6 ms·

If You're So Successful, Why Are You Still Working 70 Hours a Week?

INTPenis 3y ago
Exactly. I'm not a rich man, I make about 50k SEK /month. But I work when I want, where I want, travel the world with my dog, no obligations on office hours, dress code, and I realistically work 20-30 hour weeks. I'm a senior consultant at a large well established partly state owned european telco. Life isn't about work, it's about living.
- cactusplant7374 3y ago
  Where are you working now?
- debarshri 3y ago
  My parents had the same life. They worked for the government. One thing I realized is that if you don't work hard and generate wealth, your next generation of family won't enjoy the life that you had, as wealth compounds really quickly and not accumulating makes generations start from scratch. If that is not your life goal—creating a family, looking after generations, etc.—then you are doing the right thing. It is a cultural thing.
  - lm28469 3y ago
    In countries with proper social safety nets, health care, pensions, paid vacations, parental leaves, &c. this isn't felt the same way. Many countries with strong family values have none of this bullshit mentality either, it's perfectly possible to have a family and look after generations and have an healthy relationship with work and money. If anything money tear families apart more easily than they get them together
  - ehnto 3y ago
    I have decided not to have kids (for clear cut personal reasons) and I find myself bouncing back and forth between wanting to amass some nest egg and just spending it all on life enjoyment. I also bounce back and forth between full time work and part time for the same reasons. I am always much happier and healthier during part time work, but it isn't quite enough money to fully participate in the society I live in.
  - seer 3y ago
    Hmm, maybe I’m a “troubled country” offspring but my generation almost universally started from scratch or close to it. The only thing my parents managed to do for me was get me a PC, at the expense of things like clothes or even food - turned out quite the return on investment for me and them. But the point is that a lot of people around me started with very little and I’ve not seen much of a difference in their fortunes, sure having stability and initial capital gives you more options, but the quality of life - the elusive “happiness” was mostly tangential to that.
  - dukeyukey 3y ago
    It is a cultural thing, but really it's a poor country cultural thing. There's kinda an unspoken assumption in much of the rich world that economic success isn't an individual thing, but a country-wide thing. That even if you dob't find economic success, the country will keep growing, the citizens will get wealthier, and your children will be better off than you are. In countries that either don't experience economic growth (or have only found it recently e.g. India and China), you get what you describe. (Obviously this isn't a set-in-stone thing, but the general pattern holds)
  - lukego 3y ago
    I'm a parent of young kids in Scandinavia. The way I see it is that I mostly work and earn money for my own personal satisfaction. It's a selfish and egotistical activity but important for my own mental health. I need to be careful that it doesn't interfere with my responsibility to raise independent kids who don't want or need money from me. This takes time and energy to make sure they can make the most of the social infrastructure available to them e.g. their school. I'm very restrained in how I spend money for private consumption out of concern for setting an example that's unproductive e.g. making the kids feel pressure to earn a lot of money to sustain a lifestyle of luxury.
  - megous 3y ago
    > One thing I realized is that if you don't work hard and generate wealth, your next generation of family won't enjoy the life that you had, as wealth compounds really quickly and not accumulating makes generations start from scratch. Except when it doesn't, so my parents went through high inflation in 90's (~10% or more every year for a decade) and their parents through monetary reform in 1953, which saw savings "re-calculated" by communist government order anywhere from 1:5 to 1:50. And that's not nearly even the craziest country out there when it comes to inflation and monetary machinations of the ruling class.
  - refurb 3y ago
    > if you don't work hard and generate wealth, your next generation of family won't enjoy the life that you had This seems like a very upper-middle class mentality. The vast majority of people don't ever pass on wealth. Hell, go back 30 years and getting an inheritance was something the ultra-wealthy only did.
    - ejb999 3y ago
      the vast majority of people don't, but I would say close to 100% of parents wish they could. What parent doesn't want their kids to be at least equal to, if not better off then they were?
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        Every parent wants this, but how do you define "better off"? I won't be handing a large pile of cash to my children, mostly because to me, them being "better off" means that they are able to build the lives they want. When I look at families where the parents gave their kids a large amount of wealth, it seems rare that the kids have been better off for it.
  - jaybrendansmith 3y ago
