why do you think it uses similar resources?
  - tlb 3y ago
    Simply the observation that my programming ability isn't restored by doing some things, but is restored by doing others. Because I haven't done an RCT, there are potential confounds. Perhaps I'm more likely to reddit (vs go outside) when I'm lower on energy to begin with. And there's a lot of noise, and the metrics are subjective. Also: relaxing takes some practice. One can sit in a beautiful place with spa music playing and still have one's mind buzzing, so it wouldn't be restorative. Taking a proper mental rest took me years to get good at. Another caveat: "mental energy" is a metaphor that may not exactly correspond to something physical like neuron ATP levels or whatever. And there are many parts of the brain, and different activities use different subsets, so activities overlap in strange ways. Still, as far as self-cognitive-science goes, I'm relatively confident in this observation.
MyThoughts100 3y ago
Carmack falls into the old fallacy of "This is my experience so it must be everyone elses experience too". Just because obsession is fulfilling for him and he manages to make it work, it doesn't mean it's fulfilling to others. And yes a lot of people don't care about their work, that is the reality of the world. Most people aren't priviledged enough to have the opportunity to work on their passions. The average person needs more free time to themselves, to recharge, to self actualize, it's not about being "lazy", different people have different values and society would be better off respecting that fact. It's easy to give your life to work if you have ownership of that work like Carmack does...
xela79 3y ago
> I'm surprised that Carmack seems to find this absurd. Am I super atypical? Or is he? Carmack normal, light, workweek is 6 days working 10 hours a day, minimum. it's him :)

by jhp123 3y ago

avocabros 3y ago

There are plenty of people who do side projects outside of work, train for marathons, etc. That doesn't mean you're atypical - most people don't run marathons, for instance - but I don't think Carmack is this wild, totally out-of-band 1 in a million in terms of energy/motivation

goostavos 3y ago

In-person interviews are kind've a weird thing to just throw in there. I'd describe them as very, very different than the focused mental work that happens during the normal course of a day job. Interviews are high stress, emotionally draining, and, honestly, frequently rather degrading due to being talked down to. It's like having the fight or flight part of your brain firing on max for 5 hours. I agree that the only thing I really want to do at the end of such days is turn off. That is wildly different from my day to day. After work, I'm still hyped to go to the gym, do some woodworking, program more, study. The world is an exciting place. I've also found that if I succumb to the reddit infinite-scroll, a sense of numbness washes over me that takes awhile to shake free. I scroll like I'm seeking a high and nothing is doing it. Contrast that with, say, reading a book after work. Such a thing has never left me feeling the same empty feeling.

jhp123 3y ago
that's interesting, for me interviews feel very similar to the work I do day-to-day, except I need to be on the whole time. If I have a work task like a tight deadline or urgent production issue that requires maximum effort for 5–8 hours then the feeling is very similar to how I feel after an interview. Maybe I am too close to the "fight-or-flight" mode during normal, lower-stakes work.

PartiallyTyped 3y ago

He is. He is super atypical. Personally, I am drained by meetings and am in my happy place in front of an editor working on a grand project, one that I find interesting. The moment work stops being interesting, eg due to lack of complexity, I leave. Chaos and complexity energise me.

cvwright 3y ago
Carmack is a beast. Here's one of the first articles I ever read on HN, written by a guy who used to work with him: Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls https://waivek.github.io/website/tooltip.html https://waivek.github.io/website/tooltip.html
- MMAesawy 3y ago
  This was a great read, thanks for that.

scottLobster 3y ago

I've found that I HAVE to stay in shape, sleep well and eat some approximation of healthy to maintain my mental performance for long periods, so many issues that I blamed purely on psychology or "how I was wired" really came down to I wasn't working out at all, was drinking too much on the weekends, and sitting in a cubicle for 8-9 hours a day. That said, even today I can definitely work myself into a state where my brain just collapses if it attempts to do anything complex, and doing even the simplest chores seems like climbing Mt. Everest. However I have some morbidly obese co-workers who still manage to keep up with me and stay sharp for longer in some cases. Likewise I've read some blogs about some people who genetically can be at full capacity, or near to it, off of 5 hours of sleep consistently. I'm honestly jealous I'm sure he has a strong will but I think Carmack is some variety of biologically gifted for sure, lucky bastard.

llbbdd 3y ago
Do you happen to have the 5-hour sleep genetics study handy? I've thought that I'm this type of person and I'm curious
- scottLobster 3y ago
  It's been a while since I read said blogs, but I'm pretty sure they were discussing this one: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/03/410051/scientists-discover-how-gene-mutation-reduces-need-sleep https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/03/410051/scientists-discover...
richbell 3y ago
One of my coworkers only needs 3-5 hours of sleep; he's been that way since he was a child. It's certainly given him an advantage, though he "jokes" that he'll probably die early.

