If you keep hearing that startup life is about non-stop hustle and working 16 hours a day, rarely sleeping before 2 am, let me assure you – that is total nonsense.
Of course, if you choose to go that crazy, nobody can stop you. But there is absolutely no need.
I have built HabitStrong from scratch and for sure, it has been hard work. But neither I nor my team encourages this stupidity. In fact, in my previous startup, when my team once told me that they were planning to work the whole night, I drove them out of the office immediately.
It may give the impression that I am easy-going and don’t care about growth. Wrong. I absolutely care about building a solid, ethical business, impacting a large number of people. But doing circus in office won’t get you there.
A human being can’t do more than 5-6 hrs of intense focused work. After 5 hrs of intense focus, you brain will start melting – I am not kidding. And if you do 6 hrs of focused work, I will give you a medal.
Even if you add another 3-4 hrs of shallow work – sending emails, and doing random stuff that life inevitably throws at you, it adds up to 10 hrs. That is a lot.
After that, you are squeezing your brain like an empty toothpaste tube – nothing will come out of it.
We often need so much time at work because we are distracted and waste a ton of time on multi-tasking, task-switching, online scrolling, and of course – endless meetings and calls.
Unfortunately, meetings or shallow work can’t be totally avoided but be aware that they suck time like black holes – the less you do them, the better.
While building HabitStrong, I have realized that to succeed in life, there is no need to go crazy – instead, just focus, focus, focus.
– Rajan