    It's definitely a result of growing up poor. If you've grown up poor, you've been denied things your entire life. You grow up with a deep sense of financial insecurity, a very valid sense of insecurity, because you know how easy it is all to lose, and you've seen it happen. This puts you in a headspace where no matter how successful you become, you cannot enjoy yourself during the day without this nagging feeling that you need to work and be productive. This is a great help initially, but I believe it does make it difficult to slow down, enjoy life, even if you're quite comfortable when you retire.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      That's not inevitable, though. I grew up dirt poor, but it didn't instill such a sense of financial insecurity in me. What it taught me was that you don't need much money to live a happy and fulfilling life. That has been a strength in my career and one of the keys to my success: I don't need to sacrifice any more than I'm willing to in order to be successful, and I can stand firm for those things that are important to me, precisely because I can walk away from any job without disaster.
  - pie420 3y ago
    why would you want to curse your next generation with inherited wealth? Wouldn't you rather they learn how to work hard from you and to earn their living on their own?
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      Anyone with a large inheritance that they consider a "curse" please feel free to send me that curse. I accept PayPal, Venmo, Bitcoin and I'll even do an ACH transfer. Email in profile.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  No offence but that's kind of survivorship bias from your wealthy developed Nordic bubble working in top partially state owned company. Most people in the world, even in the west, don't have such fortunes of making good money while coasting.
  - flir 3y ago
    Finland (if that's who we're talking about) GDP per capita is nearly $20k behind USA (Sweden's only $10k behind). They're not so much wealthy as they have a different distribution curve.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      You could also look to Switzerland or Norway - both higher GDP than US and a lot less hours worked per year on average.
      - circlefavshape 3y ago
        The OP stated their income in SEK, so probably their work is in Sweden. FWIW 50k SEK per month is approx US$5k per month
        RandomLensman 3y ago
        Yes, but I think the discussion was more around is this something only the Nordics could have, and if so, why. My point is that it is not limited to Nordics, doesn't necessarily come with lower GDP per capita as other small economies can do that, too.
      - defrost 3y ago
        Both small countries with massively profitable driving industries; Norway, obviously oil rich which drives the financial, legal, and IT secondary industries and makes high returns for the citizens. Switzerland .. it's literally gold moving in and out of bank vaults that appears to be the biggest driver of the countries economic makeup: https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/countries/41/export-basket https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/countries/41/export-basket No disrespect to either country but there's nothing like watching oil flow past in a pipe or bars of gold mature like wine in a barrel to increase wealth while reducing total hours "working".
- xela79 3y ago
  ya, also earing 204 million IRR / month, and very happy.
- magnio 3y ago
  > I'm not a rich man, I make about 50k SEK /month. That puts you in the top 10% of income earners in Sweden, a country in top 20 of virtually every income metric: mean and median income (PPP), GDP (both nominal and PPP) per capita, GNI (both nominal and PPP) per capita.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    He probably means he's not rich by SV tech worker standards, not by OECD standards, because he's definitely rich.
- globular-toast 3y ago
  So you basically get to do what you want with your life? Sounds rich to me! When you look at people who have more money/stuff, remember they generally fall into one of two categories: 1. They come from wealthy families, 2. They've spent their lives working and now they get to fill whatever remainder they have left with things, but they can never get those years they spent working back. You can't choose 1 so don't waste a brain cycle thinking about it. The question is, do you want 2?
RandomLensman 3y ago
Selling expensive intangibles that are hard to value/with an effect that is difficult to attribute is just a tough proposition.
aredox 3y ago
Billions in currency won't give you one single second of life more.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  You gotta read that out loud to yourself a couple of times. Just affording a safer car, or not having health hazards in your house or workplace, buys you "seconds of life" on average.
  - aredox 3y ago
    Working 70 hours a week is a health hazard in itself.
    - yetihehe 3y ago
      But that's a separate issue from having billions. You can work 70 hours a week and still have troubles with money (like me, but it's my own fault, most of my friends envy the amount I earn, but I spend it all on maintaining home and mortgage, but maybe this year I will replace that 8yr old laptop). Or you can have billions from working two years and then just resting the rest of your life.
    - johnthewise 3y ago
      If you hate your job. If you love it, it's play time.
  - ejb999 3y ago
    yes, but you don't need 'billions' to have a safe car, or not working in a factory with dangerous equipment and/or environmental hazards.
- Underqualified 3y ago
  Sure it can, that's why healthcare is so profitable.
- echelon 3y ago
  You're already dead in geologic time. By the same coin that wealth doesn't persist after death, neither can one iota of pleasure or experience be taken to the grave. Your brain will rot and everything becomes dust. This rationale is equivalent to yours.