NetBeck 3y ago

Reminds me of excess calories chess players burn when playing. >Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day.[1] [1] https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/27593253/why-grandmasters-magnus-carlsen-fabiano-caruana-lose-weight-playing-chess https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/27593253/why-grandmaste...

baby 3y ago
I read these articles and it's apparently because of high stress + breathing. Not because of using one's brain. :(
- johnfn 3y ago
  That doesn't mean they're unrelated though - maybe high stress and breathing are a necessary requirement of using your brain a lot.
  - Solvency 3y ago
    Restricted shitty breathing, both chronic and short term, jack up your blood pressure, stress and cortisol levels, etc. Healthy athletes know how to breathe. Chess is no different. You can be a great chess player in spite of your terrible body mechanics, breathing patterns, etc. It doesn't mean it's "good" for you, and certainly doesn't mean it's unavoidable.
- toolz 3y ago
  the same thing goes for physical labor. Exhaling is mechanically how you lose body fat. Breathing more isn't sustainable without creating demand, but if it were sustainable you could just breath faster to lose weight.
  - pizzapill 3y ago
    I don't think that's how you lose fat. You get rid of the exhaust generated during the chemical fat burning process. If you couldn't exhale you would still burn fat.

baby 3y ago

If I'm passionate about something I can code non stop for like 2 days in a row without sleeping (been there done that) I'm not saying my code will look right at that point, or that it's a healthy thing to do, but I don't think the upper bound of maximal throughput + quality is at 7h a day either (or that you should even aim for maximum throughput + quality).

yodsanklai 3y ago

I suspect Carmack is atypical, which is probably why he achieved great things. We're all different. I certainly know people who can be focused for more than seven hours a day (some colleagues, me when I was younger, my family doctor, my dentist). Personally, as an introvert, what drains me most is interacting with people. I think I could be coding 7 hours on my personal project and still be rather fresh. But this isn't what my job looks like, unfortunately.

deleted 3y ago
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kenjackson 3y ago
He’s definitely atypical. I’m certainly not like him. I won’t ever revolutionize an industry — and that’s OK. I’d like to do it in theory, but if it meant being in an office 16 hours a day then I’ll pass. I’m more than happy he gets the spoils for his hard work and brilliance.
slowking2 3y ago
Same here, interacting with people makes my performance on all sorts of mental tasks drop much faster. 5-6 hours of meetings, and worst case I don't want to do anything else, best case I still need to go for a walk and another 30 minutes on top of that before I'm back to average coding skill. On the flip side, even for coding I don't love, I can usually grind out 9-10 hours at fairly high productivity; I usually won't because I have other priorities to balance but I can. If I find what I'm working on really interesting, I can do 12 hours at high productivity. For work, I try to have 2 days a week where I put most of my meetings so that hopefully at least 1 or 2 days of the rest are high productivity.

zerr 3y ago

The difference is that while most try to do their hobbies (e.g. game dev) after 8 hours of CRUD/boring/exhausting employment (working for others), Carmack had his hobby (game dev) as his day job, and also, he worked for himself - he never was an employee.

intelVISA 3y ago
Big fan of Carmack but yes, he was blessed to have his interests, abilities and 'job' align near perfectly. Being able to solve interesting problems all day and directly reap the rewards is positively alien to the avg SWE enduring their 9-5 grind on 'business problems' in a CRUD gulag to pay off their boss' new yacht.
bluedino 3y ago
The id guys took their work computers home to create Commander Keen while they still were employed at Softdisk

atleastoptimal 3y ago

Carmack is one in a million workaholic sociopath autist, you shouldn't feel bad comparing yourself to him

skwirl 3y ago

Carmack is very much atypical, but I don’t think getting completely wiped after 7 hours of any focused work is normal, either. It’s certainly the case if you are doing 7 hours of something you hate or find tedious. I would probably be fried doing 7 hours of nothing but code reviews. But if I’m building something I feel excited about, I can work as many hours as my life obligations will allow and feel pretty good about it. Lots of people have no trouble playing 12 straight hours of civilization or other focused video games.

