Jason Shen*, a former elite athlete, says it is time to call out the dangers of the modern obsession with working long hours.
Photo: Eugene Shelestov
Lots of people, and those in tech in particular, are obsessed with putting in long hours.
Elon Musk once said that “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week” and suggested that the correct number was between 80 and 100 hours.
Freelance marketplace Fiverr came under fire recently for an ad campaign that described an aspirational lifestyle where lunch is coffee and sleep deprivation is “your drug of choice.”
Or there was the time when the cofounder of Coursera launched a machine learning company called DeepLearning.ai and in a job post suggested that the team had a “strong work ethic” and routinely worked 70–90 hours per week.
Why working long hours is counterproductive
Few would question that working hard is essential to success.
But working double a standard 40-hour week is just plain wrong.
I’m no stranger to hard work.
I’m a first-generation immigrant from China who earned a scholarship to attend Stanford University, where I helped the men’s gymnastics team win the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship.
I’ve also started multiple venture-backed tech companies.
Have there been times where I was stressed and working long hours to get everything done?
Sure.
Has it ever been anything near 80 hours in a single week?
No way.
I can feel my mental sharpness decline in the late afternoon.
Long hours should be rare, because productivity always takes a hit afterward.
This isn’t just my opinion.
Stanford Economics Professor John Pencavel found that the output of employees falls off significantly after 50 hours per week, and becomes basically insignificant after the 55-plus hours per week mark.
What it really means to work like an elite athlete
In a Twitter thread about the DeepLearning.ai job posting, someone asked, “Would you look at it differently if it were a sports team?”
And then said that working with the founder would be like being “in the Major League.”
That really ground my gears, because the comparison to high-level sports is so common.
But it’s also really wrong.
While at Stanford, I trained around 22 hours a week.
My teammates, some of whom represented the United States in international competitions, trained the same number of hours as I did.
Even if NCAA didn’t regulate training hours, 70 hours a week would be such an obviously bad idea that any coach proposing such a schedule would be fired immediately.
Great performance in athletics requires short bursts of concentrated, intense effort, followed by rest and recovery.
That’s why using elite athletics to justify long hours is so foolish.
There is a tremendous amount of rest and recovery built into sport, and a huge focus on injury prevention.
Athletes nap between practices and get 8–10 hours of sleep a night.
Some people will inevitably point out that the physical body of course requires rest, but that modern work is more mental.
So?
Our brain is an organ and people who consistently get less than six hours of sleep are cognitively impaired.
The danger of ‘hustle culture’
Our obsession with hard work is dangerous because it creates the narrative that if you don’t succeed, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough.
If you’re sitting around watching YouTube videos all day, sure, you’re not going to be successful.
But just because something doesn’t work out, doesn’t necessarily mean you should have worked for longer.
A Y Combinator founder once said to me that he found little correlation between the success of a startup and how hard their founders worked.
That is, the factors that made the biggest difference were things like timing, strategy, and relationships.
Which is why Reddit cofounder-turned-venture capitalist Alexis Ohanian now warns against the “utter bullshit” of this so-called hustle mentality.
There’s something especially insidious about higher-ups using their own extreme work habits as a model for their staff.
I’m a big believer of leading by example, but most leaders have a support system and resources that allow them to recuperate from their hard work.
Many of their employees don’t have the same benefits.
Burnout hurts individuals, their families, their communities, and the nation.
Sometimes what our employers need isn’t our most brilliant selves.
It’s just completing a pile of tasks.
But there’s nothing glorious about that, and let’s stop pretending that working 80 or 100 hours a week is a righteous, practical, or sustainable practice.
Sure, there are outliers.
Even Elon Musk admits that stress has taken an “excruciating” toll.
There’s no denying that working hard is essential to success.
But we need to stop worshipping at the altar of long hours and focus on getting things done in an intelligent, useful, and sustainable way.
* Jason Shen is the cofounder of Midgame and serves on the board of the US Presidential Innovation Fellows Foundation. He tweets at @JASONSHEN.
This article first appeared at www.fastcompany.com.