iamben 3y ago
Hustle culture is absolute poison. I'm absolutely unsurprised people are working themselves into ill health when 'gurus' are telling people "by all means work 7 hours a day, but the guy next to you is working 22 - who do you think will succeed..?!" We've normalised this to a point people fill their days with busywork just to feel like they're achieving. It sucks. I say this from experience. But I much prefer life with 7 and a bit hours of solid sleep, exercise, making time for a social life, and actually walking away from my desk when I'm just pushing around the cursor.
LiamMcCalloway 3y ago
The meritocracy trap, David markovits.
begueradj 3y ago
> "Insecure overachievers are exceptionally capable and fiercely ambitious, yet driven by a profound sense of their own inadequacy. This typically stems from childhood, and may result from various factors, such as experience of financial or physical deprivation, or a belief that their parents’ love was contingent upon their behaving and performing well." It's all there.
- gifvenut 3y ago
  Culture plays a part too. I may have all those things but still work a steady 40 hrs a week. In fact, my employer gets worried if I work more than that, because they recognize the importance of downtime for employee performance.
- refurb 3y ago
  Like most HBR articles it's heavy on opinion and weak and data to back it up. How many people who work long hours do it because they are an "insecure overachiever"? The article reads a bit like "stop doing things I don't like" and "if you like doing something I don't like there must be something wrong with you".
  - captainbland 3y ago
    Yeah to be honest my experience in an office where uncompensated overtime was common, it was largely driven by management essentially using the "average" amount of work hours as a stick to beat anyone who wanted to work their contracted hours.
vouaobrasil 3y ago
I used to work in a senior position as a programmer making quite a lot, and of course, everyone around me including friends and family considered my successful. But, a few years into that job, I considered it to be the most unhappy time of my life. I quit and became independent. I started building a series of passive income streams. I'm not really working very hard at it, and I certainly make hardly any money compared to before. But I'm a lot happier. Now I "work" maybe 10 hours a week, and I spend the rest of my time chillin', working on projects that migth be profitable or might not be, reading, writing about whatever I want, etc. But I've got enough and it's the best time of my life. Yes, I don't have kids and that's partly what enables my alternative lifestyle. But it just goes to show that private land ownership coupled with the family lifestyle necessarily leads to increasing wage-slavery, especially once areas become saturated and land becomes scarce. What we need to do is move towards a system where private land ownership on a mass scale (not talking about your house) goes away and owning land for yourself to live and eat on is no longer an investment strategy but a way to establish a relationship with the biosphere. The current system is broken....
- ssss11 3y ago
  On a little tangent - similarly I was quite senior early in my career and a combination of burnout, politics, and toxic leaders led me reconsider my career on the eve of my first child being born. I transitioned to a mid-level role which is comfortable, easy in comparison, pays most of my prior salary, way less hours and responsibility, and less politics. I’ve won. For now. (I would do what you do if I had no kids!) Anyway what strikes me these days is social peers now reaching where I was, but at a normal rate, and trying to impress me with how senior they are compared to me - this notion of seniority equaling success is ingrained in society. Little do they know (or remember) that I have been there and they may learn the same lesson in time. I let them gloat, give them some wisdom, and sit back waiting to see what will happen.
- barelyauser 3y ago
  Consider the meaning of interest rates. I work 10 hours in exchange for 10 moneys. I could exchange it for 10 hours work from some other guy. But what does it mean when I purchase a government bond and make 1 currency per year of interest? I can purchase 1 hour of work in exchange of nothing. People are not working for me because I work for them (a fair system). They work for me because I'm the dragon with a pile of gold, and gold must come back to me.
kunley 3y ago
It would change if more people would realize employers can be sued, and not via any union, but directly.
somewhereoutth 3y ago
Computer money is easy money, not grief.
yawgmoth 3y ago
I imagine that if you have to work more than a sustainable pace to achieve a role, that it can be difficult to return to a sustainable pace and feel that you are "giving" the same. So, there is this self-imposed pressure to continue your behavior. Even if the entire time one convinced themselves that the plan was to "get to the top and give 90%", it's probably hard to suddenly change. At least, this is my experience as a 35 year old who worked a lot, telling myself that the delayed pleasure was the right thing. Now, (sometimes) I genuinely do not enjoy "fun" things as much because I have conditioned myself to not enjoy it. Suppose then, in that whole "life has many buckets" idea, you have some control over bucket size. Perhaps it is learned and intentional.
ReDeiPirati 3y ago