shortrounddev2 3y ago
7 straight hours of anything will fry me. But most people in the technology field (hell, any field) don't work for 7 straight hours. They work for a couple hours at a time and take breaks in between. I'd be surprised if most office workers do more than 4 hours of actual work a day
- metabagel 3y ago
  Bingo
- deprecative 3y ago
  It depends on whether or not you count pretending to be busy as work.
- laurels-marts 3y ago
  People are very different. My gf cannot sit down and work for more than an hour before she needs to go for a walk and take breaks. In general, she doesn’t find office/computer work fulfilling and is looking for a more dynamic career. I on the other hand can go 12 hours getting up once or twice to go to WC and will skip lunch. Taking a break most of the time sounds like a punishment. When I’m working on a problem and hold a lot of information in my working memory taking a break would only set me way back. Meetings are avoided unless absolutely necessary. Emails and messages are answered before I shut down as they don’t require much focus. That’s how I love working. But I’m also very introverted and robotic. I need to find a more balanced approach and appreciate my gf’s influence on me but it doesn’t come naturally to me.

mcv 3y ago

I think Carmack is absolutely atypical. What he says could absolutely be true for him, but that doesn't mean it's going to be true for everybody. It might only be true for a specific group of outliers. I can totally imagine that someone who's sufficiently intrinsically motivated, and has enough mental capacity, willpower or whatever to put in long hours, longer hours might very well produce a linear increase in productivity. But most people are going to be exhausted at some point. Or demotivated. And enough of that is going to bring productivity down. So it's the kind of thing that might very well work for you, but you can't demand the same thing from others.

alchemist1e9 3y ago
When I’m highly motivated and want to accomplish huge technical work I will shift to sleeping 2-3 hours, working 6, then sleeping 2-3 hours, I will keep doing that for as long as 4 days straight and do nothing but work, sleep, eat. I don’t tell many people this as they think you are crazy, but my family knows, and they think I have a mental health problem. I don’t at all. I function completely normally and fully regulated in all ways. I just really really want to accomplish something asap.
- whatyesaid 3y ago
  Well 6 hours of focused work is really good. 2-3 hours of sleep windows isn't enough for REM/deep I'd imagine which is the crazy thing.
- lokhura 3y ago
  I do this too. From what I've been told, this may be a symptom of ADHD, namely hyperfocusing [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperfocus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperfocus
- anoy8888 3y ago
  You certainly have mental or health problems.if you are not an alien and have the same dna as humans , 2 to 3 hours of sleep will absolutely not be enough for your health and brain productivity even if you believe otherwise

epvgwwqe 3y ago

It obviously depends on the person and their approach. Nobody is confused why elite athletes can run faster/longer but there is a lot of debate about "work-life balance". Being a "workaholic" is similar to being an elite athlete if done right, and for most people it requires lots of ramp up time to being able to work longer hours as well as proper "conditioning" such as diet/exercise consideration, as well as a genetic predisposition and explicit effort toward maintaining psych.

coryrc 3y ago
I can do tons of work if it's motivating. Most of what's available is tedium and incremental bullshit. Actually I'll go further and say most of our work is a net negative for society. Ads are just psychological manipulation to trigger feelings of jealously and greed. Or producing new mixed plastic silicon junk with a 3-year supported software stack but could run for a decade but then millennia in the trash dump. PFAs in all our water supplies. Okay even more demotivated now.
- vasco 3y ago
  Maybe change your perspective to be less sour about life, stress kills!
- TotalCrackpot 3y ago
  You may be interested in reading Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, he wrote about that: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullsh...
- aik 3y ago
  Then do something about it. Or if it bothers you too much but you’re not motivated enough to do anything about it, then it’s misplaced energy.

iLoveOncall 3y ago

It's because he is completely out of touch with the experience of the average person. This is a guy with a net worth of $50M, world famous in his field, that can tell anyone to fuck off. His time outside of work is undoubtedly much more free and dedicated to recharging than the one of the guy that has to do chores on the weekend and has effectively barely any rest.