The worst thing is that I saw the same principle applied to people that make hardly enough money to live. At least the people of this article seems to have high income, so as soon as they realize their aren't in a bad position they could have an happy exit. But for people that everywhere they look, they will experience the same tragedy, this is horrible and a big problem in some categories.
aredox 3y ago
There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village. As he sat, he saw a Brazilian fisherman rowing a small boat towards the shore having caught quite few big fish. The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?” The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.” “Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished. “This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said. The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?” The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink — we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.” The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman. “I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other branches.” The fisherman continues, “And after that?” The businessman laughs heartily, “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.” The fisherman asks, “And after that?” The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!” The fisherman was puzzled, “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”
- KptMarchewa 3y ago
  The businessman's proposal is obviously better from risk management perspective.
  - Kozmik1 3y ago
    If you want to reduce risk, I don't suggest spending more time at sea, or buying boats.
refurb 3y ago
I've known a couple really successful people. Sold companies, CEOs, etc. Just talked to a guy last month. 73 years old. Works non-stop. Worth hundreds of millions in his 40's. He doesn't work 80+ hours per week because he has to. He does it because he wants to. These people aren't common but they are out there.
- missedthecue 3y ago
  Exactly this. Brad Jacobs has the record for the most IPOs on the nasdaq. He has started something like 6 different billion dollar companies and he just started his next venture. He's in his 60s and works 7 days a week. He just loves the game. His office is where he thrives. Someone like that is bound to end up making a lot of money and it's because they didn't stop after their first million like most would have. Because it was never about money it was about doing what they love.
  - megous 3y ago
    You can do what you love and have no money. Depends on what you love. Seems like this guy loves creating money making businesses. Someone banging out some obscure GNU code, because he loves it, will not be bathing in stacks of $1000 bills.
- ergl 3y ago
  Is he happy?
  - refurb 3y ago
    Very happy. He loves starting new businesses. That's his hobby.
bowsamic 3y ago
People who truly love their work will have to stop themselves from working 70 hours a week. Sadly not all of us are that lucky, but some people truly love working, and I can't say that's a bad thing, considering our current societal structure. In fact, I'm quite envious.
mbostleman 3y ago
I think it’s hard to generalize this. I would get sick not working all the time. I love it, and while the domains might change, the amount of work likely wouldn’t change based on the amount of success.
heresie-dabord 3y ago
Answer: "Because you can't think of anything better to do." Just to be clear, this has a double meaning. ^_^
JohnFen 3y ago
I'm not. Except for time-limited emergencies, I have never worked more than 40 hours per week for others. That's never been part of the business deal I agreed to. In my own ventures, however, I work insane hours. I'm willing to do that because I'm making a bet/investment that benefits me. I'm not going to kill myself in order to benefit someone else's business. The very idea seems crazy to me.
sotix 3y ago
When I worked in public accounting, the idea was that you slaved away as an associate making relatively nothing but would reap the fruits of your labor at the senior level (and increasingly more so as you promoted higher). Most wouldn’t make it to senior or would but would jump ship as soon as they were promoted. There was a built in turnover rate at the lower levels that was very high. My cohort hit senior in 2020 right when we shifted to work from home. The business made the decision that the economic environment was too uncertain and skipped the annual raises across the board, including for promotions. Suddenly, we were seniors with the pay of associates. 2020 saw record revenue for the firm (they didn’t reveal expenses), and it also saw the largest productivity increase ever. I couldn’t believe it. People were working almost twice as much with their pay was frozen around $70,000 while working as seniors with a masters degree and CPA license. When things opened back up, that period did a lot of lasting damage to the people that had been “brainwashed” by the system. I saw many people who I think would have become mindless robots change their outlook completely and leave. For me, it was the catalyst to switch into software engineering where I no longer felt like I had to play the game of working more and more to keep up with the others who seemingly never slept, particularly in busy season. Staying up at the office until 2am on my birthday is something I hope I never have to do again. I’m sure the firm recruited more bright-eyed kids who are ambitious yet insecure like the article mentions, and the partners are making more money than ever while working more hours than ever. I’m happy to be a software engineer that doesn’t have to put up with that level of commitment in exchange for such a small wage. There’s performative theater at the office and then there’s public accounting.
pie420 3y ago
addiction

Exactly. I'm not a rich man, I make about 50k SEK /month. But I work when I want, where I want, travel the world with my dog, no obligations on office hours, dress code, and I realistically work 20-30 hour weeks. I'm a senior consultant at a large well established partly state owned european telco. Life isn't about work, it's about living.

cactusplant7374 3y ago
Where are you working now?
debarshri 3y ago
My parents had the same life. They worked for the government. One thing I realized is that if you don't work hard and generate wealth, your next generation of family won't enjoy the life that you had, as wealth compounds really quickly and not accumulating makes generations start from scratch. If that is not your life goal—creating a family, looking after generations, etc.—then you are doing the right thing. It is a cultural thing.
- lm28469 3y ago
  In countries with proper social safety nets, health care, pensions, paid vacations, parental leaves, &c. this isn't felt the same way. Many countries with strong family values have none of this bullshit mentality either, it's perfectly possible to have a family and look after generations and have an healthy relationship with work and money. If anything money tear families apart more easily than they get them together
- ehnto 3y ago
  I have decided not to have kids (for clear cut personal reasons) and I find myself bouncing back and forth between wanting to amass some nest egg and just spending it all on life enjoyment. I also bounce back and forth between full time work and part time for the same reasons. I am always much happier and healthier during part time work, but it isn't quite enough money to fully participate in the society I live in.
- seer 3y ago
  Hmm, maybe I’m a “troubled country” offspring but my generation almost universally started from scratch or close to it. The only thing my parents managed to do for me was get me a PC, at the expense of things like clothes or even food - turned out quite the return on investment for me and them. But the point is that a lot of people around me started with very little and I’ve not seen much of a difference in their fortunes, sure having stability and initial capital gives you more options, but the quality of life - the elusive “happiness” was mostly tangential to that.
- dukeyukey 3y ago
  It is a cultural thing, but really it's a poor country cultural thing. There's kinda an unspoken assumption in much of the rich world that economic success isn't an individual thing, but a country-wide thing. That even if you dob't find economic success, the country will keep growing, the citizens will get wealthier, and your children will be better off than you are. In countries that either don't experience economic growth (or have only found it recently e.g. India and China), you get what you describe. (Obviously this isn't a set-in-stone thing, but the general pattern holds)
- lukego 3y ago
  I'm a parent of young kids in Scandinavia. The way I see it is that I mostly work and earn money for my own personal satisfaction. It's a selfish and egotistical activity but important for my own mental health. I need to be careful that it doesn't interfere with my responsibility to raise independent kids who don't want or need money from me. This takes time and energy to make sure they can make the most of the social infrastructure available to them e.g. their school. I'm very restrained in how I spend money for private consumption out of concern for setting an example that's unproductive e.g. making the kids feel pressure to earn a lot of money to sustain a lifestyle of luxury.
- megous 3y ago
  > One thing I realized is that if you don't work hard and generate wealth, your next generation of family won't enjoy the life that you had, as wealth compounds really quickly and not accumulating makes generations start from scratch. Except when it doesn't, so my parents went through high inflation in 90's (~10% or more every year for a decade) and their parents through monetary reform in 1953, which saw savings "re-calculated" by communist government order anywhere from 1:5 to 1:50. And that's not nearly even the craziest country out there when it comes to inflation and monetary machinations of the ruling class.
- refurb 3y ago
  > if you don't work hard and generate wealth, your next generation of family won't enjoy the life that you had This seems like a very upper-middle class mentality. The vast majority of people don't ever pass on wealth. Hell, go back 30 years and getting an inheritance was something the ultra-wealthy only did.
  - ejb999 3y ago
    the vast majority of people don't, but I would say close to 100% of parents wish they could. What parent doesn't want their kids to be at least equal to, if not better off then they were?
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Every parent wants this, but how do you define "better off"? I won't be handing a large pile of cash to my children, mostly because to me, them being "better off" means that they are able to build the lives they want. When I look at families where the parents gave their kids a large amount of wealth, it seems rare that the kids have been better off for it.
- jaybrendansmith 3y ago
  It's definitely a result of growing up poor. If you've grown up poor, you've been denied things your entire life. You grow up with a deep sense of financial insecurity, a very valid sense of insecurity, because you know how easy it is all to lose, and you've seen it happen. This puts you in a headspace where no matter how successful you become, you cannot enjoy yourself during the day without this nagging feeling that you need to work and be productive. This is a great help initially, but I believe it does make it difficult to slow down, enjoy life, even if you're quite comfortable when you retire.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    That's not inevitable, though. I grew up dirt poor, but it didn't instill such a sense of financial insecurity in me. What it taught me was that you don't need much money to live a happy and fulfilling life. That has been a strength in my career and one of the keys to my success: I don't need to sacrifice any more than I'm willing to in order to be successful, and I can stand firm for those things that are important to me, precisely because I can walk away from any job without disaster.
- pie420 3y ago
  why would you want to curse your next generation with inherited wealth? Wouldn't you rather they learn how to work hard from you and to earn their living on their own?
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    Anyone with a large inheritance that they consider a "curse" please feel free to send me that curse. I accept PayPal, Venmo, Bitcoin and I'll even do an ACH transfer. Email in profile.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
No offence but that's kind of survivorship bias from your wealthy developed Nordic bubble working in top partially state owned company. Most people in the world, even in the west, don't have such fortunes of making good money while coasting.
- flir 3y ago
  Finland (if that's who we're talking about) GDP per capita is nearly $20k behind USA (Sweden's only $10k behind). They're not so much wealthy as they have a different distribution curve.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    You could also look to Switzerland or Norway - both higher GDP than US and a lot less hours worked per year on average.
    - circlefavshape 3y ago
      The OP stated their income in SEK, so probably their work is in Sweden. FWIW 50k SEK per month is approx US$5k per month
      - RandomLensman 3y ago
        Yes, but I think the discussion was more around is this something only the Nordics could have, and if so, why. My point is that it is not limited to Nordics, doesn't necessarily come with lower GDP per capita as other small economies can do that, too.
    - defrost 3y ago
      Both small countries with massively profitable driving industries; Norway, obviously oil rich which drives the financial, legal, and IT secondary industries and makes high returns for the citizens. Switzerland .. it's literally gold moving in and out of bank vaults that appears to be the biggest driver of the countries economic makeup: https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/countries/41/export-basket https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/countries/41/export-basket No disrespect to either country but there's nothing like watching oil flow past in a pipe or bars of gold mature like wine in a barrel to increase wealth while reducing total hours "working".
xela79 3y ago
ya, also earing 204 million IRR / month, and very happy.
magnio 3y ago
> I'm not a rich man, I make about 50k SEK /month. That puts you in the top 10% of income earners in Sweden, a country in top 20 of virtually every income metric: mean and median income (PPP), GDP (both nominal and PPP) per capita, GNI (both nominal and PPP) per capita.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  He probably means he's not rich by SV tech worker standards, not by OECD standards, because he's definitely rich.
globular-toast 3y ago
So you basically get to do what you want with your life? Sounds rich to me! When you look at people who have more money/stuff, remember they generally fall into one of two categories: 1. They come from wealthy families, 2. They've spent their lives working and now they get to fill whatever remainder they have left with things, but they can never get those years they spent working back. You can't choose 1 so don't waste a brain cycle thinking about it. The question is, do you want 2?