ren_engineer 3y ago

I think a huge part comes down to if you are actually interested in what you are working on. I can pretty easily do 16+ hour days if I'm doing something I enjoy, whether that's writing code or playing videos games when I was a kid. Another huge factor is being able to avoid external stressors which are what really drain people and cause burnout I think, having bad co-workers or manager, health issues, family issues, etc. is a killer and will impact your focus drastically. Big difference between working long hours because you are having fun versus working long hours because a boss is breathing down your neck and you'll be fired if you don't finish something in a few weeks Carmack is also in a favorable position where he's basically always been able to choose only projects he's passionate about for work, so he can't really see the perspective of somebody being forced to work on something pointless by their boss my take from his comment was that even when you are too mentally drained to write code or something similarly demanding, you could still do stuff like meetings, responding to emails, getting feedback from customers, planning stuff you will code when mentally fresh, etc. So the critical thing is to make sure you can focus on valuable stuff when you are at your best and try to save the other stuff for later

epolanski 3y ago
But how many days can you do it? Doesn't matter how much I love an activity I can hardly do it all time for more than few days.
- kqr 3y ago
  Maybe I'm in the same atypical group as Carmack (a sentence I never thought I'd utter) but during a normal work week, my idea of relaxing is things like studying statistics, product development, numerical methods to solve differential equations, history, etc. This is stuff most people would call "work" because it does take effort, it makes me a better developer and much of it ties somewhat directly into problems I'm facing at work. But for me it's winding down after work, and recharging for the next day. Sometimes I have so much to do at work that I need to just read fiction or play around in the darkroom to relax. But this is not the norm -- it's happened twice in the last decade, and lasted for about a month. So for the question of how many days I can do it? On average 1795.

pwillia7 3y ago

you're the typical one I think

useruser125524 3y ago

Carmack is absolutely not the norm from a brain chemistry perspective. His level of obsessiveness is not naturally achievable for the vast majority of individuals. That whole post is very short-sighted and solipsistic

Solvency 3y ago
Having a hyperactive brain often requires unhealthy coping mechanisms and eccentric fuel sources. In his case, way too much processed food, soda, etc. There's no bottomless reservoir. some people prioritize their health. Other people prioritize other things, at the expense of their personal health or longevity.
- gonehome 3y ago
  He's pretty fit - I think he's just way smarter than average and able to pair that with extreme focus (rare). It comes across in Masters of Doom.
  - Conscat 3y ago
    Personally I'm pretty distrustful of documentaries. To be entertaining, they usually have to do some amount of narrative manipulation or propagandizing. There are many out there that open a small window into someone's life to make them look extremely evil or heroic while the reality is much more mundane. Some even manipulate interviews with credible people to prove the earth is flat or other nonsense. I love the book Blood Sweat and Pixels and find it very entertaining and inspiring, but I don't trust that it's a nuanced objective look on the 5 stories it covers or that the characters within are as perfect irl as they come off.
    - gonehome 3y ago
      Reasonable, his intelligence also comes across in his tech talks too - similar to Andrej Karpathy in clarity and bandwidth for talks. There’s also a lot of other commentary on his capabilities outside of that one account, so it seems likely to be true imo.

shortrounddev2 3y ago

Carmack is definitely atypical

bitwize 3y ago

> Or is he? It's John Carmack. There's nothing typical about him, he's Kristy Hawkins tier atypical.

noisy_boy 3y ago

> I'm surprised that Carmack seems to find this absurd. It's like asking superman how much weight we should be able to lift. Doesn't apply to most average folks.

WWLink 3y ago

Of course, being a business owner gives you an additional level of passion and obsession with the work. The prospect of making fucking millions, and the power, and all that? Beats the HELL Out of being paid market rate to be cog #35 in the machine lol. Honestly he sounds a bit narcissistic though. Especially in context. It's hilarious that I say that because I have a LOT of respect for him and iD software producing OpenGL games when everyone else was busy licking Microsoft's DirectX boots for that sweet sweet 24/7 dedicated Microsoft support and accomodation that Apple and the Linux community were never known for lol. At the end of the day, you can be an astronaut or a surgeon or whatever and sure, you'll have your crazy weeks, but you'll also have a life outside of work. If they can live a normal life, IDK why I'd want to go working "passionate" long hours for a company that makes video games.

rvba 3y ago
He writes it from a position of a business owner. He would get like 1/6 (?) of what Doom made? Meanwhile someone who is a salaried worker is often not rewarded at all for doing any additional work. Often not even with paid overtime. If you finish a task fast you will get another task, not a promotion. The cynical take is that the managers (or business owners) cannot promote their key employees, because who will then do all the work on time? In fact if the managers have a "star" and two "potatoes" they will usually reward the star with more work. Often without any noticable change in pay. Maybe some small bonus. But that bonus is often nothing when compared to real contribution. If you did 200% more work than the 2 potatoes you will oftenbget a 15% higher bonus. What is simply not worth it. Even if you are a builder who likes to build - you are screwed. Most orgs dont even try to recognize their key talent. They dont know who pushes the company forward (apart from sales teams where it is relatively easy to indentify who sells more, but it doesnt often work that way - best sales people are those who open blue oceans - and I only saw that working once). I actually agree with him that people who spend less hours will probably be less productive. But as someone who switched jobs and had so far 40 half-hour meet and greet calls and who now sits for 6 hours per day in "alignment calls" I wonder when I am supposed yo do any actual work. Im a "builder" but the organization does not give me time to build - constant distractions, constant "update calls" - and when I finally have 2 free hours my energy levels are drained by the useless stuff. So those books that say that those big managers, leaders, builders wake up at 4am to do undistracted work - I understand. Or that they sit until late hours to actually do something, or even write emails in the evenings. In the (very good) book "Master's of doom" we could read that Carmac slept at the office. But at the end of the day he got millions from that. A typical salaried person might get maybe 50% better bonus for spending your life in the office. So why do that? You waste a lot of hours for your life (say 2 hours per day) to get a bonus worth 0,5 of your monhly salary? One could calculate earnings per hour and come to a conclusion it is not worth it. You are already paid what you are paid, the cynical view is do just enough to keep your spot and then optimize for leaving work after 8 hours and doing home stuff at work (buying stuff, reading news..). The whole corporate reaward structure does not reward you for work. It rewards you gor visibility. On a side note: the japanese who stay at work for 12 hours per day seem to mostly sit there, do chores, online shopping, sleep. I actually believe that they make maybe 5 hours if work, but are available (what of course is useful) for 12. If they sat at work for 8 hours, would they have a productive 4 or 6 hours? Most people arent savants like Carmac who are productive for 8 hours in an 8 hour job. Carmac was in an undistracted "builder mode / rhytm" for months. In my corporate envitonments it is a good thing if I can get undistracted 2 hours. Also most people arent rewarded adequatly for contributing more. If the company isnt yours or if you arent getting a % bonus, if you work long hours you will just have a shitty life. (Many poor people have a shitty life too obviously but with even less money) Fuck at my new org I'm even double booked on 2 calls at the same time. Do you think I contributing much to any? Why the whole org cant setup 2 hours with no distraction? Would everyone ignore it? Would many "people managers" who do nothing but distract have nothing to do? In addition reality is that lots of workers need someone standing behind them with a deadline / stick to do make them do work. I maybe should start a blog, or read a book. But would everyone even want to read those thoughts and rants

moomoo11 3y ago

Carmack is 10x the mythical 10x developer. Most of us don’t compare to him lol.

Jach 3y ago

You're both atypical.

jmilloy 3y ago

Seven hours of focused mental work makes me bad at more focused mental work, but it doesn't make me bad at socializing or physical activities, for example, which is exactly what he's trying to say. I disagree with Carmack that most jobs have enough different types of work that you can always find something you're not already burnt out on. That's one thing I think he's missing. But if you figure out what things actually nourish or recharge you and which drain you (which may not be what you think at all and can take some effort and time to figure out), I'd hope you aren't left in the Reddit-swiping vegetative state quite so much! That's another thing I think he's missing: his work was actually nourishing for him, which isn't true for everyone. That's why in some ways being obsessive is "easier", you have a self-recharging activity and don't have to figure that out like everyone else!

physicles 3y ago
> Seven hours of focused mental work makes me bad at more focused mental work, but it doesn't make me bad at socializing or physical activities, for example, which is exactly what he's trying to say. I’m exactly like this too. I enjoy my work way more than average, but depending on the day I have between 6 and 12 (median 7) focused hours to do work before my brain sort of grinds to a halt. But when I get home, if I unwind mindfully and don’t get trapped on HN or YouTube, I can go meet some friends for dinner or go to the climbing gym, and that feels energizing instead of draining.

timacles 3y ago

You're asking if a guy whos like the equivalent of Michael Jordan in his field, except that he writes text in a box, is a atypical? Who is even in the Carmack tier of programmers? Like maybe 3-4 other people ever?

deleted 3y ago

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thr_low_latency 3y ago

TheAlchemist 3y ago

I think you miss the point (or I misinterpret it). What he is saying, is that success has a price. If you want to achieve something great, you need to work your ass off (well, unless you're inheriting a fortune or some other unusual situations). When you work in a job where giving your best doesn't make much difference - that may be not obvious. But if you are working towards meaningful, it does - a huge one.

theLiminator 3y ago

> Am I super atypical? Or is he? There's an obvious answer here being that he's the John Carmack.