RandomLensman 3y ago

Selling expensive intangibles that are hard to value/with an effect that is difficult to attribute is just a tough proposition.

aredox 3y ago

Billions in currency won't give you one single second of life more.

rightbyte 3y ago
You gotta read that out loud to yourself a couple of times. Just affording a safer car, or not having health hazards in your house or workplace, buys you "seconds of life" on average.
- aredox 3y ago
  Working 70 hours a week is a health hazard in itself.
  - yetihehe 3y ago
    But that's a separate issue from having billions. You can work 70 hours a week and still have troubles with money (like me, but it's my own fault, most of my friends envy the amount I earn, but I spend it all on maintaining home and mortgage, but maybe this year I will replace that 8yr old laptop). Or you can have billions from working two years and then just resting the rest of your life.
  - johnthewise 3y ago
    If you hate your job. If you love it, it's play time.
- ejb999 3y ago
  yes, but you don't need 'billions' to have a safe car, or not working in a factory with dangerous equipment and/or environmental hazards.
Underqualified 3y ago
Sure it can, that's why healthcare is so profitable.
echelon 3y ago
You're already dead in geologic time. By the same coin that wealth doesn't persist after death, neither can one iota of pleasure or experience be taken to the grave. Your brain will rot and everything becomes dust. This rationale is equivalent to yours.

iamben 3y ago

Hustle culture is absolute poison. I'm absolutely unsurprised people are working themselves into ill health when 'gurus' are telling people "by all means work 7 hours a day, but the guy next to you is working 22 - who do you think will succeed..?!" We've normalised this to a point people fill their days with busywork just to feel like they're achieving. It sucks. I say this from experience. But I much prefer life with 7 and a bit hours of solid sleep, exercise, making time for a social life, and actually walking away from my desk when I'm just pushing around the cursor.