Antoninus 3y ago

I'm good for about 3-4 hours of focused knowledge work a day before I need a break or change in context. In the evenings when things are much quieter in my environment, I can squeeze in another 1-2 hours if its necessary. I do agree with the "go to the gym" part of his spiel.

reidrac 3y ago

I experience it exactly like you. I need some time to recover to get my brain functioning again. When I finish my 8 to 4 work day of average intensity (as in not exceptionally stressful or busy), WFH I'm with my kids, there are a lot of things I can't do until I have some rest. You mention hangover, perhaps. Is more like waking up after only sleeping 4 hours. When the kids are on bed and the house jobs are done, say 9pm I can have a shower and I may be 80% to do any intellectual activity. Sometimes, as you say, may be watching a series or something like that; definitely not rockets.

lisper 3y ago

I’m usually fried after 4-5 hours. And I can do pretty much whatever I want. But I’m also 58. When I was younger I could do more, but causality is hard to pin down because there was no internet then.

nvarsj 3y ago

If you read more from Carmack, I think you can see why. He pretty much just works on things he finds interesting. Even at FB/Meta, he avoided the draining work of active leadership and was basically a research scientist that occasionally made posts to try and influence people. It's pretty easy in my experience to work long hours on things that are intellectually engaging. It's the stuff which is frustrating and causes stress/burnout that is hard to work on all the time. I could easily spend 50 hours a week building a compiler but not 50 hours a week writing google docs, sitting in meetings, and talking to people - that would kill me.

raverbashing 3y ago

> I'm surprised that Carmack seems to find this absurd No, he doesn't. Right after the quote you have: > No, it just means that focusing on a single thing for an extended period of time is challenging.

tlb 3y ago

Clicking through Reddit seems to burn the same mental energy needed to program. So you can't program for 6 hours, Reddit for an hour, then program like you're fresh again. If you sit outside and gaze at the clouds & trees for an hour instead, your programming neurons will be rested and ready to fire again for a few more hours. YMMV I guess, but I'd be surprised if anyone's programming neurons are replenished by memes. Maybe by a nice movie. Mental faculties are like muscle in that they get tired and need rest. A difference is that it's easy to sense how tired muscles are and hard to sense how tired the mind is.

Timon3 3y ago
It doesn't seem to be the case for me. Why do you think it uses similar resources?
- tlb 3y ago
  Simply the observation that my programming ability isn't restored by doing some things, but is restored by doing others. Because I haven't done an RCT, there are potential confounds. Perhaps I'm more likely to reddit (vs go outside) when I'm lower on energy to begin with. And there's a lot of noise, and the metrics are subjective. Also: relaxing takes some practice. One can sit in a beautiful place with spa music playing and still have one's mind buzzing, so it wouldn't be restorative. Taking a proper mental rest took me years to get good at. Another caveat: "mental energy" is a metaphor that may not exactly correspond to something physical like neuron ATP levels or whatever. And there are many parts of the brain, and different activities use different subsets, so activities overlap in strange ways. Still, as far as self-cognitive-science goes, I'm relatively confident in this observation.

MyThoughts100 3y ago

Carmack falls into the old fallacy of "This is my experience so it must be everyone elses experience too". Just because obsession is fulfilling for him and he manages to make it work, it doesn't mean it's fulfilling to others. And yes a lot of people don't care about their work, that is the reality of the world. Most people aren't priviledged enough to have the opportunity to work on their passions. The average person needs more free time to themselves, to recharge, to self actualize, it's not about being "lazy", different people have different values and society would be better off respecting that fact. It's easy to give your life to work if you have ownership of that work like Carmack does...

xela79 3y ago

> I'm surprised that Carmack seems to find this absurd. Am I super atypical? Or is he? Carmack normal, light, workweek is 6 days working 10 hours a day, minimum. it's him :)