LiamMcCalloway 3y ago

The meritocracy trap, David markovits.

begueradj 3y ago

> "Insecure overachievers are exceptionally capable and fiercely ambitious, yet driven by a profound sense of their own inadequacy. This typically stems from childhood, and may result from various factors, such as experience of financial or physical deprivation, or a belief that their parents’ love was contingent upon their behaving and performing well." It's all there.

gifvenut 3y ago
Culture plays a part too. I may have all those things but still work a steady 40 hrs a week. In fact, my employer gets worried if I work more than that, because they recognize the importance of downtime for employee performance.
refurb 3y ago
Like most HBR articles it's heavy on opinion and weak and data to back it up. How many people who work long hours do it because they are an "insecure overachiever"? The article reads a bit like "stop doing things I don't like" and "if you like doing something I don't like there must be something wrong with you".
- captainbland 3y ago
  Yeah to be honest my experience in an office where uncompensated overtime was common, it was largely driven by management essentially using the "average" amount of work hours as a stick to beat anyone who wanted to work their contracted hours.

vouaobrasil 3y ago

I used to work in a senior position as a programmer making quite a lot, and of course, everyone around me including friends and family considered my successful. But, a few years into that job, I considered it to be the most unhappy time of my life. I quit and became independent. I started building a series of passive income streams. I'm not really working very hard at it, and I certainly make hardly any money compared to before. But I'm a lot happier. Now I "work" maybe 10 hours a week, and I spend the rest of my time chillin', working on projects that migth be profitable or might not be, reading, writing about whatever I want, etc. But I've got enough and it's the best time of my life. Yes, I don't have kids and that's partly what enables my alternative lifestyle. But it just goes to show that private land ownership coupled with the family lifestyle necessarily leads to increasing wage-slavery, especially once areas become saturated and land becomes scarce. What we need to do is move towards a system where private land ownership on a mass scale (not talking about your house) goes away and owning land for yourself to live and eat on is no longer an investment strategy but a way to establish a relationship with the biosphere. The current system is broken....

ssss11 3y ago
On a little tangent - similarly I was quite senior early in my career and a combination of burnout, politics, and toxic leaders led me reconsider my career on the eve of my first child being born. I transitioned to a mid-level role which is comfortable, easy in comparison, pays most of my prior salary, way less hours and responsibility, and less politics. I’ve won. For now. (I would do what you do if I had no kids!) Anyway what strikes me these days is social peers now reaching where I was, but at a normal rate, and trying to impress me with how senior they are compared to me - this notion of seniority equaling success is ingrained in society. Little do they know (or remember) that I have been there and they may learn the same lesson in time. I let them gloat, give them some wisdom, and sit back waiting to see what will happen.
barelyauser 3y ago
Consider the meaning of interest rates. I work 10 hours in exchange for 10 moneys. I could exchange it for 10 hours work from some other guy. But what does it mean when I purchase a government bond and make 1 currency per year of interest? I can purchase 1 hour of work in exchange of nothing. People are not working for me because I work for them (a fair system). They work for me because I'm the dragon with a pile of gold, and gold must come back to me.

kunley 3y ago

It would change if more people would realize employers can be sued, and not via any union, but directly.

somewhereoutth 3y ago

Computer money is easy money, not grief.

yawgmoth 3y ago

I imagine that if you have to work more than a sustainable pace to achieve a role, that it can be difficult to return to a sustainable pace and feel that you are "giving" the same. So, there is this self-imposed pressure to continue your behavior. Even if the entire time one convinced themselves that the plan was to "get to the top and give 90%", it's probably hard to suddenly change. At least, this is my experience as a 35 year old who worked a lot, telling myself that the delayed pleasure was the right thing. Now, (sometimes) I genuinely do not enjoy "fun" things as much because I have conditioned myself to not enjoy it. Suppose then, in that whole "life has many buckets" idea, you have some control over bucket size. Perhaps it is learned and intentional.

ReDeiPirati 3y ago

The worst thing is that I saw the same principle applied to people that make hardly enough money to live. At least the people of this article seems to have high income, so as soon as they realize their aren't in a bad position they could have an happy exit. But for people that everywhere they look, they will experience the same tragedy, this is horrible and a big problem in some categories.

aredox 3y ago

There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village. As he sat, he saw a Brazilian fisherman rowing a small boat towards the shore having caught quite few big fish. The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?” The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.” “Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished. “This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said. The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?” The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink — we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.” The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman. “I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other branches.” The fisherman continues, “And after that?” The businessman laughs heartily, “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.” The fisherman asks, “And after that?” The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!” The fisherman was puzzled, “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”

KptMarchewa 3y ago
The businessman's proposal is obviously better from risk management perspective.
- Kozmik1 3y ago
  If you want to reduce risk, I don't suggest spending more time at sea, or buying boats.

refurb 3y ago

I've known a couple really successful people. Sold companies, CEOs, etc. Just talked to a guy last month. 73 years old. Works non-stop. Worth hundreds of millions in his 40's. He doesn't work 80+ hours per week because he has to. He does it because he wants to. These people aren't common but they are out there.

missedthecue 3y ago
Exactly this. Brad Jacobs has the record for the most IPOs on the nasdaq. He has started something like 6 different billion dollar companies and he just started his next venture. He's in his 60s and works 7 days a week. He just loves the game. His office is where he thrives. Someone like that is bound to end up making a lot of money and it's because they didn't stop after their first million like most would have. Because it was never about money it was about doing what they love.
- megous 3y ago
  You can do what you love and have no money. Depends on what you love. Seems like this guy loves creating money making businesses. Someone banging out some obscure GNU code, because he loves it, will not be bathing in stacks of $1000 bills.
ergl 3y ago
Is he happy?
- refurb 3y ago
  Very happy. He loves starting new businesses. That's his hobby.

bowsamic 3y ago

People who truly love their work will have to stop themselves from working 70 hours a week. Sadly not all of us are that lucky, but some people truly love working, and I can't say that's a bad thing, considering our current societal structure. In fact, I'm quite envious.

mbostleman 3y ago

I think it’s hard to generalize this. I would get sick not working all the time. I love it, and while the domains might change, the amount of work likely wouldn’t change based on the amount of success.

heresie-dabord 3y ago

Answer: "Because you can't think of anything better to do." Just to be clear, this has a double meaning. ^_^

JohnFen 3y ago

I'm not. Except for time-limited emergencies, I have never worked more than 40 hours per week for others. That's never been part of the business deal I agreed to. In my own ventures, however, I work insane hours. I'm willing to do that because I'm making a bet/investment that benefits me. I'm not going to kill myself in order to benefit someone else's business. The very idea seems crazy to me.

sotix 3y ago

When I worked in public accounting, the idea was that you slaved away as an associate making relatively nothing but would reap the fruits of your labor at the senior level (and increasingly more so as you promoted higher). Most wouldn’t make it to senior or would but would jump ship as soon as they were promoted. There was a built in turnover rate at the lower levels that was very high. My cohort hit senior in 2020 right when we shifted to work from home. The business made the decision that the economic environment was too uncertain and skipped the annual raises across the board, including for promotions. Suddenly, we were seniors with the pay of associates. 2020 saw record revenue for the firm (they didn’t reveal expenses), and it also saw the largest productivity increase ever. I couldn’t believe it. People were working almost twice as much with their pay was frozen around $70,000 while working as seniors with a masters degree and CPA license. When things opened back up, that period did a lot of lasting damage to the people that had been “brainwashed” by the system. I saw many people who I think would have become mindless robots change their outlook completely and leave. For me, it was the catalyst to switch into software engineering where I no longer felt like I had to play the game of working more and more to keep up with the others who seemingly never slept, particularly in busy season. Staying up at the office until 2am on my birthday is something I hope I never have to do again. I’m sure the firm recruited more bright-eyed kids who are ambitious yet insecure like the article mentions, and the partners are making more money than ever while working more hours than ever. I’m happy to be a software engineer that doesn’t have to put up with that level of commitment in exchange for such a small wage. There’s performative theater at the office and then there’s public accounting.

pie420 3y ago

addiction